I’m a software pirate. Yup, that’s me.  I’m a bad guy, right?

I have a jailbroken iPhone, and I use appulo.us to download pirated apps.  I’ve downloaded dozens of pirated apps, and I don’t feel the least bit guilty.  As I write this article, there are only 2 pirated apps on my iPhone.  The others I’ve either paid for or deleted because they were terrible, or I didn’t use them.

Right now Apple is counting their way toward 1 billion apps downloaded from their app store, and a significant number of those are free apps.  But, of the paid apps, I’m willing to bet that most of those are not in use by their buyers for the same reasons I delete most of my pirated apps.

The app store thrives on the impulse-style marketing found at grocery store check-outs everywhere.  Most apps are only a buck or two, so most people don’t take the time to think about whether they really want or need that iFart Mobile app. They just buy it and delete it in a few days because they realize it’s crap (no pun).

When I download a pirated app, I do so for evaluation purposes…really, I do.  I’ll use if for a while and see if it suits my purpose.  If it doesn’t, I delete it.  If it does, I buy it.  Simple as that.  Too bad more people don’t operate that way.

Let me put this question to you:  Given my previous statement that most iPhone apps are purchased and never really used is true, does the developer lose out on revenue when his apps are pirated?  If his app wasn’t available to download as a pirated app, would it appear on as many iPhones?  I say no.  In fact I think that that developer probably sold more copies as a result.  And if not, then either the software provides no real value, or it doesn’t fit at its current price point.

As for the 2 pirated apps I have on my iPhone…I just bought one, and deleted another. I think that developers should get paid for their work, but I don’t want to buy crap, and I think a solution to appulo.us would be a 14 day trial system for apps that aren’t games.  That way I can make sure it fits my needs.

I’ve been using the Sapphire plug-in for Front Row as a media centre application for a few months now. I like it because it creates virtual directories of TV shows for me. So, I just dump whatever I’ve downloaded into the TV directory, and Sapphire organizes it in a coherent way for me to navigate on my television.

It also gives me the ability to filter out the shows that I’ve already watched. This is a great feature because I have a lot of shows in that directory, and I don’t want to have to hunt for what I want to watch.

There is a drawback to the Sapphire plug-in though. Actually, it has to do with Front Row itself. Front Row will only use Quicktime to play video, so I have to use the Perian plug-in (which will play just about any format). Perian doesn’t like mkv files too much. They stutter at the beginning of the file, and jumping around inside the file is a nightmare.

So, I’ve been looking into Plex, which is an offshoot of the XBMC project. It uses mplayer for video, and mplayer doesn’t suffer from the same problems that Perian suffers from. There are a couple of drawbacks to Plex though.

Plex doesn’t have iTunes or iPhoto integration…yet. iPhoto, I can live with out, but I like being able to access my playlists in iTunes rather than navigating through directories.

I guess the ultimate solution for me would be to force Front Row to play video with mplayer or VLC. Anybody know how to do that?

Having a Mac mini as a home theatre PC is great because it allows me to listen to my music collection on my living room sound system. Doing this requires an iTunes library though, so I’ve been looking for a way to synchronize the library on the mini with the library on my iMac.

This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I have my music collection on a share on my server, so I don’t have to duplicate my music on both Macs, but it’s really the library files that need to be synced. The reason for this is that iTunes doesn’t have a function to monitor a directory for changes in content. If I add an album to my library from my iMac, the music gets copied to the server, but the mini won’t know about it, so that album will never get played there.

There’s an app called Syncopation that will keep two iTunes libraries in sync, but it requires the application to be open on both macs, and it costs $25. That’s too much to pay for something I should be able to do for free.

What I decided to try (and I suggest you back up your library files if you try this) was to share the iTunes directory on my iMac with my mini. Then, I just made an alias on my mini from ~/Users/username/iTunes to the iTunes directory on my iMac.

I’ve been successful with this so far. I’ve had music playing on both macs at the same time, and updates to the library appear to work properly although I haven’t really put this method through it’s paces yet. I imagine I’m going to run into trouble if both macs try to update the library at the same time, but hopefully iTunes will handle this gracefully.

All of this won’t work between a Mac and a PC. There are differences between the library files for Mac and Windows. I think it has to do with file paths, although you might have some success between two PCs (would Windows shortcuts even work?).

I’ve done something similar with iPhoto as well. I just opened iPhoto while holding the option key and chose the library on my iMac. This will only work if iPhoto isn’t open on the other Mac though since iPhoto locks the directory when it’s open.

Anyway, if there’s a better way to do this, I definitely want to know about it. Maybe there’s even a free app out there to do the job. If you know of a solution, please send me an email, or better still, leave a comment for all to read.

In an earlier post, I was looking for ideas for a home theatre PC. I had no preference at that time, I just wanted something elegant that played all of the popular video encoding formats.

Sean suggested I take a look at the Apple TV, and I remembered hearing that it was easily hackable, and could be the solution I was looking for. As a bonus, I’d be able to see my iPhoto and iTunes collections on my TV.

I did a lot of research, and I was all set to buy one when I read that the Apple TV has some trouble with HD content in the Matroska (mkv) format (which is how most HD seems to be encoded). Apparently, the processor in the Apple TV is a little underpowered for this and causes problems like choppy video, audio/video sync issues, etc.

After the AppleTV idea, I was hooked. I really liked it’s form factor, and the interface which is quite similar to Front Row in OS X. Also, the Sapphire plugin for AppleTV works in Front Row. The Sapphire plugin collects meta data about your video library and organized your content in a really intuitive way (A little like XBMC).

That got me thinking about a Mac mini. It has pretty much the same form factor as the Apple TV with the added bonus of having a DVD drive. So I got one. It’s great! I have Sapphire running in Front Row, and I ordered the right converter cables to connect it to my HDTV and my receiver. I had to write a couple of Applescripts to make sure my applicable network shares were always connected so that I always had access to my content, but the Mac mini home theatre PC is probably the perfect solution for me.

Man, monoprice.com is awesome! I just bought a 6 ft DVI to HDMI cable, a 6 ft toslink to mini stereo cable, and 100 ft of 18 AWG in-wall speaker cable for $37.17 including shipping. You’re not going to find a better price than that anywhere!

I’m using all this in my new HTPC (I chose a Mac mini) which I’ll write about more when I have things set up a little better.