FrontRow Hack – Getting it Working

Over in the comments section of my other blog, reader Lone Star kindly posted the five steps needed to configure your illegally pirated copy of FrontRow, including a keyboard shortcut to launch it.

Click the link for Lone Star’s tutorial. Be warned, I haven’t tested it.

Reader Lone Star writes:

A few pre-tutorial notes:

If you have already placed front row.app in your applications folder but HAVE done the plist modification, this will not work exactly as desired. Download the patched front row.app again and replace your plist modded version with the downloaded one. We’ve found it works much better this way. You don’t see the ugly dock icon, and the problems with iTunes working properly seem to be gone too.

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STEP 1.
Download JacksonBrown’s patched Front Row STW.

His brilliant patching work makes Front Row run under 10.4.2 without having the iMac’s remote present.
There are three files inside this .ZIP
– Readme.txt you may now ignore, as it is out of date.
– Front Row.app copy to the Applications folder
– BezelServices.framework copy to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/

(EDITOR’S NOTE: It has been suggested it’s best to backup ‘BezelServices.framework’ before overwriting it)

At this point you will need to reboot your computer.

STEP 2.
Open Script Editor.app (located in Applications/AppleScript) and paste in the following code.

tell application “System Events”
tell application “Front Row” to activate
key code 53 using {command down}
end tell

Once you have done this, save it as an application named openfrontrow.app in your applications folder.

STEP 3.
Now go to macupdate and download the program named Xkeys. It is freeware.
Once you have the file downloaded, install it and then open it up. Inside the program, configure your F8 key to run your openfrontrow.app file you created in STEP2.

STEP 4.
Now go into System Preferences. In the Accounts preference tab set up front row.app (the one you downloaded, NOT to be confused with openfrontrow.app that you created in STEP2) to be a login item.

STEP 5.
Reboot your computer. When it turns back on, press the F8 key and hopefully you will be experiencing Front Row! Pressing F8 again (or a lot of other keys on the keyboard) will close Front Row.
Let me know if it works!