If you're still enjoying the New Year's holiday today, why not spend it jailbreaking your Apple TV to run iOS apps? A new hack, dubbed MobileX, does just that—bringing full-screen apps like Facebook and YouTube to your Apple TV.
Apple's AirPlay technology enables wireless streaming of video, photos, and music from your iOS device to Apple TV, but at this point, you can't access the full App Store via Apple TV.
That, of course, hasn't stopped industrious hackers from trying. MobileX, from Steve Troughton-Smith and a hacker named Nick who goes by TheMudKip, jailbreaks Apple TV using the latest version of Seas0nPass, an Apple TV hack released last year by fireCore.
On Twitter, TheMudKip said he "rewrote SpringBoard from scratch using only QuartzCore."
Springboard is the standard iOS home screen that manages apps.
In a video demo of the technology (below), Troughton-Smith said "MobileX is a window manager for iOS that replaces Springboard for the added bonus of letting iPhone and iPad apps run on Apple TV."
Without an Apple TV touch screen, Troughton-Smith navigated through apps using Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Secure Shell (SSH) and the Apple TV remote. But as SlashGear noted, Troughton-Smith has "since cooked up a hack to add Apple IR remote control support to iOS apps."
In the video, Troughton-Smith said apps scale up to 720p resolution "adequately," showing off the iPad version of Facebook, as well as Maps and Safari, which he said was a bit sluggish because "VNC slows everything down."
"The built-in menu controlled by the remote allows you to quit apps, launch Safari, connect to Wi-Fi, or show multiple apps side by side," he said. "Audio and video work well too so many games and media apps just work, like YouTube."
"If Apple isn't going to give us a way to make real AppleTV apps, then I guess we'll have to make one ourselves," Troughton-Smith concluded.
Apple introduced a revamped, $99 Apple TV in August 2010 that was a quarter of the size of previous versions, included streaming movies from Netflix, and had 99-cent TV rentals from ABC and Fox. In recent months, however, rumors have focused on the possibility of an actual television set from Apple, though Cupertino has made no announcements.
For more, see PCMag's full review of Apple TV and the slideshow above.