Apple’s Swift-friendly tvOS is now available for developers

Good news, developers — tvOS documentation and guidelines are live!

An offshoot of iOS, tvOS is basically what we’ve come to love about using iPhones and iPads, just on the bigger screen. Happily, most of the tools iOS developers are comfortable with have made their way to tvOS.

GameKit? It’s there. UIKit, SpriteKit, CoreImage and AVKit are also there.

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Apps for tvOS will need an iCloud backup for storing information (“and retrieve it in a way that provides a great customer experience”), so a little cloudKit know-how will go a long way with Apple TV.

Interestingly enough, tvOS also inherits the Swift standard library, and all UIKit library files are .swift. If you’re stuck in Objective C, it’s time to get cozy with Swift. Apple TV demands it.

Apple is also introducing new frameworks for tvOS: TVMLJS, TVMLKit and TVServices. All three serve TVML, which is Apple’s custom markup language to create interfaces for Apple TV apps. Here’s how they’ll work:

• TVMLJS — Describes Javascript APIs used to load TVML pages in apps.

• TVMLKit — Helps incorporate Javascrit and TVML into apps.

• TVServices — for adding extensions to an Apple TV app.

All the necessary documentation is available via Apple’s developer portal, and you can sign up for an Apple TV developer kit there as well.

Don’t miss: Everything Apple announced at its September 2015 event