According to the Programming Guide [1], no persistent data can be stored in the device, everything should be in iCloud, and the maximum size of the Apps is 200MB (at any given point, it seems, you can use on-demand resources)
This is an interesting way of trying to squeeze more apps and circumvent some of the latests storage-related issues in iOS
This actually concerns me, I think 400mb would have been a much more reasonable maximum. We're not going to get a lot of good games if this isn't increased.
Bastion (a 2.5D isometric action RPG) on my iPhone is 1.2GB. Transistor (one of the games they featured) is 1.84GB on the App Store for the iPhone version.
Feels like a disconnect between the docs and reality.
The AppleTV is intended to work as an always-connected device, so apps can reasonably be expected to download the assets as they are needed.
That might be what Apple think, but that certainly isn't what users think. People won't wait 30 seconds for a game to start - they'll just delete the game and buy a different one. If too many games have long load times they'll stop using Apple TV for games altogether. By pitching Apple TV as 'apps in the living room' the competition stops being Netflix and starts being a Playstation.
As far as I understand the on-demand loading, once downloaded assets do not get pruned until the device is under memory pressure. The feature also allows to pre-load assets in the background.
So if the developers do the right job, then that first 200 MB download contains everything for the player to start playing. Then, before those initial assets "run out", the additional stuff will already have been loaded in the background.
Yes. This is going to be difficult for developers, but it's also a valuable skill to be gained because it helps developers to keep their assets organized and their code will be better at dealing with streaming resources, which, in turn will open the doors for many interesting things to do in the future.
We'll see what happens - after all, when you consider a disk size of 32 or 64 GB, then obviously the current limit is purely artificial.
If developers are unable to adapt to the restrictions or if the framework isn't good enough to the point where the end-user experience suffers, then we'll either see the restrictions lifted or the framework improved.
These restrictions don't restrict the type of game you can make, they only make it harder compared to a unlimited initial distribution.
(note however that if the initial download must fit in 200 MB, then the customer experience potentially improves as the time to download 200 MB is naturally much shorter than the time required to download 20GB which is the maximum size an app can currently have).
That way the OS can clear out unnecessary files and they just get downloaded again the next time you play the game. I imagine there is room for temporary video caches etc.
If you loaded the assets over the network on demand then you could get the file size down dramatically. People just expect that when you download a game to your phone or tablet that you'll be able to play offline. Apple TV is stationary though and it's expected to be connected at all times. I bet the core binary would be ~20MB, then you could download and play a level (or a levelsode) every night.
Out of curiosity I went through my Steam folder to look at all the games I have installed. Even many of the 2D ones are well over 200mb - almost all of them are over a gig, most are 2-8 gigs. Some of them are even mobile games, like Republique.
Simple 2D games will probably be just fine with a 200mb limit but pretty much any high tier game is going to have size issues, I think. Hopefully streaming assets down will work out for those games, but there are significant numbers of games for which network streaming is impossible (open-world games, for example, Really Need all their assets on local storage at all times.)
On my Android phone as well I have multiple games up above the 500mb mark, 2d and 3d alike.
no persistent storage sounds really brutal. Does that mean even NSUserDefaults will lose data after a task switch? No save game states if you're offline? What's the point of offering a 64gb model if apps can't store anything?
Does it really make more sense to create _another_ OS, rather than extending OS X or iOS? It seems like they're doing that anyway seeing as games etc will work "across all devices"...
I'm not sure what you're trying to point out. It looks like TVMLJS is the framework that the current set of "Apps" are built with. They're basically dashboard widgets that display XML and Javascript.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/tvos/releasen...
- You can use all the iOS Frameworks you know and like to build/port your full-fledged apps for apple TV
- You can build simple apps ("ideal for streaming media") with XML/JS.
This means everybody can hack something together to get their online video onto the apple TV (video bloggers, local tv stations etc), but obviously for more complex stuff (e.g. games) you'd use the usual frameworks from iOS.
The TL;DR is that if Apple made your iOS device the controller for the game on the TV, that changes everything.
Imagine that...game developers can design and program controllers for their games. That may be a bit confusing for some, and there may be some standardization that is needed....but just the idea blew my mind.
Imagine a game where I can play with my 3 kids. But, the controls for my 2-year old (on my iPad) are different than the controls for my 5-year old (on my iPod) which are different than the controls for my 7-year old (another iPad) and myself (an iPhone).
But we all experience the game fully, relatively easily, in our own way.
Oh man....that got me so excited....alas...that was not meant to be.
One can only hope that it comes in the future...because that would most definitely unlock a whole new generation of casual gamers that no console could dream of unlocking.
This is definitely possible now. In fact, this is possible now even with the existing Apple TV - using the TV Out feature which many games already employ.
And open themselves up to be judged as a serious game player? I don't think they want that, as someone who views the gaming community with a great deal of disgust. Whiny, entitled children who are extremely critical.
Apple has an amazing casual market and it makes more sense to capitalize on that.
1. The gaming community is one of the most critical, volatile, toxic cultures I've ever seen. See: Gamergate. This isn't a comment on individuals, just the collective. This is where my impression of whiny, entitled children comes from.
2. Apple seems quite comfortable in the casual gaming community.
3. Coming out with their own hardware would be a commitment to gaming that would open themselves up to actually WANTING the criticism of the gaming community. I don't see Apple relishing this at the moment, especially after the Apple Watch flop and the introduction of a stylus 8 years late.
I was thinking about this a week ago while contemplating their gaming moves with AppleTV.
I think Apple wants to focus their own design energy on the broadest customer base, which means casual gamers. Based on that, it makes sense that they would basically deliver their rendition of the Wii-mote. It's interesting to compare it to the FireTV remote as well.
Honestly, there's a lot of "hard core game" controllers out there and they all fit in the mold of the XBox/Playstation dual-stick model. It's a smaller market, and people tend to be brand loyal and also generally not fans of Apple. So I think it makes a lot of sense for them to stay out of that racket and leave it to third parties.
This puts a lot of onus on the game developers to provide a good consumer experience. The hallmarks of great Apple products is when they get in there and say "no, you want it this way don't you?" This seems like capitulation or a punt more than anything.
What have they done for game developers? Almost nothing it seems. If anything, they've made it harder to reach Apple customers by fragmenting the experience across 3 form factors, with the same 70/30 revenue model. There doesn't seem to be any true rational why you would need an AppleTV, that another cheaper product doesn't do better, or something many people already have doesn't already do.
>... If anything, they've made it harder to reach Apple customers by fragmenting the experience across 3 form factors
Microsoft and Sony both sell tablets, phones, desktops and laptops as well as Apple. Of the three who's OS, development tools, deployment and hardware lineup seems most coherent to you?
> ...There doesn't seem to be any true rational why you would need an AppleTV, that another cheaper product doesn't do better, or something many people already have doesn't already do.
I don't think there's ever been a single Apple product ever released that people didn't say the exact same thing about.
iOS 7 (2013) introduced the GameController framework, an SDK to allow game developers to detect physical button presses / D-pad, etc...
This was designed to work in conjunction with hardware makers who made game controller shells that housed iPhone / iPod Touch, but with some extra physical buttons.
I always viewed this as laying the groundwork for an Apple TV App Store, but it seemed to instantly lose traction and haven't heard anything about since the couple of months following WWDC 2013.
My concern is the apps that are approved for this device and the speed at which it occurs.
I've bought into the whole eco system in terms of hardware: macbook, Apple tv, iphones, ipads etc. But I don't really care for apple radio, itunes music, or itunes video. I use netflix and amazon and spotify. So my concern is that those apps will be quickly available without any slow down or blocking by Apple. I also like to stream local content which I can do easily with my ipad. I think as long as I can get the same selection of apps I get for ios I'll be happy, but I've seen apple make arbitrary choices before.
Amazon doesn't support the current Apple TV or Google's Chromecast, so I doubt they'll support the new Apple TV either. Maybe they think this is an effective way to get people to buy a Fire TV or Fire TV Stick.
I don't think so. Amazon has always been about being everywhere, no matter what devices you use. So I'd be surprised if Amazon doesn't release a (Prime) Video app soon. And it should be ok for Apple too, since they allow an equivalent app on iOS.
I don't think that's true when it comes to video. Amazon only recently released an android app for Instant Video. They didn't put it on the Google Play store though. You have to enable installation of untrusted apps, download the apk for the Amazon Appstore, install it, then install the Instant Video app from Amazon's Appstore.
The way Amazon has tried to edge itself in is by supplying custom content, both in TV and games. Netflix has kept its edge with content, HBO has kept it's edge with content. Whether you like Amazon's content is up for debate, but what's not up for debate is Apple is behind in this regard.
Going into content would be a terrible mistake for Apple. It would set them up as a competitor against the very services they rely on to make the Apple TV competitive. As a neutral party, they can provide an attractive platform for Netflix, HBO, etc services.
Sony made the mistake of getting into content decades ago. Their aim was to deliver content to their device businesses, but it made them the enemy instead of an ally of every other music, TV and film company on the planet. Apple had an exclusive with HBO Go last year. That would never have happened if Apple had their own TV service.
> My concern is the apps that are approved for this device and the speed at which it occurs.
Microsoft and Sony have much longer and more arduous processes to get distribution on their consoles, so I doubt this will be a significant problem. I think a greater risk would be a loose policy allowing sub-standard apps and games getting on to the platform and giving it a bad reputation.
Consistency is really important in branding. I don't understand why people rag on Apple for being so incredibly consistent in their branding. I bet your own marketing department would love to have that kind of discipline.
How much time is spent here on HN talking about A/B testing things and going with the best result. Apple is incredibly profitable. As much as it might irk you, I bet their phraseology performs VERY well.
True. But that means that the old AppleTV is now the only hardware that Apple is selling which has no software support. Pretty unusual, considering they're still supporting the 4S.
Not everyone wants what the new ATV is offering. I have no desire for games, more apps, siri, etc., and as such am not willing to pay > $99 for it. For how I use it, the (soon to be) old-gen ATV is perfect and now it'll cost even less!
If it's an ATV2 you'll probably get more than you paid for it because it's jailbreak-able.
I never bought the first gen ATV but when the new ones dropped for $99, I snapped one up as an impulse buy and then got another when the 1080p version came out, for the other TV.
I'm impressed with my FireTV stick (1080p streaming over wifi to the tune of 10Mbps for 2.5h straight!!, but I use the AppleTV more.
At $150, I'll probably buy the new one to see what it's all about. These streaming devices are pretty cool and pretty cheap. (I've also got a WDTV and my receiver does spotify+airplay audio; I haven't yet bought a Roku though).
It looks good, but the price is pretty baffling. I can run VLC and plex for free on my iOS devices, StreamToMe is $3, Air Video HD is $5. Is Beamer that much better?
Does anyone know that if we mirrored a game from our iPhone 6s would it graphically look better than if we played it natively on the Apple TV? Seeing as the graphical horsepower in the phone is better than what the Apple TV offers.
Google is marketing Android TV more as an OEM solution for smart TV vendors at this point.
And I don't know that superior / inferior plays into it really. Standalone Android TV devices just don't make a lot of sense because there's no demand for them. Consumers trust Apple to make shitty experiences less shitty, so until Apple leads, there is no market. It's the same as it was (is?) for tablets: there's not really a market for tablets, but there's a market for iPads. I think that's what we'll see with the Apple TV.
Remember Google TV? Flash support on Android? How is Google Glass working out? What proportion of Android phones get regular OS updates, and how does that bode for Android TV updates?
Google's corporate culture is to move fast and break things. That works great for online services that you can iterate on rapidly and fix for everyone quickly, but once you sell a product to a consumer how does it get updates? How does it get fixed? How do you overcome a bad initial experience? Apple has faced all of these problems and over many years has built addressing them in to it's DNA, it's corporate instincts. Google has never had a good answer to these questions.
FireTV is pretty awesome. By far the best FireOS product. I love voice search via the Android app. It's actually the only voice recognition software I use. Games aren't very interesting, but I am extremely dubious of AppleTV stealing much market share from the consoles. It'll be big screen versions of Candy Crush.
Android TV is a buggy, slow, confusing experience. I'm trying to buy a new TV at the moment and after having used it on a few TV's don't have good feelings towards it.
Android TV is different from Chromecast. Android TV can behave exactly as a Chromecast (you can wake it up by casting from your phone), but it also has a remote driven interface, voice recognition, and apps with non touch interfaces. Developers must release a android TV version of their application in order for their app to work with Android TV, the entire android ecosystem is not available to TV by default.
tvOS seems to support seamless transitions of apps across iOS devices (they mentioned it in a game context) so it may prove to be much better than that -- e.g. watch a show on Hulu, walk into room and hand the app over to the TV and so forth.
Android TV devices act as Chromecast receivers, so you can do the same thing on Android TV, at least with media player apps. However, I don't think there's a built-in way of transitioning state for full-fledged Android apps. Samsung's apparently been experimenting with it [1], but it's still in beta, currently only works with a few Galaxy devices, and requires apps to integrate their SDK. I'm interested to see what Apple's approach looks like.
Very interesting to see the alternative JavaScript and XML approach to creating apps. I guess it makes a lot of sense for the simple apps that will be available. Good that there's still basically the whole of iOS available for use, however.
Can specific apps still block airplay? I haven't used AppleTV in a long time, but it was crazy frustrating when certain apps restricted you from being able to airplay to a big screen.
I'm guessing mirroring the entire screen might be a possible workaround but I thought perhaps apps could detect this as well and shutdown.
In a lot of cases this can be due to licensing restrictions. These companies may not have licenses to allow streaming off of the mobile app to a big screen. It has less to do with the company and more to do with the content licensor (who may have previously licensed the content to someone else with exclusive rights to TV but not to mobile).
Content licensing and not technical issues are usually the reason for these annoying practices. Blame the content owner.
The Chromecast basically doesn't need to do anything except stream video. This, on the other hand, has a reasonably hefty mobile processor (same one as iPhone 6). Also, the Chromecast's wifi is pretty anaemic; not much room for antennae.
I think from a consumer marketing perspective they want really want a box with an Apple logo sitting in every living room in the country. I think that, and maybe because of the SSD and other hardware.
> Anyone understand why they didn't launch this as a chromecast like USB stick vs. a standalone box?
The same reason that Google didn't do that with Nexus Player, which is the nearest equivalent consumer product from Google to the Apple TV.
> Surely price point will be a big issue with adoption.
Possibly -- I think there is a reason why Google did Chromecast first. But Apple has been pretty successful in the past aiming at the high end of the market and not worrying about price point effects on adoption, trusting on marketing and prestige.
I'll ignore the idea that an A8 processor based computer with gigs of memmory and 32 GB of flash storage could be fitted into an HDI stick. Presumably why did they produce a full-featured computer platform instead of a streaming stick.
Chromecast already exists, so why duplicate it? My question to you is, where's the value added in an Apple version of Chromecast? Where's the revenue stream? How does it establish a platform? How does it play to their strengths?
Considering the amount of processing power put into this thing, how should it fit into a stick?
I also got the impression they want it to be standalone device. IMO a good idea, if I'd tell my parents to use their phones' to watch TV I'd get some very weird looks.
The "Remote" app has been around for years (dating back to before the previous "black hockey puck" iteration of the Apple TV) and can control the TV as well as iTunes.
That's not what this is about though, it's for UI layout (much like with Dashboard). You don't call Objective-C APIs from JS inside a WebKit container, you're actually using JS to layout the app.
TVML for layout and TVJS for logic. TVML is just an XML schema for Apple TV UIs and TVJS a Javascript framework to present the XML templates loaded with your data.
If you're wanting to stream video you can build a full app with almost no Obj-C/Swift (there's still a small shell, though probably nothing custom needs to be here).
The XML templates are a little odd in that they're JS files (e.g. Index.xml.js) and contain the XML as the return value of a global function called Template.
AFAIK, the "Channels" on the Apple TV gen 2 and 3 are already JavaScript and XML-based (a while ago, people discovered that they could spoof the XML and JS on the Trailers channel to play arbitrary videos). So it's somewhat natural that the new Apple TV continues with Javascript.
Show me a way to make money off a consumer experience in 2015 that isn't a walled garden. You're either a platform or you're a feature waiting to be integrated into a platform.
It's so shitty how the Raspberry Pi has been able to do the same technical things as this for almost 3 years now with complete freedom and ease of use, but the only thing stopping it was DRM. Now this non-innovative POS is probably going to overtake it simply because Apple can cut a deal :/
As a developer, I wish that were true. I bought a Raspberry Pi, and just opening a window with OpenGL in it was frustrating beyond belief. You can apt-get install SDL2, but like most packages it hasn't been adapted to the Pi and won't work with GLES. So you have to build it from source. And even then I couldn't figure out how to stop keyboard input from my SDL window from leaking into the terminal that started the game. And so on... I ended up giving the Pi away.
And that was ~a full year after it came out, I never buy things on launch day.
In Xcode, it takes something between 5 and 10 clicks to create a working project for OS X or iOS (with OpenGL or whatever framework you want to use).
The developer experience is a big part of what makes the Apple TV what it is. I'm not saying it's perfect - I can't believe the App Store doesn't allow for time trials yet - but it's really, really easy to beat the developer experience for any other living room device.
How many cores does a Pi have? What's it's clock rate? How many and what type of GPUs does it have and what's their performance? Is it 64 bit? What controllers does it provide? What's the voice command system? What are it's versions of Metal, UI Kit, Cloud Kit? What's the software distribution mechanism? Sorry, but this isn't Slashdot.
Just the other day I realized I didn't even have batteries in my TV remote anymore. Haven't had the desire to turn my TV on in who knows how long. As a consumer I'm not optimistic this will change anything.
I'm at a loss for what you're trying to say here. So you don't watch TV? Like, in any of the possible ways that a TV could be utilized? No Cable, No DVD/BluRay, No YouTube/Netflix hookup, no XBMC/Kodi/Plex style streaming, no console gaming?
Sure its possible that all those options and others are not of your interests, but then what were you expecting to change? You're obviously not the target demographic.
I guess just contemplating out loud whether this is a play to try to "rescue" "TV as a commonly utilized device in the household", or if I truly am an anomaly, and that TV is still trending well among all the new devices everyone may choose to use these days as an alternative.
I should've thought this through though, realizing that this is a new Apple device on a heavily "pro-apple" forum :)
I don't watch any broadcast TV, but the large screens with HDMI connectors in my living room and bedroom are awfully useful for watching movies on, photos, and so on
As a consumer of what? Because of it's not of movies, TV or games then, gee, I doubt a product aimed at movies, TV and games will have a huge effect on you.
The only times I use the TV is when I want to watch something with my daughters using a WDTV. Years ago, we used to play Wii games together, but the Wii is just a pain to use and the controllers aren't even usually charged up these days.
If this offers compelling, fun multi-player casual games with a smooth, no-fuss interface I may well get one just for that.
I found that I used the TV a little more often if I could talk to it via Xbox One. If it worked as well as Amazon's Echo for voice recognition, I'd probably use it a little more. This said, I'm not excited about having to press a button for Apple TV to hear me, nor am I likely to use it if I end up losing that small remote. It would be nicer if you could either have it always on or have an option for it to continuously listen for an hour or two.
This is where HN breaks down. The branding is explicitly tvOS, not TvOS (HN used to have pedantic mods manually change all titles to make first-letter-caps even when not relevant, not sure if it's automatic now or not).
Are you serious? HN is breaking down because someone didn't follow Apple's brand identity when posting about a product that was launched about 2 hours ago!?
Upvoted just because your link to U+203E OVERLINE lead me to finding out the difference between it and the macron¹.
If I understand correctly though, you’re saying to get around the automatic capitalization of submitted titles by using an overline as the first character? So this title would look like this instead:
‾tvOS for Developers
…but that doesn’t really seem very elegant to me. Perhaps you could achieve a similar affect by using an invisible character at the beginning of the sentence instead, such as U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE². Since it’s not in Unicode’s 'Zs' (Separator, space) character category—in addition to its 'Wspace' key having the value 'N'—it’s unlikely that if HN’s code strips leading and trailing whitespace from submitted titles, U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE will be stripped.
I guess if that doesn’t work, you could always replace U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T with a similar looking lowercase equivalent such as U+0288 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH RETROFLEX HOOK³ or even U+1D5CD MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF SMALL T⁴ (that’s assuming you’re fine with some people not being able to view it due to not having a font installed with a glyph for that character)… but I’d avoid misusing the semantic significance of those characters like that.
Side Note: Unlike what Graphemica may have you believe, there are actually more fonts than just DejaVu Sans that contain glyphs for the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. Modern versions of OS X come with STIXGeneral¹ (v1.1.0 on OS X v10.9 at least), and fonts like Symbola² and Everson Mono³ also have glyphs for them. (I love Symbola’s glyphs for the MATHEMATICAL ITALIC characters such as U+1D463 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL V⁴, while Everson Mono is fantastic if you need a monospaced font for all those characters⁵).
The first letter is (used to be?) made capital in HN titles automatically. I've had to go back and change this manually after the initial submission. Most folks probably haven't run into it before. And anytime I corrected it, it remained corrected.
This is an interesting way of trying to squeeze more apps and circumvent some of the latests storage-related issues in iOS
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/tvos/document...