From the course: Learning Apple tvOS App Development

What makes tvOS special?

From the course: Learning Apple tvOS App Development

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What makes tvOS special?

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- [Tutor] "The future of TV is apps." That is what Apple told us when they announced new Apple TV running tvOS but what makes tvOS apps so special in comparison to iOS apps for example, and what is the Apple TV experience supposed to be like? To understand that, you must know that one important aspect of the Apple TV experience is that it highlights a communal living room experience. And instead of using an app all by yourself like you would on iPhone or iPad, Apple TV apps are supposed to bring people like friends and family together, and a huge difference here is that the huge living room TV is very far away in comparison to an iPhone or an iPad that you're holding in your hand. And you're also not directly interacting with that screen but with the Siri remote, and here is a complication or something that you need to keep in mind because still, you're using the TV remote but attention does not have to be on the remote, but on the screen itself. And how we can achieve that is by a good Apple tvOS app design, and this is why we are talking about some key design principles that you need to know, because Apple TV apps are always three things; they are connected, they are clear, and they are immersive. And what these terms mean we're going to have a look at that all by themselves, so let's start with connected. And if you have already used a tvOS app or tvOS, then you're familiar with this parallax effect where touches on the Siri remote, are intuitively reflected on images or icons on Apple TV, with the effect you can see here. And this is what really establishes the connection between your app and the user using the Siri remote. And that is what connected actually means so that the user feels a connection between using the touch surface off the tvOS remote or the Siri remote, and what's going on in your application. And clear is all about not getting lost, that everything is easy to read and most importantly on a distance, and also that you're not using any ambiguous gestures to control your app. And being immersive is all about using this big screen and dedicating the entire screen to your content as you can see here in this example image from our application that we're going to build in this course. So, keep in mind that your applications always need to be connected, clear, and immersive. And now let's also have a look at some technical details that are special to tvOS, and let's start with the storage limitations. First of all, the maximum size for your tvOS app bundle is four gigabytes. And now the real bummer is actually that you only have 500 kilobytes off persistent storage that is local to the device that you can use together with NSUserDefaults, and this is because data must be purgeable by the operating system when the user downloads for example, a whole season of a series or a very large movie. And what we can do to still save user data is to use iCloud because Apple TV is always online and this means that we can store and retrieve user data in and from iCloud. And what we can also do is package read-only assets using on-demand resources, and there you have a space up to 20 gigabytes.

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