iTheater - a mini review
Glenn Wolsey said:
Honestly, iTheater sucks...
I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised, especially when I read the bugs list (which made me think "so what
does work?").
This project was really starting to look like vapourware to me. It is curious that they have made such a hash of the release schedule (most open source projects would have just cut whatever they had, called it 0.1alpha and made the original release date).
Features
Yes, it is a little ropey around the edges, it suffers some strange behaviour (bugs) and one can't actually use the interface to listen to music or watch DVDs yet (so that only leaves watching movies off the hard disk). Playback seems to be as good as QuickTime on my Mac mini (and subjectively, perhaps better than Front Row).
Given that even Front Row has a few minor bugs on hardware with which it comes supplied, I think a few minor bugs in the first release of iTheater are excusable. Why the lead developer felt the need to restrict access to the source until now is a valid question, though.
The interface is quite nice and not too cluttered (some of the early screenshots looked very similar to Microsoft media center, far too much detail). Completely absent from the main menu is a way to view your photo album. There is very little eye candy (much less than Front Row and on par with Media Central).
The inclusion of a weather screen (looking very similar to a single dashboard widget) is an interesting concept that I really like. I hope that screens for news, sports, iChat, Photobooth, Calendar and Keynote presentations will follow soon.
iTheater vs the competition
MediaCentral 1.0 is more feature complete (DVD and music playback work and it even offers a softeware update facility and the ability to control eyeTV receivers), but lacks some of the polish of iTheater (such as navigation sounds).
There is very little to choose between CenterStage 0.5 and iTheater. Feature completion and bugs are approximately equivilent. CenterStage arguably offers the better eye candy (such as fish-eye main menu with Apple-style relections), but many screens are overly complex with too much in the way of GUI furniture (scroll bars, bounding boxes and the like). However, iTheater is far more responsive and seems to be less resource hungry than CenterStage.
FrontRow continues to set the standard for Mac, but could benefit from some of the ideas presented in the three OpenSource alternatives (as well as elsewhere).
Futures & Conclusion
iTheater is worth checking out and keeping an eye on - it shows some promise after a very rocky start. I particularly like the weather screen, but iTheater is missing a lot of critical functionality that prevents me from recommending it as an alternative to FrontRow. More than anything, I would really encourage at least two of the three teams (MediaCentral, iTheater and CenterStage) to merge their efforts. If one of the teams can get Jonathan del Strother (of
CoverFlow fame) on-board, so much the better.
