Last weekend Tizen Developers Community went wild by setting up 3 Hackethons at the same time in Toulouse France, Barcelona Spain and Los Angeles USA…
I was doing my best to help Toulouse’s challengers to get their project as advanced as possible in a couple of days (night included) …
In short those projects could be sorted in 4 groups :
- Utility apps which focus on one usage and provide the features using platform API.
- Games using existing or home brew libs (javascript)
- Social apps, mostly web front end to existing backends (NodeJs, PHP)
- Concepts mostly mock ups or drafts
I won’t cover the whole event and submitted entries, for that just jump to bemyapp the organizer’s blog and follow social medias ( #TizenToulouse , #TizenBarcelona and #TizenLa )
Here I’m going to focus on difficulties met by programmers and try to sum up their feedback.
SETUP TIZEN SDK
Romuald French Tizen Evangelist made a presentation on the SDK.
Note: If you missed that part you can watch out video recorded at SolutionLinux earlier this year.
Video:
Video:
The good news is that everyone managed to install latest Tizen SDK 2.2.1.
Gnu/Linux users did not complain since all of them used Ubuntu.
Some windows users had the usual issues with versions conflicts of JVM or dirty environment, but managed to sort it out by themselves, Note that Julio Staude’s tutorial helped to setup the drivers too.
One user thought that this event was a great opportunity to switch to GNU/Linux Ubuntu with the help of his FLOSS evangelist schoolmate.
Few mac users did install SDK too, one of them didn’t found obvious that the welcome perspective should be closed after the creation of a new project.
I noticed that half of them were editing their sources outside eclipse with their favorite editor.
JAVASCRIPT DEVELOPMENT ON TIZEN
JavaScript programmers did not faced majors issues to launch their app on the device…
Experienced ones are already targeting cross platform apps using famous JavaScript libs/tools (grung, undersore, request to list a few of them).
One of serious JavasSript game developers was a bit frustrated by having some flickering artifacts on HTML5 Canvas using Javascript buffers classes (However I checked that game on one recent Tizen product to be revealed soon, and it runs fine so there is no need to report bug upstream on https://bugs.tizen.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa … ) Besides these annoying visual glitches the whole game based on handmade engine was pretty efficient
and made a (too) good impression during the demonstration to the jury. You can try it for yourself at http://dreamirl.com/pongarena/ .
Some “social project” wanted to use the Calendar API so I provided a code snippet that uses http://tizen.org/appcontrol/operation/social/.
DEVICE API
A couple of other projects aimed at using the devices hardware capabilities, that was the most interesting ones from my point of view as a Tizen developer.
A localized bookmarking project called GeoMemo has been possible even if the GPS module is not actually functional (I don’t even know if there is any hardware unit, It could belong to the Telephony module which is not supported on this device). Anyway this not blocking because the GPS service is using a playback plugin that update fixed NMEA messages from somewhere in Germany. This could be surprising but suitable for a demo but if needed the NMEA logfile could be replaced too (track this TDIST-354 related bug )
One other project had to be demoed on the simulator since the shipped version of Tizen present on reference device does not support HTML5’s getUserMedia API. (However I managed to make it work a year ago on rd210 device, so it can be safely assumed that it will work on retail devices.
until that time then this bug TDIST-195 can be tracked).
The winner team is just a student coming from Tunisia and wanted to transform his Tizen device into a portable cash register for small shop owners. The project would feature a bar code reader (understand porting an existing library using native code glued to HTML5’s getUserMedia )… Since that was a bit tricky then an helpful neighbor hacker provided him a NFC tag and the project was boosted to make the app fully functional for the demo (since NFC is supported by Tizen RDPQ device). For the future of the application “TheSaleMan”, here are some free libraries to scan barcodes : ZBar and dmtx).
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COMMUNITY
Also let me give a few winks to other members of the Tizen community whom I never met in person but they got my attention :
#TizenLa’s ShakeRec is a snapshot application using the Qt framework (I might write an article with this ex MeeGo Qt developer, If you’re interested please, contact me).
#TizenBarcelona’s i-alternativae alt project which aim at providing an alternative coin system (which is pretty in the air now) this is quite challenging because it probably implies the use of cryptography and networking…
Video:
During this event I had the pleasure to explain how to opensource Tizen Applications …
and to encourage developers to share their applications on this Tizen wiki page :
https://wiki.tizen.org/Applications, some of them did , others are intending to.
Now I open to any feedback from developers who want to continue working on their project and share the experiences to the tizen community contact me.
RESOURCES
Since there were many game developers here is a link that can act as an entry point to game development on Tizen :
https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Game_development
Documentation that was asked and provided during the event :
- TDC2013-Bringing_Android_Apps_to_Tizen.pdf
- 2012-05-09-1415-1455-enabling_cordova_aka_phonegap_on_tizen.pdf
- TDC2013-Bringing_Android_Apps_to_Tizen.pdf
- TDC2013-Native-Hybrid_Tizen_Apps_Development_Technique.pdf
I also made a couple of video (in French), if you were there or not and want to watch some special project just ask me to publish them.
CREDITS
Let me thank all the developers and organizers present during this event.
I hope we’ll be able to meet at upcoming Tizen Events.
Copyleft: CC BY-SA ~pcl
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