Josh On Design

I have long loved my series of TV streaming Roku devices. The UI isn’t as fancy as the Apple TV, but it’s very stable, very responsive, and far easier to use than Apple’s insane remote. Historically the Roku SDK was really only targeted at streaming TV apps (which makes sense), but there wasn’t a way to write games or other high performance apps using anything but Roku’s own BrightScript SDK. However, about a month ago Roku announced the Independent Developer Kit that lets anyone build and side load apps onto their own Roku’s using C++ and OpenGL. I was thrilled but bummed that you have to run the SDK on Linux. However, it’s just some command line scripts, so maybe we could run it in a Docker container. After a little experimenation I figured out how. Let's dig in.

If you saw my tweet about porting Chrome to the Roku, I'm afraid it was, indeed, an April Fools joke. I didn't actually rewrite Chrome in a TV scripting language. However, I did build something cool.

For Christmas Jen and I finally bought a TV after four years of distraction-less living. We finally decide it was time after countless evenings watching Hulu on my 15" laptop. We were adamant, however, that we would not buy cable. We just want a better way of watching Hulu, NetFlix, and a few other sites. To make that happen I bought the latest Roku device, Angry Birds edition.