In my current side-project, I’m making a tvOS app. One of the screens features a handful of circular buttons. Unfortunately, when the tvOS Focus Engine renders these buttons, they get really awful shadows and focus states, that look a bit like this.
I had the good fortune of attending Apple’s tvOS Tech Talk in Seattle this winter - which meant I got to ask a few folks in the Q&A lab! They told me that, unfortunately, tvOS doesn’t allow non-roundrect focus effects: the system-standard focused state are pretty “simple” and aren’t clever enough (yet) to alter their shape depending on the alpha-channel of the image in the UIButton.
We needed to roll our own custom focus effect - but fortunately, it turned out to be pretty straightforward!
Here’s what the finished product looks like:
There's a whole write-up about this project over on devsign.co
Enjoy!