I agree; developing for several (different) platforms is not trivial. Although I haven't developed for tvOS, I believe the limitations in the SDK are there for good reasons (flexibility usually goes on the cost of debugability) which produces similar UI's (e.g. Plex, infuse, DS-video), but again this is for tvOS alone!davilla wrote: 23 Apr 2017, 13:40 UI redesign is in progress. We do have to keep one thing in mind and that is to not break the other skins with radical changes.
Sire remote handling is quite difficult to deal with in a traditional remote control model. Plus to make things even more difficult, our remote handling cannot be only to fit Siri remote, we have two other platforms where something like the Siri remote just does not exist.
Unless you have actually developed an application for tvOS, you might not know that there are special hints provided via tvOS UI elements that assist in dealing with Siri remote. Those UI elements do not exist under MrMC as we handle all aspects of drawing the UI bits via GLES. That's why MrMC has several skins where you can pick the look and feel of the UI. No other tvOS (not iOS) app can change its UI appearance on the fly like we can with MrMC. And no other tvOS has the flexibility in design of the UI, all others can only show UI elements that the tvOS API offers.
Changes are coming, to improve Siri remote under the new skin. That is the one area where under tvOS we know we are at a disadvantage to other tvOS Apps. For playback, we have much better ability than others and as such, the player/media management core components are just fine as they are. The native Plex client works very well, as will the upcoming native Emby client. And a Trakt client is in progress. Plus there are a few other things in progress that we can't talk about yet but we are pretty sure that our users will like them.
I also agree on the player; MrMC offers on of the best playback experience on iOS/tvOS especially with the Plex integration; in fact, on iOS I use only Plex media-base because, unlike tvOS, it goes where I go and make me access even my remote PMS; this is really a killer feature even compared with KodiPlexConnect add-on on Kodi.
