BackRow, ugly Windows cousin of FrontRow

It's that time of the year. When Apple knockoffs fall from the trees, and collect in little muddy piles on the ground. Today's example is BackRow, a quickly developed (and almost instantly designed) Windows clone of FrontRow. Does it work? Well, yeah, sort of. The author starts off by explaining: "i looked at the short videos on Apples website (linked above) and the press release video at news.com. this work was done by reverse engineering from the videos, i have never touched an iMac (or an iPod) in person ... nor would i ever want to. if i cant program to it (meaning FrontRow, iPod, and MS PMC being closed to external developers) ... then whats the point?"

Sure, iPod Linux, and other hacks have proven you can't fiddle with it... And iMac's are totally unprogrammable, right? Otto is crying so I'll get to the plusses and minuses of Casey's work here... First off, it's pretty cool that the Windows Presentation Foundation lets you do this quite quickly. As a former (lousy) programmer, from what I can see this WPF is good stuff. Unfortunately, handing someone the keys to a Ferrari doesn't mean they can drive it. At least, not very well. In this case you have some Microsoft Office clip art icons, a gradient, and some cheap tricks to pull off Front Row on the PC. Anyone want to bet how soon Apple lawyers will be on this?

What doesn't work? The interface is a straight copy. No problems there. However, movie trailers are missing because there's isn't a site with WMV's that matches what Apple has done with QuickTime. That made me chuckle. Music playback has issues, as you cannot "play all" in many cases. Also missing are podcasts, audiobooks, and uh, playlists. Apparently the author felt these weren't useful enough to copy. Ahem. Stop on by the site to see the whole drama, but beware: those demo videos are WMV's...