TVUIKit in tvOS 12 - An Overview

On September 27th, Apple released tvOS 12 for its Apple TV - with all the feature hype around support for Dolby Atmos, Zero Sign-On, and a new International screensaver. For Apple TV developers, it’s worth noting new frameworks including Network, TVML advancements and the new TVUIKit framework.

What is TVUIKit?

In a nutshell, the TVUIKit framework enables you to bring common UI elements from Apple TV into third party apps. The TVUIKit framework simplifies the development of Apple TV views including posters, monograms, cards, caption buttons, and lockups in app. More on that below

What’s included in it?

Peeking deeper under the hood. Our team describes the new Apple TV objects as the following:

Lockup Views (Focused States)

• TVLockupView: Poster view with header and footer that enlarges what the viewer has selected

• TVCardView: A custom view which is typically used for ratings and reviews (think stars, tomatoes, number of reviews)

• TVPosterView: A tvOS image view which has an image, title and subtitle. TVPosterView’s typically expand when in focus.

• TVMonogramView: A tvOS view which represents a person, user, or customer. The view usually contains an image or generates initials with title and subtitle.

• TVCaptionButtonView: Caption button which includes title, image, and subtitle.

How does it work?

Lockup views are focus-able views to present main content on informative screens prior to playing the video. Each view, - or view set - can have a header and/or a footer view.

What’s great about it is that when a state changes for a particular view, developers then have the option to change the appearance of the view. Perhaps you’d want to do this to make the view more noticeable, or stand out compared to the other cards. Some of the main states include: normal, disabled, selected, and focused. Focused being the state when the user is hovering on that particular card

Other New UI Components Added in tvOS 12

A new keyboard/layout has also surfaced, which is a digit entry keyboard. Only showing digits from 0-9, this makes it easy to navigate rather than entire keyboards on the television. For more information on the keyboard, check out Apple’s developer post.

How does it help content creators and app developers?

Ultimately, TVUIKit helps reduce the process of creating the same views across an app. Instantiate the element and it comes with several UI features that were once being created manually. Because developers were already creating these types of views, it only made sense that Apple standardize and make it easier for developers to create cards, lockups, caption buttons etc.