Recently released Remote HD is an iPad/iPhone/iPod touch universal and powerful application that gives you complete access to your AppleTV, Mac or PC. It works like an Apple Remote, but it can do a lot more – one of the greatest features is Remote View that brings your AppleTV’s display to the iPhone/iPad or iPod touch.

Remote View now also works with XBMC and Boxee.

The app allows you to reconnect to last connection – - if you use Remote HD mostly to connect to the same Apple TV, you can save the time of searching for available connections and tapping to connect.

Using Remote HD you can also put the Apple TV to sleep, restart it or even shut it down altogether. In addition, selecting “Log off” will perform a “soft” restart on the Apple TV.

Other great feature is that when you connect to your computer or Apple TV using the mobile network (3G, EDGE, GPRS), Remote HD kicks into a mode designed to save data transfer and optimize its performance based on the available bandwidth at any given time. Check out the rest of the features here.

The app is XBMC and Boxee compatible. aTV Flash has already added support for Remote HD (can be installed through the Maintenance –> Install Extras menu).

We have 5 free copies of the app to give away! To enter the contest follow us on Twitter and retweet the contest message (Win RemoteHD and access your AppleTV from your iPhone/iPad! Follow @appletvhacks and RT for your chance to win #giveaway). The winners will be announced on Tuesday (June 29).

• File Identification Progress (shows how many files Boxee is scanning, has identified, and doesn’t recognize within the media collection)
• Manual Movie & TV Show identification (you can now tell Boxee what’s in your collection and/or change incorrectly labelled files)
• Facebook & Twitter in your Boxee feed (recommendations from friends on Facebook & Twitter can now be seen within Boxee)
• New & Improved RSS Management (a brand new way to manage, discover and play RSS feeds in Boxee)
• hundreds of bugs fixes.

Find the latest version of Boxee here.

Source: Boxee

With these rhymes Andrew from Boxee tries to encourage developers to participate in “TV Meets Telephony” Hack challenge. Boxee has partnered with Twilio, a SF-based startup that has a very cool web-service API for telephony, to host a hackathon to see what kind of Boxee apps people can come up with using the telephone.  The contest will culminate in a 29-hour Hack Day on April 10th and 11th in both SF & NYC.

More details here.

[update] And the winners are:

1st place: Bring the Popcorn (Drew Baumann and Brett Hazen)

2nd place: Find My Phone (Fuzz the Destroyer)

Bring the Popcorn

Bring the Popcorn is a fun app to quickly organize a movie party directly from Boxee.  Using a simple interface and leveraging the Twilio API, users can add their friends, sort out who brings what, and SMS those friends to see when they are coming over.  The app was developed by a team of Luther College CS Majors Drew Baumann and Brett Hazen.

Find My Phone

Prolific Boxee developer Fuzz the Destroyer adds to his extensive portfolio of Boxee apps with a dead simple and crazy useful entry called “Find My Phone.”  The appropriately titled app uses the Twilio API to find where you put your phone with a clean interface and a wry sense of humor.

Source: boxee

There will be a live broadcast (by Livestream) on Boxee blog and via Boxee.

Three unveiling presenters – Missy Suicide of SuicideGirls.com, Jim Lanzone from Clicker.com and Tom Kurz from The Escapist, will be talking about their new Boxee apps for the event.

Boxee will be sending Beta invites to people attending the event, people who sign up for early access and over time to all existing alpha users.

In case you want to get your name on the early-access list you can fill this form.

Source: Boxee blog

In case you didn’t have enough fun hacking your boxes for 3.0 update, here it comes…another “revolutionary” update. Apple says it prevents content from temporarily disappearing. According to them, when you have to update to 3.0.1? “When you are using Apple TV software version 3.0 and all of your movies, TV shows, and songs appear to be missing” or “When you are using Apple TV software version 3.0 and all of your movies, TV shows, and songs appear to be present, but you have not yet updated to Apple TV software version 3.0.1.” Interesting… Wasn’t it easier with “Don’t think too much, update your box immediately!”…?

Official Apple instructions here.

- XBMC launched beta 3 of Launcher 3.2.
We can confirm now – it’s compatible with 3.0.1

- Boxee says it is already working in 3.0.1 (with Launcher 3.2 beta 3)
Also confirmed.

- nitoTV released 0.8.2 version with 3.0.1 support
(RSS, USB and watchdog patches updated for 3.0.1 as well)

- aTV Flash released 4.0.1 version with 3.0.1 compatibility.

- Patchstick 3.0.1 is also available (with Sapphire and RSS)
You need to use LaunchMore version 0.4 or 0.4.1 to apply this update.

nitoTV

Released yesterday, 0.8.1 version (direct download) now supports 3.0 update.

nito says some features may have no chance of making it back in. Couchsurfer and RSS are not working, but they have restored the functionality for DVD, MPlayer, QuickTime, Weather, Network, download, installer and Application Launching sections.

Audio volume and sub toggling and resume returns in QuickTime playback! It is possible to turn off the volume control in General settings if this is not a desirable feature.

Guys warn things may be a little buggy from the OS transition.

Follow nitoTV thread at Hackint0sh.org

XBMC

Launcher 3.2 beta 1 (beta 2 is already on the way!) works with 3.0. However the new version is not ready for public use, and only people who are comfortable with the command line should install it.

Installing:
1) “patchstick” the 3.0 ATV
2) ssh into it and download Launcher-3.2.beta2-debug.run
3) install Launcher chmod +x Launcher.. ; ./Launcher-3.2…
4) install XBMC with Launcher or just re-symlink your old install (ln -s /Users/frontrow/Applications/XBMC.app /Applications/XBMC.app)
5) run XBCM

XBMC forum thread

Boxee

Today XBMC guys made it possible to run Boxee on ATV 3.0.

That’s how to do it:
1) “patchstick” the 3.0 ATV (You should just use your old patchstick you used previously on the ATV )
2) ssh into it the ATV and download 3.2 Launcher
Type:
wget http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/858897/XBMC/Launcher-3.2.beta2-debug.run

3) Install the Launcher
Type:
chmod +x Launcher-3.2.beta2-debug.run

Type :
./Launcher-3.2.beta2-debug.run

Enter the appropriate password “frontrow“  and answer “Y” when it asks to restart the finder.

4) From your ATV Menu> Launcher > Downloads, install Boxee alpha 0.9.14.6992.

Note: Please do not select the Launcher 3.1

5) Launch Boxee  from ATV Menu >Launcher >Boxee .

[via Boxee Support forum]

Others working in 3.0

• Patchstick created with OS 2.1 (SSH enabled; accessing AppleTV with Cyberduck (sftp) works great)
• Patchstick created with OS 3.0
• QuickTime components
• Composite Colour
• AppleFileShare Server (AFP) (working using afpinstall.sh and ATV-Recover image)
• LaunchMore! 0.4 (with ATV firmware 3.0)
• atvPWN (Not all of the plugins that can be installed through the latest atvPwn are actually compatible with 3.0)

Not working:

• ATVFiles
• aTV Flash (they say an update should be available by the end of the week)
• Sapphire
• Software Menu

In case you needed to downgrade back to firmware version 2.4.

UPDATE:

aTV Flash 4.0 Released!
Highlights: 3.0 AppleTV compatibility, improved update process, VNC server + bug fixes.

UPDATE 2

Patchstick 3.0 Update 3.0 released.
ATV 3.0 support, MobileAir Mouse, Bit torrent incl. Web UI, Boxee, XBMC and more.

UPDATE 3

Sapphire Browser beta 7.6 now supports AppleTV 3.0

On his blog dannyruchtie.nl, Danny has published short but exhaustive tutorial on how to hack the Apple TV to run boxee, XBMC and enable an external hard drive.

In just four steps he explains how to create and install a patchstick, access Apple TV and enable external USB drives. He ensures the whole process is completely free.

Read the article here.

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

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.