Love Mac, but New to Slingbox?

The Slingbox has finally arrived in the Mac world! Sling Media has released the version 1.0 of their software for Mac OSX. Now you can have a truly personalized TV viewing experience over the Internet. You can “sling” your favorite programs from your home TV to your Mac anywhere in the world. We at SlingCommunity.com want to welcome Mac users to our user community. Please use our Mac forum to discuss your issues and experiences. We look forward to your contributions to all our other discussions. Here is our article on the new Mac release of the Slingbox software, giving you a real feel for the product and for ways it has advanced over last year’s Slingbox beta version. Now… on with the review!

A Review of SlingPlayer for Mac 1.0

After months of development, SlingPlayer for Mac 1.0 has been released. Mac users have official support from Sling Media, and with the hiring of dedicated Mac developers, this shouldn’t be the last piece of Mac software we see from them either.

The public beta release of SlingPlayer for Mac was reviewed extensively on SlingCommunity and the general release version for the most part is a very similar program with a few changes. This review will discuss those differences and how things have changed.

First Impressions

The first thing a user of SlingPlayer for Mac will notice is that the installer present in the beta versions no longer exists. SlingPlayer is now a completely stand alone application package and installation consists simply of dragging the application package in the disk image to your applications folder or wherever you want it. There’s no uninstaller either. Removing SlingPlayer is as easy as deleting it (except for preferences). The setup assistant is now contained within the application package (much better than having a standalone application like before). SlingPlayer firmware and remote control files are also inside the application package as well. This is a vast improvement over the way the files were arranged with the public beta.

Upon starting the program, the user is brought to the main video window with the Slingbox Directory dialog box open and displayed (this is assuming an installation where the Slingboxes have already been set up and the setup assistant has been run). The dialog box now meets Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines with the “watch” button being the very bottom button as opposed to the top one. It took some getting used to when first seeing this, but now, I prefer it this way.

One will also notice that the background of the video window is now transparent and the controls are completely different in look and feel from previous versions. The look is cleaner and looks less like a child’s toy with oversized multi-colored buttons and that “ported from Windows” feel.

Skins are now gone, at least for the time being. The interface you see is the only one. It still provides the same basic functionality, but there are a few differences. The gummy buttons in the upper left hand corner now function the way you expect an OS X program to function. The red button closes the video window and exits the player, the yellow button sends the player to the dock and the green button toggles between “windowed” and what I shall call “full width” mode. Full width is different than full screen in that the player window is sized to take up the maximum windowed area on the screen.

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