AwkwardTV announced that there is now a 3rd party Apple TV Plug-In Installer, the application is currently in private beta testing.

The link above contains a youtube video where you can see how the interface of this plug-in installer looks. The AwkwardTV Loader can install 3rd party plug-ins for the Apple TV without need to download the plug-ins beforehand.

Available Plug-Ins for Apple TV:

ATVFiles - Simple file browser plugin

Applications Menu Plugin - Allows you to run any app on ATV from a menu

ATVWakeOnLan - Wakes up remote media servers

Apple TV Closer - Quit Apple TV interface with remote control

AppleTV RSS Plugin - RSS Feed Reader

Sports Scores - Display sports scores

Weather - Gives you a weather report

Perlbin - Run any perl script

Perian - The swiss army-knife of QuickTime components

aTV-ShareMounter - Automatic mounting of shares on bootup

One of my biggest complaints of the Apple TV is that it seems to be mostly designed for iTunes Store customers. This plugin loader is what the Apple TV needs to really gain popularity with users who have video content in varying formats.

This is certainly an impressive amount of work to have been done for the Apple TV all within the last month and a half. It’s sort of exciting to a watch a product like this get molded into what the geek public really wants.

Earlier today in the iheartmacs link feed, I mentioned a piece of software that I found through The Unofficial Apple Weblog, it’s called CoverSutra and it’s got a very attractive interface.

CoverSutra is also a last.fm scrobbler client. Which is to say that this application can submit the song and artist name of the track you are currently playing to your last.fm profile. Using CoverSutra as a last.fm client is an alternative to the freeware iScrobbler, which does it’s job just fine, but I’ve already a menu bar full of icons, and I don’t want another one that’s just there to communicate with an internet server in the background, CoverSutra brings a welcome amount of feature consolidation in that regard.

CoverSutra is more expensive for Americans thanks to the poor value of the US dollar, CoverSutra is around $13 USD with the current conversion rates.

Interesting side note, the developer of CoverSutra is Sophia, a woman in Germany. I’m glad she’s at it, CoverSutra is a fun and useful app that sets up easily, even for users like me who are picky with their iTunes keyboard shortcuts.

Apple TV: Oh So Hackable

The Apple TV has been in the hands of customers for just about two weeks, and man it’s been great! What I’m most interested in is people who are extending the abilities of the Apple TV to better suit their lives, because let’s face it, who has all of their video content stored in the Apple TV compatible formats? Certainly not me. Progress from Apple TV hackers wasted no time in making it’s way to the internet. The first bits of progress came in a couple days after the Apple TV had started shipping. Engadget let us know how they went about upgrading the internal hard drive in their own Apple TV. The big news was when two guys at the SomethingAwful (wiki) forums got the Quicktime plugin Perian installed, thus xvid playback was then possible.

As it turns out, the Apple TV is capable of running full blown Mac OS X Tiger, the same Mac OS X that we all know and love. That’s great, but there are obvious limitations to this computer, the biggest, it has 256MB of RAM built-in with no RAM slot to add more. I’m not a fan of modern Mac OS X systems with only 512MB of RAM, so this 256MB RAM limitation means that this computer is best suited for dedicated appliance computing.

Appliance computing like say video streaming to your TV over your network, that one is obvious, right? How about an Apple TV running Asterisk as the brains of your company’s PBX phone system? Yea, I didn’t see that one coming either, but I suppose it makes sense, as that was one of the first dedicated appliance installations for the PowerPC Mac mini when it was first released over 2 years ago.

After following all of this, it sure seems like Apple did not go very far to protect this new product from being tampered with. Sure they had to physically open the case and take out the hard drive, but from there it was not very difficult to mount the filesystem. Around then they realized that this thing is running our new friend, OS X. Now that all this has been done, there is a good chance that more work will be done to simplify the steps needed to apply these hacks and perhaps even automate the installation process. Hopefully allowing people to mod their Apple TV without opening the case.