Category: Samsung

A long weekend with Tizen, CreateJS and JQuery Mobile

Let’s start from the end of my weekend, this is what I’ve just finished:

And now it’s time to explain what there is behind.

What you have just seen is a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an application that I’ve in mind, it allowed me to study, test and having fun with different technologies, in this post I’d like to share what I’ve learnt in less than 24 hours.
I worked with different technologies as the post title suggest, I was really curios to see how I can create good application UI on Tizen OS and understand more about its limits (if there were of course) and performances.
At the beginning, I worked on the 2.5D animation where I had to scale, skew and rotate any images chosen by the user from the Gallery application.
When I started this part I tried immediately the CSS3 transitions, I thought: “They are new, so probably they care about performances on mobile!”, so after 3 hours to play with CSS3 transitions and trying to have a smooth animation on Tizen, I decide to move on Canvas!
CSS3 transitions are very good for web and desktop, but for mobile when you start to do many heavy animations they really suck, in this Tizen device (it has an hardware similar to Galaxy S3) that is so powerful everything has to work well and with them I can’t achieve my idea.

So I moved to Canvas, but I thought to find something that could help me during my “coding time” and that it feels me more comfortable so I remembered that I’ve used long time ago CreateJS for some test and in this case it helps me a lot.
When you work with CreateJS, more or less you are working with Actionscript with some small changes, for any Actionscript developer it should be a good start to move on Javascript, but there are many other options as Dart or Typescript for example that are good enough for any developer that is looking for something more than Javascript (my 2 cents).
But in this case CreateJS  helps me a lot because is highly focused on Canvas development so definitely what I was looking for.
I haven’t any trouble with this library on Tizen, the performance are so good as you have seen on the video and I didn’t write so much code, my Javascript file for the whole app is less than 260 lines, not a lot I guess.

After that I moved on and I start to work with Tizen web APIs to get images from the Gallery application.
In this case the Tizen developer forum and the online guide help me so much, in fact I found a working example in the forum that I had only to customise for my PoC.
The big issue that I found here is if I want to select more than one image, working with Gallery instance, I couldn’t do that or maybe I couldn’t find a way to do that, so I decided to create a quick picker (at the beginning of my application) to allow me to choose more than one image to the time.
To do that I had to work with filesystem APIs instead of the Gallery one, but in a while I had done everything, this is the code to retrieve all images from Image folder of Tizen OS, but you can use to retrieve any kind of files on Tizen OS:

function onResolveError() {
    console.log("error retrieve data");
}
function onsuccess(files) {
    for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
        console.log("File name is " + files[i].name + " and URL is " + files[i].toURI()); 
    }
}
function onResolveSuccess(dir) {
    dir.listFiles(onsuccess, onResolveError);
}
function openImages() {
    tizen.filesystem.resolve('images', onResolveSuccess, onResolveError, 'w'); 
}

After that I spend few hours to skin my app and get the right look and feel I had in mind with CSS and JQuery mobile and to create this post with the video.
A quick recap of my last experience:

  • on Tizen if you need to improve performances try to work with Canvas instead of CSS transitions
  • when you have to retrieve files (images, video or whatever) remember to set the right privileges on config.xml and then add the code you can find above
  • CreateJS is a really good library if you want to work with Canvas efficiently and without wasting your time
  • CreateJS has a good community and if you have a problem you can find a lot of solutions and suggestions
  • CreateJS is familiar for any Actionscript 3 developer

That’s it!
Ah, if you are asking if I changed my “religion”? Don’t worry, soon you’ll have news about Flash Platform in this blog, but sometimes I want to experiment new things.

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Tizen the new mobile OS

Yesterday Tizen conference finished with a lot of great things announced, so in this post I’d like to recap the main news that I’ve catch during this conference.
First of all Tizen is an open source operating system, not only for mobile purpose but also for TVs and automotive market too.
Behind Tizen there are many players but the most interesting are Samsung, of course, and Intel.
Actually Samsung is working on the new version of Tizen, the 3.0, but they have just released the 2.1 that allow any web developer, C++ developer or Unity developer to deliver content on this new OS.
The first devices will be shipped this summer (more or less), in Europe the first operator that believe in Tizen will be Orange, in Asia otherwise will be NTT DoCoMo.
Web development APIs on Tizen are hardware accelereted, so the performance should be incredible, actually if you want to start work with Tizen is quite easy, first of all you have to download the SDK, then inside the SDK you can find the TizenIDE that allow you to create Web Application or Native Application, debug them and prepare for the store.
This IDE is really well done in fact you can debug your application in a simulator (quite similar to the last introduced in Flash CS6 or Device Central for example), directly on the device trough USB, or in the emulator; the simulator and emulator are inside the free SDK that you can download directly from Tizen website.
Web Applications, at this moment, run in Tizen Web Runtime not with Phonegap or other frameworks but Apache Cordova is working to support Tizen export soon and they would like to add on Phonegap buid solution made by Adobe.
Tizen is based on webkit and it’s the most compliant platform at the moment with a score of 492/500.

Another great thing of Tizen is that Samsung created a real platform around it, in fact for the native side you can also create and skin your GUI directly with Tizen UI Builder, a software similar to Apple Interface Builder and it helps a lot during the creation and definition of UI.

I followed a couple of session dedicated on how to port PhoneGap application on Tizen and it’s interesting to know that the porting is so smooth (less than a week for many games).
The Web Runtime APIs for Tizen are very powerful, they allow to work with Bluetooth, NFC and many others low-level features in a really easy way.

At the end of the event any attendee received a device for testing purpose, so after dinner I started to play with Tizen and the Web Runtime, mainly to understand if there are many differences between a Tizen app and a Phonegap one.
As you can see in few time I create an example that works on Tizen with HTML5, Jquery Mobile and Underscore.js

The first impression is positive, everything works well, I didn’t find any kind of problems, the documentation is well done and you can find a lot of resources directly on developers website.
I didn’t try yet to work with platform APIs but I see on the documentation that are quite similar to Phonegap so I don’t think that a Phonegap developer could have any problems to work with them.

Last but not least, Samsung has created an app challenge that will start at the beginning of June where you can win a lot of money so if you want to partecipate take a look at the challenge website.

Finally, Tizen is going in the right direction for me, the big deal will be the penetration on the mature markets, if many people all over the world will start to buy it and use it, probably it should become so interesting, but for now we have to wait the launch of the devices.