Tizen Conference 2012 Review

The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr.

As with last year's MeeGo Conference 2011, the Tizen Conference took place in the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, the same hotel that's also featured in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety from 1977. I arrived on Sunday evening, but in contrast to last year's event, there were no weekend activities (the Hacker Lounge was already open, though), and the event itself only really began on Tuesday, with Monday afternoon and evening used for registration and a keynote by Jim Zemlin.

Tuesday started with a proper keynote that showed actual Tizen demos, which was nice (it was the Tizen Conference, after all). Throughout the day, the demo sessions were open where companies like ProFUSION showed off demos like a fridge interface and experimental JavaScript bindings to use EFL (not as nice as QML, but better than using EFL from the C API).

On Wednesday morning, the Linux Foundation was giving Tizen developer devices to attendees, with a remote shell accessible via the "sdb" tool from the Tizen SDK (similar to "adb" in the Android world). Oh, and basic X11 tools like "xeyes" and "xclock" were pre-installed, allowing for quickly checking how normal X applications would work in the window manager. Also on Wednesday was my talk about gPodder on mobile devices and the gpodder.net web service - I'll post the slides soon.

On Wednesday evening, Quim Gil and the local Qt chapter Silicon Valley organized the Qt Overlapping event for Qt developers being in town for either the Tizen Conference or the Ubuntu Developer Summit. After coming back, the Hacker Lounge was still open, so we played a round of ping pong until the early hours. I left on Thursday evening and had some time for sightseeing in the afternoon - check out the photos if you are interested.

After coming back from the conference, my first goal was to get Python and some GUI running. That's done now: You can run Python and PyGame on Tizen. Similar to this, PySide should also be possible once one takes the time to get it to compile it using the Scratchbox2-based SDK. I've also got Qt 4.8.1 running on the device, but of course it needs some more polishing and integration.

Still, Tizen has a long and challenging road ahead until it will become useful (from what we see now), but maybe they will get something good going. As for now, there's still Harmattan and all the great things about it (and compared to the supposed-to-have-a-future Tizen, the supposed-to-be-dead Harmattan looks very, very good today and works really great, no question about that!).

It was good to meet again some people that I knew since the beginning of Maemo events in 2008 and new people that have been involved in MeeGo recently. Looking forward to doing some more hacks on Harmattan, and maybe also looking forward to that wind-named future OS from that company that already brought you wind-named OSes a few years ago. Thanks for the great time so far :)