Boxee: UI Nightmare, But Worth It?

My pal, Ian Forrester invited me to the alpha of a new media sharing app called Boxee. Yikes. I was baffled by the experience at first because the app doesn’t support the use of a cursor, you have to use keys to mouse around. I can’t remember the last time I fooled with a tool that doesn’t allow mousing.

Boxee, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

It would take a handful of friends to determine if sharing my movie, music, and photo preferences with others — and vice versa — through Boxee is worth the fiddly interface, which reminds me of the controls on a television menu, or searching through the movie offerings in a hotel.

Apparently, there is a lot to Boxee. It is a surrogate player for media (drives iTunes on the Mac, for example), and presumably does the same for movies in some way (I haven’t tried). The alpha crashed once, but aside from that seems pretty workable, once you get used to navigating with arrow keys, enter and escape.

Boxee’s lightshow effects were very trippy, however:

BOXEE, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
BOXEE, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

There is a Download page, which I don’t understand: where are things downloaded from? My friends? Some online service?

At any rate, if a bunch of friends sign up, I might try it as a place to share movie experiences. More to follow. Let me know your Boxee experiences.