Mac + OSS = a sometimes hit

I’ve been trying to get Galleon to work on Mac OS X for sometime now. Thanks to the app bundles and some bearable instructions—the Windows guys get an installer, we have to line-by-line it, but at least there aren’t that many lines—I can get it running and it’s pretty nice on the TiVo side of the equation, but there’s always the one thing that just won’t work.

See, the Mac users are the hungriest of all of this kind of application, because we’ve been shafted for a year now with TiVo’s inability to create the Desktop 2.0 software for our machines. That means no TiVoToGo or pretty much any cool new feature you’ve read about in a press release lately. Not coincidentally, that’s also the length of time I stopped evangelizing TiVo — in fact, I can’t remember the last time I actually did recommend TiVo to someone, because I’m waiting for them to stop announcing and start delivering.

And even with Galleon, which is open-sourced, it’s still mostly focused on the UNIX and Windows folks. I’ve spent three weekends trying to debug GoBack because the transcoding won’t work with Mac VLC or the ffmpegx binaries, and I’m just about ready to give up.

Frankly, if Apple really does have this “Mac mini DVR” that the rumor mill keeps jabbering about for MacWorld. I’m snapping this up immediately. Mac users like people who treat us as first-class citizens, and sadly Apple is the only big name that has done so consistently, without using us as a springboard and then pulling away entirely (for the obvious reasons).