I’ve been doing a little more work on the development kit for BackRow appliance plugins, and so I’ve put together a little video showing what’s new.

At present it can run the main AppleTV interface, although this requires that you copy the PlugIns, Screen Savers, and Patches folders into the DevKit application bundle. It can also optionally work with just a single plugin, using that as the root controller.

There is now an options window allowing you to specify the run mode, along with realtime toggling of some built-in BackRow statistics tools: a framerate counter, a ’safe region’ highlight, and some copious printing to stdout of all layers being rendered.

Along with this comes the useful addition of BackRow running within a proper window, moveable and resizable, and which has a normal window level so you can open your debugger on top of it if you want to.

The video is in QuickTime format, using MPEG-4 video, 890×618, 13.2Mb in size.

Apparently my manual edits to the volume levels aren’t actually saved, even though they claim to have been. So there’s a bit near the beginning where what I say is drowned out by the intro movie. What I say at this point is, basically:

You can resize this window. It’s not very stable when there’s a list on the screen, but with video it seems quite happy. Frames per second appears down here, safe areas appears like that. And there we have it.

Also, it doesn’t appear to want to play anything until it’s downloaded the whole lot, so please be patient. I think I’ll be trying something other than Snapz Pro X for the next one…

Watch it here