David Cordero

Blog

Showing HTML content in tvOS

Published on 15 Jun 2020

If you ever tried to display HTML content in tvOS, you might have discovered that it is not as easy as initially expected.

That is because there is no web browser, UIWebView, or even WKWebView available in tvOS.

Nevertheless, there is an alternative solution that can be useful to present simple HTML content as Term and Conditions, Privacy Policies, etc…

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How to free up space in your CI or iOS Development machine

Published on 01 Oct 2019

As a result of working in iOS Development, it is quite common to see how your machine eventually run out of space.

The reason is that, as things go, some files like archives, simulators, or caches from building are created, but never deleted.

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Cooling the Raspberry Pi 4

Published on 27 Jul 2019

Some weeks ago the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Raspberry Pi 4, a new version of their amazing board that will allow us to go even further in our projects.

This new model means a huge bump in terms of performance, being nowadays closer to be a mini-computer than the educational board that it was originally aiming to be.

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SwiftUI, personal thoughts and Model-View-Presenter

Published on 12 Jun 2019

It was just a few days ago that Apple presented SwiftUI, a brand new framework to create the user interface of our Apps that might eventually replace UIKit in our Apps.

Despite the hype, SwiftUI is still just a baby framework, and it will need patience, love and tender to become a strong and useful adult framework. As we already saw on the first version of Swift, new tools need some iterations and some patterns created by the community until they get really useful in our daily basis.

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Improving the iOS development cycle with breakpoints

Published on 28 Mar 2019

The Development, Build and Run cycle is by far one of the most annoying parts when working in native iOS development. Your thinking and creativity flows are suddenly stopped by unnecessary waiting times, just because for some reason Xcode decided that it was a good moment to build again certain files that were not modified at all.

Apart from that, one always ends up having to navigate over and over again to the screen in which you are working on.

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Librem 5, a mobile platform which focuses on your privacy

Published on 30 Dec 2018

The world of operating systems for mobile devices has been dominated by Apple and Google for the last ten years.

Both android and iOS have been around for quite a while already, and in their current versions, 9 and 12 respectively, they have reached a huge level of stability and customer satisfaction.

They also offer a huge number of Apps available in their App stores which make of them great platforms to smoothly achieve every kind of daily tasks.

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Apple Tv, designing beyond Siri Remote

Published on 23 Nov 2018

Together with Apple Tv 4th Generation, Apple introduced its new remote control, Siri Remote, a completely new concept to navigate on big screen interfaces.

In a world of remote controls with tons of buttons, Apple had the courage 😜 to release a box controlled by only six buttons and a little digitizer, having only two of the buttons and the digitizer available for developers….

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Extending TVML with custom templates

Published on 07 Jun 2018

TVML templates are the base of every App based on TVMLKit. They ease the creation of Apps following the UI patterns of tvOS.

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Mind the cup

Published on 07 Mar 2018

It was a few weeks ago that I went to Google.

Google has great offices here in Zurich, and I thought that having them organizing a technical meetup was a really good opportunity to see them from the inside.

It was a great and interesting day, and I am happy to have met nice people in a very friendly environment.

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Bumping the performance of TVML with Prototypes and Data Binding… or not

Published on 25 Nov 2017

The low performance of TVMLKit has been one of its biggest bottle necks since tvOS was launched. Not only when performing heavy computing task, which could be after all derived to Swift, but also when dealing with a lot of UI elements.

You only have to load a screen with several items and layers and you will start noticing delays and glitches when loading your views.

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TvOSScribble, building Scribble for tvOS

Published on 20 Aug 2017

As I mentioned in Being a tvOS Developer, the lack of buttons on its remote control is one of the biggest challenges when creating Apps for Apple Tv.

It is sometimes quite hard to find intuitive gestures for very common actions. One of those actions is definitely the one to zap among channels.

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Directional clicks on tvOS

Published on 10 Jul 2017

If you have tried to detect directional clicks on tvOS you might have notice that it is not that easy.

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Being a tvOS Developer

Published on 10 Jul 2017

It is already more than one year ago that I came to Zürich and I joined Zattoo.

Zattoo is a small company based in Switzerland, dedicated to the distribution of television through the internet, regardless of the device the users have.

Among these devices are iPhone, iPad, and now that it has an App Store, the 4th generation of Apple Tv “recently” released by Apple.

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TVML and UIKit as happy roommates

Published on 06 Jul 2017

There is a classical beginning for every tvOS tutorial and it is a question: Are you creating a TVKit application or a native UIKit application?

Depending on the answer to that question, you will end up with one of two completely different ways of working to create your application.

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NSTimer stands for NoSwiftyTimer

Published on 22 May 2017

NSTimer is one of the simplest mechanism provided by Apple to create timers.

You probably saw it applied to several purposes: Views being shown or hidden after a certain delay, periodically updated views, or any other task being executed periodically or with a delay. They are without any question a very generic and powerful tool.

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