What?

I'm not talking about Boxee here, but rather people like ViewSonic, Netgear and even WD.

Most companies don't show their UI at all on their web sites or press materials. That's a huge alarm because it means that the UI was designed and implemented by the same guy who's responsible for collecting the open source code and the code given to them by the SoC vendor and glueing it together. It means the UI is going to be pretty crap.

The Apple TV UI has issues, but it also has a lot of strengths, and it is most certainly not crap in the same sense as the test-based, file-browsing pieces of crap I see most everywhere else. There's a good amount of graphics flare and multiple ways to browse your collection, plus of course cover art and meta data - something most other boxes don't have at all.

For Photos, its slideshow looks really great and so far its library selection still also looks better than everyone else's. No else one has done photos at a level even close to "fair" let alone something very usable. Even Boxee's photo UI sucks very badly. Frankly, I'd rather Boxee not support photos at all than keep the UI they have in there now.