Front Row is the cool little movie theatre app that comes packaged with the new iMacs, Mac Books (and Pros), and Mac Minis. For some reason, Apple decided not to enable Front Row in the OS updates for older machines, even though it can be operated from the keyboard in addition to the new IR remote.

Turns out you can enable the software on older machines with a few tweaks. Take a look at Front Row Enabler or edit a plist file if you are interested. The Front Row software is actually checking to see if there is a built in remote before it will run... reminds me of Apple's past crippling efforts: features like iBooks not doing dual screen and Final Cut not rendering real-time on iMacs and iBooks immediately come to mind.

Naughty Apple.

Anyway, enough about enabling Front Row... I wanted to give my Mac's movie system a custom look and feel for when friends stop over to watch vids. I wrote a howto for Make about skinning front row. It's actually pretty simple, so give it a shot and send me a url to your kickin' new theme in the comments!