Goodbye Front Row, hello XBMC

When Apple released Lion, they ditched Front Row, the built in media centre that had been around since Tiger.

Seeing as Macs no longer ship with a remote, plus the launch of Apple TV since then it didn’t come as much of a surprise.

But if like me, you use you Mac away from a main TV then Front Row still had some use. Under the Lion environment, you could restore Front Row – albeit lacking any input from iTunes – but replacing some system files and the app, or by using one of the many packaged versions out there.

A year on, and enter Mountain Lion. I quite like it to be honest – but the fixes/hacks to get Front Row back no longer work, pretty much leaving my remote useless. I did a bit of digging to see if Front Row could be restored and is seems not for various technical reasons that I’ll not go into beacuse a) it’s late and b) I don’t really know what they are!

But there is a solution. XBMC. The darling of many a jail broken Apple TV (I hear). In order to get running with the remote again, download, install then in system->settings->input devices allow the remote to open XBMC. You can get it from the XBMC website.

Happy days! I can go back to watching movies and not sleeping enough! Speaking of which…