We have had an Apple Tv for over 5 years and it was a gift from an Internet supplier. When I got it, I was doing iOS programming also besides the web and I said I must write a simple app for Apple Tv, even a simple Hello World app at least. It hadn’t happened, even after my kids came and grew. Well, until today.
Today, I don’t know how it happened but I was sitting at the saloon and trying to keep away myself to don’t touch the computer. Because it was Sunday and I want to care for the kids. Then my brain tricked me like that “programming is also caring to the children, don’t worry about that, you can do something for them by programming something, what about Apple TV hah? You always want to do with that. Do it now. For the children, yes.”
Then I picked up the computer from my room and start coding at the saloon with the children. First time! Because they ask so many things I couldn’t do anything with them on the computer. Even printing out painting paper for them can be hard. And I’m not a patient person, unfortunately. But, I’m trying to. Believe me.
Anyway… I started a TV OS project in Xcode and put an image of my children on the StoryBoard. This part was easy. But I couldn’t send it to Apple Tv. Because my Xcode version was not able to do that. Apple TV’s OS version was higher. I Couldn’t download the latest Xcode because my macOS version was not able for that, either. I lost an hour to understand what was happening. I started to update macOS when I realized the reason. It is macOS Monterey right now. Then I download the latest Xcode, but not from AppleStore because it was a very slow connection and the process circle was not going to over 15 percent. I downloaded it from Apple’s website.
When I finished all of the things it was dinner time. My wife made us 4 delicious pizzas. We shared one of them with the neighbor and they gave us food, too like tacos. I said taco but I don’t know what taco is actually. We call it “durum” at we have maybe 50 different wraps like that. This one was had cow liver in it and it was delicious, too. But we couldn’t finish it because we have already eaten the pizzas a lot.
Anyway, what was I’m telling? When we finished the meal I moved to my room to start coding but time was not enough to do something with the kids. Because their sleeping time has arrived. I told them we can continue tomorrow.
After the kids, we started watching our favorite vlogs from YouTube. This is our tradition, watching travel and caravan vlogs, locals and foreigners. We don’t have regular TV broadcasting. The satellite unit of the tv has broken for 6 years. As we have the Internet we don’t need regular TV broadcasting. We have apps instead of that.
So, when we finished the vlogs I started doing something in Xcode. Maybe 15 minutes later this little app happened. I put some buttons with images and labels. And I wrote a little function to speak the clicked button’s label. When you click the button this function tells the label word like “cow, cat, dog”. And ta-da! The app was ready.
The hard part was making a proper icon for the app. I wanted to make a surprise for the kids with the icon. They watch cartoons every morning on Apple Tv and when they see a different icon they always click on it. This time they will see themself as an icon. I hope they won’t scream and wake me up to ask what was that.
I have a little improvement plan for the app. It is very static right now. There are 8 buttons only. I want to be able to add more buttons with scrolling and I want the list to come from the Internet. I will be able to change the content easily by so. I can put numbers or cars or something else instead of animals. I can do that with a single JSON file.
I put the project on GitHub if you are interested. https://github.com/hcivelek/TV-Kids
