Boxee has made its new user interface design official and it does look very good. From what we can see, it looks well thought-out as well. The global menu leads you quickly to the most accessed features and the social aspect (recommendations and so on...) is very readable on the left. The other important element, the queue, is updated on the right. The movie library that mixes local and internet content seems quite convenient.

Behind the scenes, the support for hardware acceleration is there and Boxee is now using DirectX and DXVA (in Windows) to take advantage of the hardware. It means that you can now build kick-ass small footprint machine powered by NVIDIA's Ion. The public Beta should start on Jan 7th.

If you don't want to build your own box, Boxee has partnered with D-Link to build one. For D-link, this brings an awesome software platform and for Boxee, this is the way to break out from geeks and early adopters to a larger audience that typically won't build a media center PC. it seems like a win-win, really.

I don't know if this is the final design, but if it is... WOW!