Samsung has published the second milestone, so-called M2, of Tizen 4.0. This is the second release for Tizen 4.0 after Samsung hit the first milestone back in June, also announcing that Tizen is the most successful Linux-based embedded OS in the whole world. As expected, Tizen 4.0 M2 comes with a bunch of new, welcome additions and some fine-tuning for the platform.
To begin with, C# is supported as an application programming language – a great step forward, given that existing Tizen frameworks are either C- or HTML-based. Also, there’s the new Profiler for Visual Studio Tools for Tizen, that is expected to help developers at debugging and – easy guess – profiling. Visual Studio Tools for Tizen, if you don’t remember, is a framework for developing Tizen applications for Smart TVs, IoT devices and smart appliances as well as smartphones and wearables. This all began in November 2006 when, for those not in the know, Samsung signed a partnership with Microsoft to work on open source projects such as .NET Core and Xamarin.Forms in order to build a tool to create Tizen applications. In less than a year, Samsung has released four versions and two milestone versions of Tizen .NET with Visual Studio Tools for Tizen.
Speaking of Tizen.NET architecture, the South Korean company defines it as “an exciting new way to develop applications for the Tizen operating system, running on 50 million Samsung devices, including TVs, wearables, mobile phones, and many other IoT devices around the world”.
With the new milestone, Samsung is announcing the support for .NET Core 2.0, that provides a higher number of available APIs thanks to .NET Standard 2.0. Another feature that is very promising is the so-called “Wearable emulator”, i.e. the capability to emulate wearables: basically, rather than prototyping in the real world with real devices you do it in a simulated environment. This way, Samsung aims at helping developers worldwide to solve the riddle of the infant wearable market.
Last but not least, with M2 we got the preview of Tizen IoT. Tizen IoT supports both headless and headed mode. Supported platforms are ARTIK 530 and Raspberry Pi 3. With Tizen Studio 2.0 and Things SDK APIs, the company aims at simplifying the development of IoT applications to be used with Samsung SmartThings Cloud and controlled by Samsung Connect App.
The idea behind the framework is to unify the Tizen ecosystem – so far fragmented between TV, mobile and wearable – into a common, lightweight umbrella environment – sort of a one ring to rule them all. Samsung’s goal for Tizen IoT is not to support Samsung products alone, rather “Tizen IoT has been released for any type of special-purpose IoT devices based on the Linux kernel.”
And you know, Linux is pretty ubiquitous nowadays.
Uhu, I almost forgot: Tizen 4.0-based Samsung smart TVs will arrive next year.
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