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With details on the Internet about Apple’s new Front Row application slow coming, I visited the Apple Store myself to get a hands-on look. Overall, it’s a very promising extension of the iPod paradigm into the living room, and I’m eager to see it come to other Macs. I also found some interesting quirks and puzzles.

First of all, I was relieved to discover that Front Row is fully keyboard-navigable. The Up and Down arrow keys navigate the lists, while the Space bar selects (”Enter” on the remote) and the Escape key backs up (”Menu”). Command-Escape shows or hides it á la Dashboard. So far, so good for the prospect of controlling this with a third-party remote.

Slapping the tiny remote back against the right-edge of the iMac, I discovered that only the right edge supports the remote when not in use. It appears the magnets are actually inside the computer, rather than on the remote itself. This is most likely a good thing, as it prevents the remote from collecting all the iron filings you leave lying around you coffee table. It also makes the iMac handy for storing paper clips.

There’s not much else to say about the remote that you can’t tell by looking at a picture. It resembles a Shuffle, it has a smooth plastic finish (oh noes, scratch lawsuit!), and it’s way too small and lightweight for me. Grabbing it from the surface of a table is like trying to pick up a quarter; it’s easier to slide it off the edge of the surface into your hand.

Playing media files is as you’d expect from the start. Although it’s not controllable by AppleScript, Front Row issues AppleScript commands behind-the-scenes to the iApps already on your computer: iPhoto for photos and slide shows, iTunes for music, DVD Player for DVDs, and QuickTime Player for videos.

The listings themselves, however, build on the familiar iPod UI. Accelerated vertical scrolling makes short work of long lists, although the scant seven-item display makes it easy to overshoot your target. Everything slides and fades gracefully, so it’s a very fluid experience. Music and Photos are organized as they are in iTunes and iPhoto, mirroring the functionality of the iPod almost exactly.

Videos are a slightly different story. The main Videos menu lists logical groups: music videos in your iTunes library, TV shows in your iTunes library, movie trailers from Apple’s web site, and movie files in the Movies folder in your home directory. Front Row itself becomes the video library manager, whereas iTunes and iPhoto already exist to manage their respective media. Interestingly enough, while the Videos listings do include videos in your iTunes library, they do not include videos in your iPhoto library. For those, you have go to Photos.

For the movies in your Movies folder, Front Row reproduces the folder hierarchy you have on disk. I’m glad to see Apple didn’t try to think too much for you on this one, but it remains to be seen whether Apple has a separate iVideo-like application in the works. In the meantime, create subfolders in your Movies directory as you please.

One nice touch that’s not made obvious on Apple’s Front Row web page is live video preview as you browse the listings. For movie files, music videos, TV shows, and even the online movie trailers, a live preview appears and starts playing before you actually select it, using iChat’s “Shiny black table” effect. I say again: even for the online movie trailers. Why not, I guess.

Behind the scenes

For those of you who are wondering whether Front Row will work on a non-iMac machine, the jury is still out, but the outlook is not so good.

The Front Row application itself resides in /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app. The associated help files (which are so brief as to be useless) live in the usual place. Other than that, it’s unclear what comes with it, and there was no installer receipt to examine.

That said, it was observed today that BezelServices gets some updates providing hooks that report the availability of an IR receiver. It’s a reasonable inference, then, that Bezel Services handles the IR receiver of the new iMac — and perhaps the IR receivers of other forthcoming machines.

So, when Front Row wants to know if an IR receiver is available, it consults Bezel Services. What happens when Bezel Services is out of date?

Oct 22 12:21:35 FatLenny FrontRow[5730]: Message Handler Installation Failed: bootstrap_check_in(): 0×44e: Bootstrap unknown service

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _BSRemoteControlFeatureAvailable
Referenced from: /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/MacOS/Front Row
Expected in: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BezelServices.framework/Versions/A/BezelServices

dyld: Symbol not found: _BSRemoteControlFeatureAvailable
Referenced from: /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/MacOS/Front Row
Expected in: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BezelServices.framework/Versions/A/BezelServices

Oct 22 12:21:36 FatLenny crashdump[5731]: Front Row crashed

I find it strange that this isn’t trapped with a more specific error message to the effect of “Front Row ain’t gonna run on your computer.” If it just crashes because a framework seems out of date, then we can suspect two things: first, that Apple does in fact anticipate running Front Row on non-iMac systems, and second, that an updated Bezel Services may be coming to everyone in 10.4.3, at which point Mac OS 10.4.3 will simply be listed in Front Row’s system requirements.

Still, it’s just asking BezelServices for the remote, right? It could just want to know whether or not to expect IR commands, right? Not so fast. Running “strings” on the Front Row binary reveals this chilling error message embedded within the code:

No Remote Present - Exiting

Damn. Apple may well expect you to buy a remote to get access to Front Row, even if they have to enforce it artificially in software when all the other required components of the system are available.

It remains unclear whether the iSight is actually one of those components. Though early reports have suggested the iSight camera circuitry watches for IR commands, the iSight doesn’t seem to get turned on when Front Row activates. In addition, the use of Bezel Services, rather than the iSight driver, suggests that a separate hardware component is merely sharing the dark hole at the top of the machine.

This could indicate that the built-in IR support may be limited to those machines with which Apple provides an IR sensor at the factory, but it’s not out of the question that the new iPod dock, with its IR sensor and USB connection to the computer, might be supported as well. It will be up to someone with access to both an iMac G5 and a new iPod dock to test this out for us.

In the meantime, all indications are that a Front Row transplant to a different machine will be impossible without, at the very least, an Apple-supported IR receiver. Whether this will change soon we can only hope.

With limited versatility, requirements for a remote apparently contrived to force you into buying one, and lack of support for much more than a big-screen iPod, Front Row comes with its share of disappointment. But Front Row is for many people’s needs a very slick and useful way to access media from across the room, and as long as you have the right equipment, I have to say it’s very nice to use. Here’s looking forward to 10.4.3 and Front Row 2.0.

Updates:

It appears the IR sensor is behind the Apple logo on the new iMac (between the W and A in this photo).

I missed it before, but strings also reveals some details about the preference files:

com.apple.iApps.plist
com.apple.soundpref.playFrontRowSounds
com.apple.soundpref
com.apple.FrontRow
com.apple.RemoteUI

A few more things to be on the lookout for. No idea at this time what these files might contain with regard to Front Row.

Here’s the URL for the XML feed Front Row uses to retrive movie trailers:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/home/xml/current.xml

Apparently also, Front Row works by parsing the XML files for your iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Awfully clever for them to have included those xml files all along…

All that appears to prevent Front Row from running without a remote is the value of the LSUIElement key in the Front Row application bundle’s Info.plist file. Changing this from 1 to 0 appears to disable the remote, allowing Front Row to run without it.

That small change and the updated BezelServices framework appear to be all that would be required to run Front Row on your Mac of choice.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Fixing things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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