At the Samsung Developers Conference at Mobile world Congress 2014 (MWC14), the Tizen based Samsung Gear 2 was officially Introduced to Developers. Anna Schaller (Sr Manager, Developer Relations Media Solutions Center, North America) was on stage to educate the audience on how they can Integrate their applications onto the Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch, via the all New Samsung Gear SDK.
The Tizen Gear 2 is the first device as part of Samsung’s Tizen based wearable platform to be released next month. Finally we will have a Tizen based device that we can load our applications onto, a HTML5 WebKit W3C standards based environment. The SDK is now available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu.
There are quite a few variables when developing for a Gear App as you have different devices, a Smartphone and Smartwatch, two OS’s with Android sporting APK Apps and the Tizen Wearable OS with Packaged Web Apps.
Luckily both Architectures are Linux based and share the Samsung Accessory Protocol (SAP) Framework which has the same set of APIs for both Android and Tizen. Keep in mind that the runtime on Android is Dalvik and Tizen we are using the WebKit Runtime. So if you know HTML5 and CSS3 then your off to a good start on your first Tizen App.
Apps are installed and deleted from the watch by use of the Gear Manager and another handy feature is that you can set what applications can send notifications to the Gear watch. This is still not something not natively supported by the Pebble.
You have three types of apps that can be developed for the Gear watch: Standalone, Integrated and Linked (Master-Follower).
Below is the Samsung Gear SDK Video:
I look forward to seeing your Tizen Gear Apps 🙂
