We are open for submissions: if you find anything related to Apple TV and you think it may fit here, send us a tweet or a Facebook comment and we’ll post it the coming week.

Edition 2:

1. The Apple Logo
2. Kicking in, Steve Jobs
3. The Mighty Jonathan
4. Pricing, Pricing
5. Cool!

The Apple Logo

Apple’s logo is probably one of the most easily identifiable. It has gone by several iterations [1] but has been easily recognised since the colour strips in the 80s. Designed by Ron Janoff, not by one of the company founders or designer, but by an advertising man [2]. Of course, being so distinctive ensures quick lawsuits if someone has a similar logo… Or even not a very similar logo, like this poor company in China has found out [3]. One more reason to be happy with our awesome new logo!

[1] Neven Mrgan’s Tumbl, The Apple Logo, Neven Morgan
[2] Creative Bits, Interview with Ron Janoff, creator of the Apple Logo,  Ivan Raszl
[3] GoChengDoo, Apple Tells Chinese Food Company To Change Its Logo, Staff

Kicking in, Steve Jobs

We’ll be seeing these kind of posts for a while. Remembrances of one of the technological leaders of our time, satyres to make us laugh, comics. What it feels to be Steve’s neighbour? It means seeing him almost every day, doing business in his garden. Walking around the street. And you also get to see how his sickness gets worse [1]. Sad story, about someone who has seen Steve very often. There are a lot of lessons we can get from Steve, and some of them are best seen in this short and sweet infographic [2]. And in case you missed, you can always watch the ever famous Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish Stanford’s Commencement Address [3]

[1] Palo Alto Patch, My neighbour, Steve Jobs, Lisen Stromberg
[2] The Daily Beast, The Ten Commandments of Steve Jobs [infographic], Leander Khaney
[3] Youtube, Stanford’s Commencement Address 2005: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, Steve Jobs

The Mighty Jonathan

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer starts a new battle [1]. One of Apple’s strong points is design. Nice design, sleek design, perfect design. And Jobs and Ive share parts of the pie for doing Apple’s products the most brand-clear, sleek and sought after. Now “Jony”, as he is known will have to face the struggle for the perfect design (ignoring focus groups, market research and anything else as before) without Jobs’ support. Alone.

[1] LA Times, Apple Designer Jonathan Ive Enters a New Era, Jessica Guynn

Pricing, pricing

Apple gadgets are overpaid? A lot of people think so. But once you make the numbers, a MacBook, iPad or iPhone are cheap. You have top notch hardware, and a software capable of getting the most of this hardware without hassles. And if you are not convinced, check this [1] about managing supply chains to lower costs. Or compare a generic tablet with an iPad.

[1] Splatf, The New Apple: The Best Gadgets, but Also the Best Prices, Dan Frommer

Cool!

• The magic numpad, a sticky addition to your Magic Trackpad to turn it into a… numpad!
• Beta 7 of aTV Flash (Black): we’ll be following with a full blown post about this soon… Stay tuned!

The post Apple TV News from the Web: Edition 2 appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

We are open for submissions: if you find anything related to Apple TV and you think it may fit here, send us a tweet or a Facebook comment and we’ll post it the coming week.

Edition 1:

1. The Apple TV Set
2. No more 0.99$ TV rentals for the Apple TV
3. Steve Jobs’ resignation
4. Miscellanea from the net

Probably the biggest Apple TV news of last week and the more important for us. Looks like Apple will strike the market in 2012 with a full Apple TV Set. Speculators in the media are not sure about the sizes. Some sources [1] point out that the most likely sizes are 17 or 19 inches touch-screens, iOS enabled. Think of a giant iPad for your dorm or kitchen. Other sources [2] suggest a NetFlix rival, delivering content to televisions, although this same source suggest that dropping prices in high end LCD screens will mean Apple can enter the battle. Others [3] suggest 2013 as the likely time for the “iTV”, even after newly appointed Apple CEO Tim Cook said “we are not entering the TV market”

[1] VentureBeat: Apple is working on a television for 2012, sources say, Dylan Tweney
[2] CultOfMac: Apple Is Working On A Subscription TV Service’ To Take On Netflix, Ed Sutherland
[3] MacRumors: Multiple Sources Suggest Apple Working on Television for as Early as 2012, Arnold Kim

No more 0.99$ TV rentals for the Apple TV

Yes, seriously. But I bet you found already. Apple has dropped the ability to buy cheap chapters for rental. Removed from iOS, removed from Apple’s page and removed from iTunes. Only lasted for a year, but it was doomed to fail. TV producers were afraid it was too cheap, and they have finally cut the plug. The official reason stated here [1] is that Apple TV users prefer to buy than to rent. The first site to notice [2] made an exhaustive search to show that indeed, all sources were clean. Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told in [3] exactly that, as official Apple statement. No more cheap rentals. Go figure.

[1] The New York Times: Apple Ends Its TV Episode Rental Service, Brian Stelter
[2] AppleInsider: Apple abandons 99-cent TV show rentals for Apple TV, Neil Hughes
[3] All Things Digital: Apple Pulls the Plug on TV Rentals, Peter Kafka

Steve Jobs’ resignation

Of course, we could not miss the biggest news since the sandwich bread. The big boss empties the seat [1], leaving now-CEO Tim Cook to keep Apple as the biggest company in the world [2]. This has resulted in all kinds of web reactions:

• A guy has run 21 km in Tokyo’s city center to draw a GPS Apple Logo
• Apple should retire the turtleneck like teams do with jerseys 
• What Steve Jobs’ calendar looks like the day after resigning 
• iResign on Twitter 

[1] Reuters: Steve Jobs resigns from Apple, Cook becomes CEO, Poornima Gupta
[2] The Guardian: Apple pips Exxon as world’s biggest company, Dominic Rushe
[3] iDownloadBlog: Apple Was Given the App Store Trademark and URL, Cody
[4] Google+ status: Icon Ambulance, Vic Gundotra

Miscellanea from the net

• Could be the Apple TV the next gaming console? Luis Borba wonders in this post if Apple could make the aTV a gaming console, using iPads and/or iPhones or iPod Touch as controllers. It’s an interesting idea, although we agree with what nitoTV has commented on twitter, using iDevices as control systems is not natural, since they don’t have any resistance to touch.
• Apple: The next chapter: Dan Frommer wonders how Apple will now move ahead. What directions will they move, and how Tim Cook will manage everything. After all, he has been more or less in charge since February.
• Big IceFilms Add-On Update: the servers at IceFilms somehow stopped working for a lot of people, luckily the guys at hd420p posted a tutorial to solve it.

Picture courtesy of Skeddy in NYC at Flickr

The post Apple TV News from the Web: Edition 1 appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

Today we will install an FTP server in one of our Apple TV 1. FTP means File Transfer Protocol, and a FTP server is a program sitting in your device, waiting for someone to send him files (or ready to send them). Then, if you have an FTP server in your Apple TV, you can transfer files easily an quickly from your Mac OS (in a Finder window, Go menu and select connect to server, then ftp://locationofappletv) or your Windows machine (just enter ftp://locationofappletv in your Explorer window).

For this tutorial to work, you need to have SSH access to your Apple TV. Of course, this is the first step in any jailbreaking tutorial, so I’ll assume you are past this step. If you are not, you can find more details in our How-To category.

This will only work (in an useful way) in an Apple TV1, since the Apple TV2 lacks a hard drive and FTP needs somewhere to store the files. What else do you need? Well, you need the FTP daemon. A daemon is a special kind of program in UNIX systems that watches what is happening… Oddly enough, the name comes from electromagnetism’s theory father, James Maxwell. Odd happenings.

Where can you get this little program? The easiest source is an Intel Mac. You can copy this file straight if you are in a Mac computer: it is located in /usr/libexec/ftpd You have to copy it to /usr/bin/ftpd You also need to make it executable, do it by logging to your Apple TV and then

sudo -s
chmod +x /usr/bin/ftpd

What happens if you don’t have a Mac installation at hand? Well, I found a trick in AwkwardTV‘s wiki to install the FTP server. You just grab it from the recovery partition in your Apple TV. This is a special part of your Apple TV’s harddrive where Apple puts a copy of the operating system. Then, if everything fails, you can safely start your system from there.

The procedure for getting this is as follows: You ssh into your Apple TV and then issue the following commands:

sudo -s
INSTALL_SOURCE='/tmp'
DAEMON='usr/libexec/ftpd'
dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=$INSTALL_SOURCE/recovery.dmg bs=1m
hdiutil mount $INSTALL_SOURCE/recovery.dmg
hdiutil mount /Volumes/Recovery/OS.dmg
cp -p /Volumes/OSBoot\ 1/$DAEMON /usr/bin/
chown root:wheel /$DAEMON
hdiutil unmount /Volumes/OSBoot\ 1
hdiutil unmount /Volumes/Recovery -force
chown root:wheel /usr/libexec/ftpd

This is just the UNIX way of mounting the recovery disc, copying the file, making the file usable and unmounting the disk. It won’t fire any missiles anywhere.

Things are closer to an end. Now we have the FTP daemon sitting in your Apple TV… But it isn’t active yet. Moreover, we want to be able to connect to it, so we need some user that can talk with him. Enter into your Apple TV via SSH and issue the following:

If you know what you are doing, you can do use some command line text editor. What does this blurb do? It writes a PList file (a property list in Apple’s OSes) telling iOS to run the FTP daemon. To write it, we use the UNIX command cat, which is one of the simplest ways to write a file. Once we have this file, we can load the daemon with:

launchctl load $PLIST_FILE

Now the only thing left to do is create a user to access via FTP We will name this user appletvftp. Run the following via SSH:

USERS_FILE='/etc/ftpusers'
cat >> $USERS_FILE <<EOT
appletvftp    allow
EOT

Yay! The only thing left to do is to check that you can transfer files to your Apple TV. Follow the steps we said at the beginning about Mac’s Finder or Windows’ Explorer. By the way, if you are in a Linux system, you have several ways to access, probably your file manager has some “connect to server” option quite visible. Try it.

I hope this has helped all those Apple TV 1 users out there! Stay tuned for more tutorials, and don’t forget to subscribe to our brand new newsletter.

Picture courtesy of Omoon at Flickr

The post Installing and Configuring a FTP Server in Your Apple TV 1st Generation appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

What shiny things you have by updating to AppleTV iOS 4.3?

• iTunes TV Shows: Purchase your favorite TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, and watch the shows you already own, in HD.
• Vimeo: Browse and play videos from Vimeo, access your video inbox, and mark videos you want to watch later.
• You’ll need iOS 4.3 is also required to access Movie and TV Show rentals.

What happens to my jailbreak status and settings if I update to 4.3?

Well, you’ll lose all your jailbroken settings and installed goodies. Remember, you can disable the auto-update in the Maintenance->Settings menu.

Is aTV Flash (black) compatible?

But you can then re-run aTV Flash (black, Beta 6) installer after jailbreaking iOS 4.3 and  you’ll be automatically be updated to the latest and “awesomest” version. In addition to that, you can get a new version of Media Player (0.7.1) from our friends at FireCore.

What’s new in Media Player 0.7.1?

• More subtitle types, options and support,
• Folder cover art,
• Improved streaming, DVD playing, buffering,
• Lots of fixes.

You can get this new version from the Maintenance->Manage Extras menu.

You can get the latest version of  Seas0nPass and its ever handy user guides here.

Image courtesy of walknboston, Flickr

The post Update! Seas0nPass Untethered Jailbreak for iOS 4.3 (Rev 8F455) appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.