if you’ve used Apple’s Front Row or navigated an iPod’s screen, you’ll feel right at home on the Apple TV. Its interface features a main screen that includes Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, Photos, Settings, and Sources entries. You glide around the interface by selecting entries, pressing the play/pause button, and choosing options in the resulting screen. As with Front Row, you move back through the command hierarchy by pressing the remote’s Menu button.
The Apple TV is responsive to the remote and, by default, you’ll hear Front Row’s musical clunk sound when the Apple TV executes a command. The screens look sharp on a high definition (HD) TV and, in typical Apple fashion, there are some lovely motion effects—icons smoothly rotate into place when you choose a new main-menu command, and the screen flips every so often when you play audio files.
This screen flipping is more than cosmetic. Because screen burn-in is still a problem with some varieties of TVs, the Apple TV takes care not to leave static images on the screen for too long. By default, a screen saver kicks in after two minutes (you can adjust this interval). And that screen saver is very attractive, displaying a swooping Apple logo, pictures from your photo library (or from the device’s internal bank of floral images if there are no images synced to the device), or album covers from your iTunes library. Both photos and album covers drift up the screen at varying sizes and occasionally perform a pirouette.
The Apple TV is responsive to the remote and, by default, you’ll hear Front Row’s musical clunk sound when the Apple TV executes a command. The screens look sharp on a high definition (HD) TV and, in typical Apple fashion, there are some lovely motion effects—icons smoothly rotate into place when you choose a new main-menu command, and the screen flips every so often when you play audio files.
This screen flipping is more than cosmetic. Because screen burn-in is still a problem with some varieties of TVs, the Apple TV takes care not to leave static images on the screen for too long. By default, a screen saver kicks in after two minutes (you can adjust this interval). And that screen saver is very attractive, displaying a swooping Apple logo, pictures from your photo library (or from the device’s internal bank of floral images if there are no images synced to the device), or album covers from your iTunes library. Both photos and album covers drift up the screen at varying sizes and occasionally perform a pirouette.
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