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 :)

MeeGo Conference 2011 in San Francisco

I've been lucky to be among the sponsored participants for the MeeGo Conference 2011 in San Francisco this week (thanks to the Linux Foundation). As with the last events, it's always nice to meet up with fellow Maemo community members whom I already knew from previous summits/conferences and also to finally meet some new community members in person for the first time.

Intel loaned out ExoPC hardware running MeeGo Tablet UX for MeeGo development during the AppUp Event on the Warm-Up weekend. Conny had the great idea to start a multi-touch Pong game that we now call "Mong" (Gitorious repo) and that we now collectively develop with some community members (sounds - recorded live from the Air Hockey tables at the Hacker Lounge! - by Erik, graphics by Tim, code by Conny and me):


More photos of the event: Conference and Party on Flickr. Don't forget to add your photos to the MeeGoConf2011 Flickr group. My Python + PySide talk went well, too bad that Matti (who helped prepare the presentation - thanks!) couldn't come. Slides are already available, and check out the MeeGo-Python tutorial if you want to get started. I'd be grateful for any feedback on the session and the tutorial - especially the things that weren't clear and could be improved.

About the keynote, I mostly agree with Jaffa's thoughts about how it could have been better, and that there should have been some announcements or commitments to release MeeGo-related end user products to give the project some much-needed(?) backing from vendors. I also agree with "MeeGo needs Harmattan a lot more than Harmattan needs MeeGo" - even though it isn't "real MeeGo", it's presumably the single polished MeeGo-related handset product that will (hopefully?) be available soon-ish.

But again, from a community perspective, MeeGoConf SF 2011 was great (thanks to LF for the sponsoring and to the organizers for choosing a great venue), San Francisco the city was awesome and - judging from the rumors on TMO - I'm pretty sure that we're looking forward to a great June that will allow us to finally port our apps to new MeeGo-related hardware.

Let's hope that we have an opportunity to meet up again in some future Maemo/MeeGo-related event :) Thanks for a great week!

MeeGoConf 2010: Fun, QML, gPodder, Python

I've attended the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin this week. Meeting people, playing werewolf or table tennis and discussing MeeGo Python are just some of the great things about this conference.

One of my burning questions for third-party app development ("QWidget? MeeGo Touch? QML? Which one of those?") was answered with "QML". I've played with QML before, and it's great, but right now, one has to work on a very low level (as in "design your own buttons") and without any UI style guidelines. Let's hope the Qt Components provide reusable UI parts there and that the style guidelines are published as soon as possible.

I've also got some gPodder feedback: Niels suggested subscription pausing and auto-deletion of episodes (both are already implemented and just need exposure as UI elements). Murray suggested a custom TreeModel implementation for the episode list, which I've started working on now. Mike suggested the often-requested multi-episode deletion feature, which is also something I plan for the next release.

On Wednesday, we had a Python BoF to discuss the state and future of MeeGo Python. I'm looking forward to using PySide for the QML UI of gPodder. A PySide/QML workshop is planned for the next PyUGAT meeting, so join in if you are in Vienna in early December.

Oh, and the IdeaPad that we got from Intel is great. Thanks a lot for that. Will come in handy for prototyping and testing Touch UI interfaces!

Hope to see you again in a future MeeGo event :)

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.