One of the coolest things I've installed lately is Boxee, the 'open connected, social mediacenter for OSX and Linux'. This Open source mediacenter has a very slick and polished interface and enables you to play your own media, but also all sorts of free internet audio and videostreams. Boxee is THE perfect partner for your Mac Mini or barebone Ubuntu PC that you have hooked up to your TV.
A very nice addition to all of this coolness is the Boxee Remote App for the iPhone or iTouch. It was already available in the jailbroken iPhone world, but has now been approved by Apple to be in the iTunes Appstore. And it's totally free.
When you start the app, it finds your Boxee box, and connects to it automatically. Then you can choose between a conventional remote, with arrows and an OK button to navigate through Boxee. But later on I descovered the 'Gesture' mode, which basically turns your iPhone into a touchpad, making the navigation just like you're working on a laptop touchpad. Tapping the screen emulates a mouseclick. This makes navigation without even looking at the remote app possible.
Although the Boxee project is still in a Beta stadium, and may be unstable from time to time (especially on Ubuntu, in my experience), it promisses to be the leading mediacenter software in the near future. The remote app for iPhone personally has made me a Boxee addict now.
