Watching Apple TV

After having an Apple TV for a couple of weeks in our living room, I can confirm that it truly changes the way of watching TV or listening to music. Still there are some features I dearly miss and which can be hopefully added soon by a software upgrade.

• Something like a “Playing now” playlist. Maybe I'm overlooking something here, but every media player except iTunes supports an ad-hoc playlist. Basically there should be a way to select music and not play it right away, but after the current selection finished. This is a feature a love on our Squeezebox.


• Speaking of the Squeezebox: remote controlling Apple TV from a PC would be nice, too. Sequeezebox does it via a the web browser, for Apple TV iTunes would be the natural choice.


• The main reason for buying Apple TV was to present pictures on a large TV. But this feature of Apple TV seems to be designed in a hurry. The main feature that is missing is some sort of index page: if you want to start a slide show at a certain picture, you have to click through it one by one.


• Support of streaming from iPhoto: iPhoto itself can so it, so should Apple TV, too.
  At least allowing to sync iPhoto slides hows with all settings, including a soundtrack. As of now iPhoto just copies the photos of an album.


• Re-sizing pictures automatically before the sync, as it's done for iPod. A 7 megapixel photo doesn't do anything to improve the experience on the TV, but it slows down syncing and fills up Apple TVs hard disk in no time.


• Syncing iTunes with other computers. I don't understand, why I can sync a TV show to my iPod to watch it on a tiny screen, but not to my laptop. Yes, I know, I can just import it, but an automatic sync is much more convenient.

Last, I think Apple needs to think about how to organize the iTunes media library, as they grow bigger and bigger. And it will get only worse when finally HD content hits the iTunes store. So there need to be a way to distribute content on different disks and computers.