Some interesting notes about Tizen and Meego (based on unofficial sources gathered by the Meego Network France, which was sent to the Meego dev mailing list) – so take them with a grain of salt (got some of the details there):

1. When Tizen was announced, it was more of a “political” decision of a future system than the announcement of an existing new technical platform (Intel and Samsung and the Linux foundation are still thinking of how to create it based on Meego and Limo, so that’s why no additional technical info was released yet).

2. Big part of Tizen will be the framework and the corresponding SDK to support HTML5-WAC applications. Native applications development will be supported through the use of EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries). What this means that the UI will be EFL based, not Qt based. This doesn’t mean though that Qt cannot be integrated as an add-on, as we see below:

3. Meego will form a big part of the components that are not Qt based (from what I understand including most of the core systems), and Limo will supply the EFL components.

4. What #3 basically means is that this is largely a Meego system with Qt removed; however, one can basically make a Qt-derivative since the core is hugely Meego.

I personally haven’t touched Enlightenment or their libraries since the early 2000s (peanutlinux days), but I do know that EFL is quite lightweight and is sponsored heavily by Samsung for use in their products and platforms.

This is gonna be interesting because what ensues is a probable tension between the Qt proponents and the EFL proponents. We also know that a number of Qt developers developing for Meego have been alienated by the Tizen announcement. All we can do is wait for this to sort out.

Here’s an interesting take into how to make an open source program. This should make a good case study on how to plan out and develop a program for distribution to the open source community.

Presenting Binary Clock – a GPLed java program which shows the time in binary. This is a simple java midlet made for nokia phones (from what I’ve heard, it runs on samsung phones too).

Anyways, here are the steps (illustrated):

1. Decide on what you want to do with the program.  You can then make a mock drawing on a piece of paper on how the program will respond like what is shown below:

2. You would also have to determine the target audience for your program.  In this case, we target mobile phones, mainly nokia phones.  To do this, you would have to have appropriate tools for the job ready.  Shown below are the tools used to make the program (testing and design).  Note that all these tools run in linux (although there are windows versions available, except for Fireworks which is a windows program); Fireworks was run in wine (yes, it does run, for those who are curious).

The final design from the Fireworks layout is below:

3. Since we have tested this in our emulators/sdk, it is now time to test it by ourselves with our available hardware.

Click to Watch!

Click to Watch!

Click to Watch!

4. When you feel that it is more or less ready to be distributed, you announce it to the world, and allow other people to modify and enhance our code.

Many thanks to Daniel Rindt of Visetics (http://www.visetics.com) for sharing the development workflow and the actual program with me.  To get the actual source code, please get it here.