Points to watch out for TV application design

Internet TV is the craze now and the demand for TV application developer is high, mainly due to the lack of efficient TV app developer. I had been working on a TV project for the past months and had been mentally taking notes of the potential pitfalls in transiting from developing for the web to developing for the tube.

1. A clean minimalistic web design does not work on TV.
The tv have a huge screen space that will become significally awkward with your minimalistic design. Having nice large graphics or videos is a 'easy' method for filling up the awkwardness.



2.Elastic fantastic!
TV application design really focuses a lot on the elasticity of your image, header, sidebar .... etc. Do not assume all TV are widescreen.

3. Plenty of testing... on a REAL TV!
No. A 21inch LCD monitor will not give you as relevant feedback as testing your app on a TV. Other than screen resolution problem, you have to watch out for colors too.

4. Use CSS3 to replace javascript animation as much as possible
Using the hardware-accelerated css3 transition will give you a much better performance on a large screen. From my observation, Firefox (4.0) seems to be the most affected browser when the screen size is enlarged. The browser that performed the best is google chrome. Performance in this case refers to the smoothness of the animation.