I'm happy to introduce Picturesque, my first game and first app for the new Apple TV. Picturesque is an Image Trivia game focusing on America's great wonders - our National Parks. If you want to lean back get inspired for your next adventure, or challenge your friends to test their knowledge of these natural wonders, then try this. It's available today on the Apple TV App Store.

In Picturesque, the player's objective is to correctly identify as many parks as possible based on a random image of the park. It's a great fit for the TV because it combines social game play and interaction with rich photographic imagery. The pictures look amazing on a wide screen TV, and the new Apple TV remote makes the game play fun and interactive.

It's always exciting when you can build a product that bridges different hobbies and interest. Picturesque combines my work as an iOS developer with my passions for Backpacking and Photography. I'm happy for the result to be both my first game and my first foray into this new platform.

Designing the game modes was a fun part of working on Picturesque. We made the game modes include a time limit based on difficulty so that the game becomes more challenging as you progress to new levels. But we didn't want people to feel rushed to move on if they were enjoying the current photo, so we made the game require an explicit button press to move to the next image, instead of using an automatic timer. Enjoying the photography is just as much a goal of playing Picturesque as correctly identifying the parks are.

Because tvOS includes all of UIKit and Core Animation, we had a lot of flexible to design and build fluid animations between images in the game. You'll notice that the entire UI moves to advance to the next image. Transition animations like this look great on the large interface of a TV screen, but do still require a degree of subtlety the same as they do on smaller devices.

Picturesque is the first app I've shipped that is written entirely in Swift. I have to say that I am really enjoying developing in the new language. It's clear that this is our future as iOS developers. More and more of the work we are doing at Mutual Mobile is in Swift, and I feel very comfortable that this is the right direction for us to be moving in. Developing for tvOS in Swift 2.0 was a great experience.

Picturesque was designed and developed by myself and Ryan Considine. Working on this with Ryan has been hugely rewarding, and as an added bonus, we now have an added excuse to visit more National Parks!

With any new platform, this really is only the beginning. Developers have only had a few weeks to build products for this device, and I'm excited that it's now here and looking forward to seeing what's to come.