Boxee Remote for iPhone/iPod Touch

The good people behind Boxee, the free, cross-platform media center, have developed an app for controlling their popular application. However, it had previously only been available to jailbroken devices because Apple was taking forever to approve it. Well, the wait is over. Apple released it to the masses yesterday.

I downloaded the Mac version of Boxee just for this. The Mac and Linux versions are currently still in alpha, which borked my experience a little (Boxee crashed whenever I tried to play music), but the remote still worked for navigation. It even let me input text with my iPod’s virtual keyboard. Very nice. Typing things into on-screen keyboards can be a pain with regular remotes.

The remote has two modes: gesture and buttons. The gesture mode is nice; the Boxee icon serves as a sort of joystick and turns red when dragged, with a tap on the icon making selections. The buttons mode, while not as cool as gesture, is a little more usable. The gesture mode could be a bit picky about clicks, whereas the big “OK” button on the buttons mode wasn’t finicky at all.

When you start the app you’ll get a screen that explains the different modes. It’ll show up every time you start it unless you tell it not to. After you exit out of the welcome screen the app will start looking for hosts to connect to, which crashed it, but when I restarted it worked.

Team Boxee are making a good start with this app. It’s a free download from the iTunes Store (link opens iTunes), and you can watch it in action here.

[via Boxee Blog]