A relatively minor update to the appliance here (although not for those unable to download anything with AppleTV Software v1.1 installed). This includes a Swedish localization by fooBar, and fixes for sshd installation and for AppleTV Software 1.1 compatibility.
The link below downloads the installer, the link on the AwkwardTV site downloads the appliance alone, for those building Patchsticks.
So, yesterday AppleTV software version 1.1 dropped, along with YouTube support, which is nice. Also nice is a whole slew of new UI classes for appliance plugin developers. Mmmm.
Not so nice is the way that it changed a few APIs, moved some into a whole new framework, and deleted a vast amount of unnecessary OS X components. These components happen to include everything necessary to act as either a client or a server for most network file systems, amongst other things.
Ah well. I guess I’ll be writing a simple server system for the AppleTV then, to help people drop their media onto it. I might get that done this weekend, depending on any further fallout from the update.
For now, however, the BDK has been updated, as has the Loader appliance. The Loader should function on both versions of the AppleTV software, so an upgrade to version 1.1 isn’t absolutely required. The BDK, however, uses a number of the changed routines, so it is now dependant upon the latest version of the BackRow framework, and requires the AppleTV framework to be installed locally. It does include headers for the new BackRow framework, however.
For information on the changes in the BDK, you can look at its change log, and for information on making your plugins compatible with AppleTV version 1.1, you can look here.
The Xcode project template has been updated with the required plugin changes, so new projects will automatically be compatible with AppleTV 1.1. I’ve also provided some information on the update in the online help for the BDK testbed application.
I’ve been asked about this by a few people now: how does the icon display on the Main Menu work, and can I use it in my plugin? Well, the answers are ‘reasonably easily’ and ‘yes’, and today’s tutorial will show you how to do it.
Download the sample code for this tutorial
The code in this tutorial was written for BackRow version 2.0. Now that Apple has released AppleTV software version 1.1, some changes need to be made. In the tutorial and in the sample code, you will need to replace the [[self list] selection] call with [[self list] renderSelection].
The BackRow Developers’ Kit has been updated slightly. There was a bug in the keyboard handling support, where it would incorrectly post a button-up event for tap left & right, where it shouldn’t do so.
The new version is downloadable from the usual place.
This is something I’m asked about fairly frequently, and the answer is actually pretty simple; it involves about ten or fifteen lines of code, overall, and BackRow provides just about everything you’ll need.
Because the original video was so darned big, I decided to re-record it at a lower resolution, and try to lower the file size a bit. So, we now have a slightly expanded tutorial which shows the implementation of a recursive menu system. This will hopefully show a little more of how the menu controllers work than the original version, too.
You can watch the video inline, but I’d recommend downloading it to be able to view it full-size (720×576, i.e. PAL 576p).
Update: The podcast feed is now available on the iTunes Music Store. Subscribe, rate, review and enjoy, people 
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