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by prgmatic 3936 days ago
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"...
3 comments
madeofpalk 3936 days ago
Apple TV has always been based on iOS, but was 'forked' a while ago and has diverged a lot since then.

Initial reports suggested that this 'new' tvOS is based on iOS 9, which makes sense seeing as it's using a lot of iOS API's and frameworks

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savoytruffle 3936 days ago
Recall the 1st generation Apple TV (announced in autumn 2006 and sold until 2010) was actually using a version of Mac OS X on an Intel CPU.
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steckerbrett 3936 days ago
Yes, that's an exception though. Very weird device really.
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alttab 3936 days ago
Depending on how they structure the teams and how they share their code, this will either go well, or very, very poorly.
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bickfordb 3936 days ago
It's probably not another OS in the traditional sense, but a different set of ObjC/Swift frameworks that are TV / set-top box relevant
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guelo 3936 days ago
Here it mentions XML and Javascript which is, um... different. https://developer.apple.com/tvos/
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pkaler 3936 days ago
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...

There looks like there is a TVMLKit which looks like AppKit and UIKit. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/tvos/releasen...

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chkuendig 3936 days ago
I think its pretty clear from that page:

- 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.

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simonh 3936 days ago
Craig Federighi told journalists that in terms of software it's 95% the same as iOS an OSX. It's a new OS brand, not a new OS.
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