One of the challenges with the windowing aspects of SlingPlayer is that you have more choices than to Maximize, Minimize and Close. You have the “dock right”, “dock left” and “full screen” options as well. So more than 3 buttons are needed to enable the various “windowing” functions. The developers worked around this by adding small “window left” and “window right” buttons in the main controls area. If you choose one of these the button icon then changes to look like a “window” instead of the original “left” or “right” icon. I’m not 100% sure I like these buttons, as they are not very descriptive and hard to see. But the intent of the developers was to make the interface as minimalist as possible. They have done an excellent job with that.

The window left and window right buttons still perform the same functions as in the beta and as the “dock left” and “dock right” in the Windows version. One needs to note, however, that the rest of the open windows on your Mac will not resize like they do in the Windows version of the player. This is apparently, a limitation of the Mac OS. Just beware that anything open underneath the player when windowed like this will not be accessible.

I’ve used the terms “window left” and “window right” for the Mac player because you can now put the player window in the OS X dock. So you can “dock” the player window, and it will continue to play and be viewable while “docked.” This is a new feature in this version. I believe some of the public beta versions had this working and updating every few seconds, but you now have full motion video in the dock.

One will also notice that the audio control buttons are gone, as is the control mode button. These controls are still available from the appropriate menus. The intent by the developers was to prevent SlingPlayer Mac from looking like a “Playskool Busy Box” and instead like a Mac program. Much feedback has been given to the developers already that the control mode needs to have a button and that things in the UI while better, still need further development.

The rest of the controls are all very simple. You have a large “play” or “stop” button, volume control, show/hide remote and favorites. “Mousing” over any item on the control bar brings up a “tool tip” that shows what the item is for and the equivalent keystroke command. The number of favorites visible is, of course, dependent on the size of the video window. Favorites that are cut-off can be displayed in a pop-down window by selected the down arrow button just to the right of the favorites that are shown. There is still a “Sling Optimizer” button in the “black” area of the control bar. In some ways it would make more sense to use that space for the command mode button or something similar.

In the beta version, the volume control seemed to be fairly non-linear. My opinion is that the same behavior occurs in the release version. Moving the control from minimum to maybe 25% seems to make the audio pretty loud pretty quickly.

One other interesting aspects of windowed operation is that you can now select the SlingPlayer window to always be on top. No other windows or applications will end up covering the video window. This is extremely useful if you want to ensure you can always see your video with nothing else covering it. Users with more than one monitor will find this especially handy.

The background of all the remote control windows is now transparent. I find this rather un-nerving and that it does not match the other windows properly. Hopefully, this will be cleaned up and fixed in the future or at least allow the user to select the transparency and color of the remote background.

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