It’s been a few days since Apple released its 2.4 software update. Time to sum all the rumours up! But first, let’s take a look at new features that come to our ATV devices:

Remote app directional control: Control your Apple TV with simple finger gestures via the Remote app. This feature requires Remote 1.3 running on an iPhone or iPod touch with iPhone OS 3.0.

Flickr Search: Search Flickr photo tags to find recently updated photos of interest. Save searches to quickly find new photos or use as a screen saver for Apple TV.

New view options: View movies By Genre, By Movie, or Unwatched. View TV Shows and Podcasts By Date, By Show, or Unwatched.

Updated transport and chapter modes:During video playback, click right or left to fast forward or rewind. Additional clicks increase the speed. Click down to show chapter markers.

Updating Apple TV software is more than easy. Check it out here.

Certainly the most important feature is a support for controlling Apple TV from your iPhone or iPod. You can control audio or video playback by flicking left or right to rewind or fast forward. Flick down to show chapter markers when watching video and then flick left or right to skip. You can also tap the screen to play/pause either video or audio.

As TUAW reports, their in-house Apple TV geeks, Megan Lavey and Christina Warren, both installed the updates and gave them a try. “Megan indicated the gestures were quick and responsive, and coupled with the ability to use the iPhone/iPod keyboard to search for shows, the new versions made it much less tedious to navigate through your shows¨.

This video seems to confirm these observations.

The main question for many ATV users was if boxee will be running on the device after updating? Boxee quickly responded to that kind of doubts, tweeting: “if you upgraded your Apple TV to 2.4: run patchstick again, update launcher, download latest boxee and you’ll be back boxeeing” (http://twitter.com/boxee). They also reposted a short tutorial ‘so how do i get boxee on atv?’ on their forum.

On various forums users confirmed the full boxee functionality on ATV.

According to awkwardTV, 2.4 update works fine also with XBMC Media Center 9.04, NitoTV Take 2 0.7.6+ (but isn’t able to install Perian) and LaunchMore. But they also reports some problems:

• Divx (Perian) has no audio when installed like this or by this article “Install_Perian” (it’s maybe related to “fooled” files);
• SoftwareMenu right from atvusb-creator (mac b10) causes Finder to crash, had to ssh and remove frappliance, then downloaded latest version and it is OK now;
• ATVFiles (Version 1.2.0 (479)) crashes when browsing files.

We’ll be following all 2.4 update-connected news and will inform you immediately.

Winners will be announced at boxee event in San Francisco on June 23rd.

Couch Surfer Pro adds mouse/pointer support, easier navigation, and faster page loads. Couch Surfer Pro is everything you love about the Internet right on your AppleTV.

AirControl beta adds support for the new Loop™ Pointer from Hillcrest Labs. Consumers who use aTV Flash (version 3.6 with AirControl) will be able to use the Loop Pointer to navigate menus, control video and browse the web with the flick of a wrist.

This new version is available for both Mac and PC. Current customers will have access to the new version immediately in their online account.

Find more at aTV Flash.com

There have been some software updates lately released and announced:

Jaman , a movie download service, has released new version of their Jaman Player that lets you synch Jaman and other movies to your AppleTV. Here you’ll find how to watch Jaman movies on your AppleTV.

aTV Flash, a patchstick that enables installing plugins and other applications on Apple TV, has released 3.5.5 version of their installer program. This version includes a number of efficiency improvements for the installer application as well as support for the popular Hotspot Shield application that enables private web browsing. New aTV Flash has been released for both Mac and PC.

Finally Boxee announced that their Windows version, earlier available only for invites, will be open to all June 23rd.

see you at Mezzanine! - we were able to book Mezzanine in San Francisco as the venue for the event on June 23rd. following our meetup in Webster Hall in NYC, we thought we should find a similar place in San Francisco.

how to build a boxee app - there are now two examples of boxee apps that could serve as a good starting point for building your own app. the first one is ThruYou and the second is songza. if you have any question about the API or the development process you can check out the boxee dev forum, or connect with idan on twitter.

Drobo + 4TB - our friends at Seagate are sponsoring 4TB of Barracuda drives for each of the 3 Drobos we are giving away at the event. Drobo + 4TB is my personal setup at home, connected to my Mac Mini over the network and serving all my videos, music and pictures. it is excellent!

ideas for boxee apps - want to build an app, but don’t have a specific idea? you can look at what people are asking for on getsatisfaction, search on twitter, look at services with open APIs, or just think of what you’d love to see on boxee and is not already there. fred wilson will be happy to see someone build a La Blogoteque app.

As with the previous event, there will be a new version of boxee released on the night of the event which contains updated features and content.

working on a boxee app? let us know http://bit.ly/boxeedevchallenge

Here you have some details:

The boxee dev challenge will have 3 categories: Video, Music and Photos.

In each category we will have a People’s Choice award and a Judge’s Choice award:

People’s Choice Award: Drobo + 4TB from Seagate
Judge’s Choice Award: Sony Bravia XBR9 46″

The deadline for submitting your application is June 14th at 11:59pm PT, but we encourage you to submit early and often as we’ll be talking up cool applications as they come in.

Voting will take place between June 15th - June 22nd.

On June 23rd will have a boxee event in San Francisco (RSVP here) announcing the People’s Choice and our esteemed judges will choose a winner from the 10 most popular apps in each category.

The judges at the event will be:
Veronica Belmont - Tekzilla, Qore
Ryan Block - GDGT, former EIC Engadget
Cali Lewis - host of geekbrief.tv
Avner Ronen - boxee founder and CEO

Looking for more info on how to develop boxee apps: check out http://developer.boxee.tv and take a look at the sample app (we will publish additional sample apps). Please submit your app to dev_challenge@boxee.tv.

Whether you’re a developer or just a boxee fan, we look forward to seeing you @ the event.

That would involve distributing them to the device through the iTunes App Store, as is currently the case for the iPhone.

In January, it was suggested that NVIDIA’s Ion platform is likely to be included in the next Apple TV.

Among the uses proposed by Apple for the wand are zoom operations, a keyboard application, an image application, an illustration application and a media application.

Other possiblities for the wand include it being used to call up a dock, and then to select an option from the menu by moving the wand across the screen.

The controller could also scroll through a CoverFlow display and be used to manipulate photos by zooming in and out and rotating.

Source: HTDV.biz-news.com

It will be interesting to see how it develops, and if this will finally move apple to invest more in the platform.

As cleaning the forum will be almost impossible, we have decided to stop that service for the moment. And perhaps starting it again with a more clear rules and mechanism to avoid spammers and unrelated content.

Thanks for your comprehension.

This release has at first sight no additional features, looks like a maintenance release.

Friends,

For those of you following the Hulu / TV.com story, we wanted to share the news that Hulu has also requested to be removed from boxee at the request of their content partners.
We’ve put up a blog post on our site (http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/02/18/the-hulu-situation/) giving a little more insight, but we wanted you to hear it from us first.

Here’s the text of our post:
we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year). since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users. so we built support for browsing Hulu on boxee, reached out to Hulu, showed it to them, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers (without a formal partnership with Hulu). the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.  you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing there.

our goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly available on the Internet.  we have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation.

we will tell them how users love Hulu on boxee, why it represents a great opportunity for them to better engage with fans of their shows, how boxee can help in exposing their content to new people, and why they should be excited about future opportunities of working with us.

we will blog/tweet as soon as we have any updates and hopefully we’ll be able to bring back the Hulu experience to boxee sooner rather than later.

Best,
Andrew

For that post, I will request you to comment and send feedback to their blog.