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 :)

Maemo App Development - One Year Ago

I just realized that one year ago, I was giving a talk about Maemo Development at the Metalab here in Vienna. Back in January 2010, things were still very much different from today:

• Scratchbox was the SDK - Linux only, VMs for everything else
• No proper IDEs for Hildon development (there was Eclipse integration, but I never used it)
• Qt still was "the new stuff that's coming up" for Maemo development
• Mer was still something to look forward to
• MeeGo didn't exist - Maemo 6 was the future ;)
• MADDE was in Technology Preview state - not widely used
• Direct UI (now MeeGo Touch) was thought to be the future toolkit
• Qt 4.6 was just released in December - no QML in Qt yet

It turns out that we are in a much better position now, we've got a nice cross-platform IDE (Qt Creator), a proper SDK (Qt SDK) that works on Windows and OS X the same as on Linux and the "low-level" issues (optification, packaging, ...) are handled by Qt Creator mostly.

Today, the issues are different - I'm complaining about Qt Creator (from the Qt SDK 1.1 Preview) crashing a lot in QML design mode, I can deploy my apps to Symbian devices without much effort (didn't think I would ever do that) - even though there's no proper toolchain for Linux or OS X (Remote Compiler doesn't count). The Qt Quick Components are still not released, even though I'd love to create some great apps with them. And most people forget in the N9 rumor jungle that we have still got the best Linux-based mobile OS (with Linux userland) that exists in an actual product that you can buy right now (that's Maemo 5 on the N900 if you didn't get that hint..). Just like Duke Nukem Forever, a MeeGo handset will be announced and released eventually - give it some time.

Back to the "Qt Creator shouldn't crash when editing QML" developer story: We're not there yet, but comparing the current state with the state one year ago, that's some progress right there! Looking forward to those bits falling into place in the upcoming months.

Video of my talk from January; coming up: Nokia App Forum Alps

Back in January, I've given a talk about Maemo Development at the Metalab Vienna. It's been up for some weeks now (the talk is in German, but at least I was using the N900 during the whole presentation. BTW: Is it possible to disable auto-rotate in the image viewer?): (direct link)

Maemo 5 "Getting Started" from metalab on Vimeo.

This upcoming weekend, the Nokia Mobile Developers Conference is taking place in Hagenberg, Austria, and if you happen to have time on March 5th and 6th, register for free (free shuttle busses are available from Vienna to Hagenberg and back). I'll be giving a talk about Open Source Applications on Maemo 5. Say hi if you happen to be there! :)

headphoned, Metalab Talk, App Forum and gPodder updates

Due to popular demand, the Headphone Daemon is now available for Fremantle and the N900, too. A package is in Extras-Devel and should be available for QA testing in Extras-Testing soon. There is also a discussion thread on t.m.o and the packages page for QA.

In other news, I'll be giving a talk about Maemo.org and Maemo development at the Metalab Vienna on the 22nd of January. This is in preparation of the Hackathon that's happening on the weekend after the talk (a good opportunity to hack on CLI Sharing, maybe..).

In general, it seems like the N900 seems to get up to speed here in Austria now: The Nokia App Forum Alps is organizing a competition for mobile applications, so hopefully we see some new apps coming out of this. And if you happen to be around Hagenberg in early March, do join the Mobile Developers Conference.

A new gPodder version will be out "very soon now" - just one bug and one feature (my.gpodder.org API) left to do. I hope I'll be able to do it this weekend, so you can all enjoy the #maebar UI updates and new features such as Flickr support.