The good news: There’s a nifty new version of Boxee available for the Mac.
The bad news: This will be its final version for the Mac.
Per Electronista, Boxee marked a swansong for its desktop app with the launch of version 1.5. The new version, an 82 megabyte download, has a newly refreshed interface with quicker access to the browser and the menu appearing as an overlay with quicker search. Movie and TV sections have been given their own updates, such as easier navigation by genres and sources, more details, and a better way to check for unwatched video episodes.
The app requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later to install and run. Its release is the last official desktop version and will be pulled after late January, when the interface comes to Boxee’s own hardware with the Live TV Tuner add-on.
Andrew Kippen from the company explained the decision to axe the desktop app as a virtue of a widening gap between the software version and what the team was allowed to do with the Boxee Box. Limitations on certification and copy protection imposed by Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, and others prevented Boxee from offering much of what it wanted.
TV was also more likely to be driven by dedicated hardware, Kippen argued. Along with the Boxee Box, it saw Internet-aware Blu-ray players and TVs leading the charge as well as sharing-capable smartphones and tablets. Makeshift setups with computers hooked up to TVs were less likely to stay.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
One reply on “Boxee updated to 1.5, sings swan song for Mac OS X, Windows versions”
This new version of Boxee is very unstable on my Mac Mini media computer running the latest version of Lion OS. I’ll stick to Plex and/or XBMC thanks. It’s also not hard to understand this Kippen fellow’s sudden love for “dedicated hardware” is it? And what exactly is “makeshift” about a Mac Mini (for example) attached to an HDTV? The HDMI cable? The Bluetooth keyboard/mouse/trackpad that is vastly easier to use than the ridiculous “dedicated hardware” remote control?