by: George Starcher, Associate Editor
I was only able to update my AppleTV yesterday. We were at my Grandfather’s funeral this past week. He was 94 and had a full and varied life. He did all sorts of stuff. He even hung out with George Washington Carver. My grandfather knew so much about plants that some people think he had a college degree. Someone even thought he was a PhD once. He was also a talented writer, civil engineer and photographer.
There are already plenty of posts on comparisons of the “HD” rentals vs real HD discs like Bluray etc. Here are somethings I noticed about the update.
I love the flickr integration. My dad got his photographic talent from my grandfather. You can see some of this work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/photophool/ Sure, you already knew about that. BUT did you know that you can make someone’s flickr or dotMac photo feed your AppleTV screen saver? I am not a bad photographer but I am nothing on the level of my dad. So just go into Settings->Screen Saver->Photos and pick the feed you want to use for your screen saver. You can even specify which flickr grouping to use such as Most Recent or any other groups your contact has setup.
They need to adjust the menus a little bit. In some spots in the interface you can circle back around from top to bottom. In others you cannot. I wish that were a consistent behavior. Anything to make a few less button presses.
I would also love the ability to sync over the contact lists for dotMac and Flickr from iTunes. It would let you set it up where you have a full keyboard and sync it over.
The other feature that was not hyped but I absolutely love is the additional of airtunes functionality. For some reason the AppleTV is cludgy feeling on keeping played podcasts up to date between itself and iTunes on my mac. Now I can just play from my iMac and stream it over. That also opens the door to use my Remote Buddy on my iPod touch as the remote instead of the Apple remote.
The rentals are simply addictive. Instant gratification without the hassle of having to return a disc. Worse if the rental place loses the disc and threatens to send you to collections over a disc they lost. That is no longer a headache you have to risk.
I love the update and may have to buy my dad an AppleTV on his birthday.
