
Hands-on with the tvOS SDK - qzervaas
http://telliott.io/2015/09/15/hands-on-with-the-tvos-sdk.html
======
apetresc
The biggest disappointment for me, from poking around the tvOS SDK docs, is
that the high-fidelity microphone (which clearly must exist on the remote in
order for the Siri-enabled features to work) is not accessible from a public
API.

Here's hoping someone will figure out a private API for it, even if I won't be
able to ship apps like that on the App Store.

~~~
makecheck
On the surface that would be a security risk that is hard to quantify (how
would they figure out that an app is occasionally capturing audio from
someone's living room and using and/or storing or sending it in a way that
it's not supposed to?). For instance it could probably be used for some evil
scheme to make targeted advertising.

They might be able to open it later if they can find a way to do so, e.g.
perhaps only allowing post-processed text to be returned and not raw audio,
and even then only whitelisted words.

~~~
interpol_p
They could do it via the granular permissions system on iOS, e.g., "This app
wants to access the microphone. Allow/Deny"

Though it might be weird having to explicitly read and grant permissions to a
TV app.

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robbiet480
What I don't understand is why the Apple TV comes with either 32GB or 64GB of
storage, but apps are limited to 200MB and I don't exactly see Apple letting
you download content to the device (a la AppleTV 1st Generation). So, why all
the storage?

~~~
osxrand
It is o my the initial download that is limited to 200MB, once launched the
app can then download another 2GB right away. You can have another 2GB on the
device, and up to 20GB in the cloud. So 4.2GB on the device at once per game
and all the slices in the cloud. So common content in the initial 2.2GB and
the rest in the swappable chunks.

I'm guessing this is for a few reasons, one would be to get debs into the
habit of creating these downloadable slices for something down the track. But
that's just a guess.

Another would be that the game is downloaded really quickly, from the end
users point of view, and able to begin being played really quickly, without
having to wait for 4-20gb to download first, then realize you've run into
storage issues and have to deal with them. Common files and first level or two
while the next 10 are on their way down. Seems like a decent plan for a fast
user experience, if that's why they are doing it.

~~~
gurkendoktor
The problem is that most game developers are probably not writing
SpriteKit/SceneKit games in Swift, but rather using Unity or some other kind
of portable engine. Now they all have to wait for their toolchain to catch up
with Apple's app thinning mechanisms.

After the complete failure of MFi controllers on iOS 7+, I hoped that Apple
would make life easier for game developers, not harder. Now we have a 200 MB
app limit plus the requirement that games have to work with the default
remote.

~~~
simonh
My own take in MFi controllers is that they were always intended to primarily
be used with the new Apple TV. Supporting them early was just a Trojan Horse
to get them in the stores in advance of the TV launch.

The alternative to requiring thinning is to allow fat app downloads and pretty
much guarantee that app thinning stays a niche capability with low adoption,
so Apple is making sure devs and their tools vendors just have to suck it up.
It also means developers of apps that can conceivably fit inside the 200mb
limit will work their buts off to make sure it does, which will tend to
improve download speeds.

Both effects will lead to a better user experience at the cost of some
developer inconvenience, but frankly they're not asking anything unreasonable.
Apple provide support for app thinning in their own frameworks, and if devs
still freely choose to use different tools then that's up to them but a
professional tool or framework that doesn't support thin apps in this era
isn't worthy of the name.

~~~
gurkendoktor
> My own take in MFi controllers is that they were always intended to
> primarily be used with the new Apple TV.

Then Apple shouldn't have allowed Lightning-connected game controllers. I
bought one for development purposes when their price dropped from $99 to
"let's clear this shelf" ($15 in my case), and not only can I not use it with
an Apple TV, it's also a terrible controller, on par with a $10 USB gamepad.

I agree that tvOS was probably the driving force behind MFi controller
support, but I also think it was a complete failure. (Sadly!)

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ghshephard
Can anyone tell if he was porting an iOS or OS X game to tvOS?

This suggests it was an OS X app: "While I didn’t delve too deeply, I was able
to copy over most of my code from the Invaders project verbatim, just making a
few tweaks for places where the OSX APIs differed from iOS."

~~~
Sephiroth87
It was a SpriteKit game, which has very similar APIs on both platforms, the
differences are mostly on the inputs side...

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coolandsmartrr
On the other hand, I have never seen a HN link labelled in green.

Is this a new feature?

[http://i.imgur.com/6gAgfsg.png](http://i.imgur.com/6gAgfsg.png)

~~~
tommyd
How come your HN looks like that - is there a new UI I'm not seeing? Mine is
still orange(? - colourblind!) background

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Same; still seeing all the old stuff. A/B testing perhaps?

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blumkvist
Why is this domain (and a few others on the front page) colored?

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DanBC
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

~~~
blumkvist
Thanks.

And to the downvoters too.

