Boxee has been in private alpha for some time now, and I’ve been out of alpha invites for almost as long as I’ve had access to the app. If you’ve been waiting for that alpha invite, your wait is over. As we reported earlier, Boxee has now changed from private to public alpha.
Boxee is now open for all Mac, AppleTV and Ubuntu users. Windows users will have to do some waiting, as its version of the app has now gone into private alpha, though thousands of invites will be sent out weekly.
But why would Boxee stop there? As if opening the gates of Boxee to the masses wasn’t quite enough to keep everyone happy, and I’m pretty sure it would be, they’ve gone ahead and updated the program while they were at it. Features in the newest version include:
- Joost support – apparently the #1 most requested feature other than an invite. Yay Joost. Sounds like a drink to me.
- BBC iPlayer support – they’ve answered the call from all of the users in the UK to add this functionality. Doesn’t work anywhere but the UK, which is the BBC’s fault. Come on BBC, show some love!
- MTV Music support – that’s right, MTV still plays music, and now you can search for artists or songs in addition to just browsing for tracks.
- More keyboard shortcuts – they don’t really want you to browse with a keyboard, but if you like to break the rules you can Command + Tab to switch to a different program (even in full screen), Command + F to toggle full screen and Shift + Letter to jump in a list directly to that letter.
- More enhancements – now there’s support for dual screens, you can search in Hulu and the most exciting feature, there are now guidelines for developers that will result in more services being added to Boxee.
This is a great update for previous users of Boxee and a great starting point for everyone else. Congrats on the job so far, Boxee.
Product [Boxee]
Isn't Boxee available only for Mac Intel computers?