It appears that the sorry state of UIs in media server software doesn’t extend to the Mac platform. I’ve been surfing around reading a few obscure articles this week and although the software isn’t very mature, I’ve been quite impressed with several Mac projects. Namely: MediaCentral, CenterStage, iTheatre, and CoverFlow. The best part is that unlike some of the Windows appliations, these three for the Mac are free! (Try saying that ten times fast.)
Although MediaCentral is quite text-based for navigation, its presentation is definitely a lot sharper and more refined than any of the others. CenterStage is intersting and has a lot of potential, but better be careful not to ‘over utilize’ available space. It’s definitely the most mature of the projects. My main gripe is that if I’m browsing a bunch of movie covers (which BackStage - the CenterStage backend component sucsessfully downloaded for me), why do I need a text title underneath them? I don’t; it simply wastes space. Also the cover browsing section seems awfully small, but as I didn’t poke too deeply, one might be able to turn off the preview area to the right (that would be handy). iTheatre is at RC1 currently and has quite a few pieces of missing functionality, but could be nice although is heavily text-based like MediaCentral. CoverFlow is purely for browsing your music but it is such a simple, obvious UI that it merits mentioning. Hopefully its ideas can be intergrated into a more encompassing media browser.
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