tvOS

Is Apple considering another round of major changes to iOS’s Home screen? If watchOS and tvOS are any indication, the answer could be “yes.” Earlier this year, Apple launched the Apple Watch with a purely text-free Home screen, requiring users to identify 20-some initial apps (and manually-added third-party apps) by icon designs alone. This month, it will release the fourth-generation Apple TV with a refreshed UI, again almost entirely eliminating below-app text in favor of redesigned icons with 3D depth.

While it would be easy to write off Apple’s changes to text labels as one-off decisions for “really small screen” and “really big screen” devices, they collectively raise an interesting question: if developers properly redesigned their iOS icons, would text labels — a staple of graphical user interfaces for decades — really be necessary any more? I’ll take a look at some of the pros and cons below…

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With the Apple TV 4 developer kit in the hands of developers, select software makers are experimenting with different ways to take advantage of the iOS 9-based tvOS operating system. Developer Kevin Smith has created a MAME Emulator for the new Apple TV that is based on a similar port for iPhones and iPads. These special software kits allow users to run vintage video games on their modern devices, such as Frogger and Metal Gear Solid.

The video below shows some of these games in action. As MacRumors notes, the A8 chip in the new Apple TV is able to handle these simulated games fairly well. The developer explains on his YouTube channel how the emulator was developed:

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On the eve of this year’s iPhone launch, Apple has pushed out an update to the TestFlight application to enable internal testing of apps on tvOS. The Apple TV operating system has is now in its second beta version for users who have access to pre-release hardware.

Developers have been able to test locally on their devices by plugging them directly into Xcode and building their app, but today’s TestFlight update will allow them to distribute the builds over-the-air to other members of the same development team.

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