I have owned a smart watch for about nine months. I have the #Samsung Gear S. (Which I just say is probably the most I’ll thought out naming ever. Try typing it into Google and see how many bike parts you get appear!)
I first started to set up the Tizen IDE back in January. Got it up and running but couldn’t for the life of me get the Emulator to run the sample code. After about two weeks of (part time) trying, I decided to give up.
Fast forward four months and I decide to dust it off again. Have a another go. I finally managed to get it working and the Emulator (although incredibly slow on the machine I was using) displayed the sample clock widget.
Fast forward two more month and I have been again attempting to get something pulled together.
I personally want a simple clock face with a analogue face, digital face, some kind of battery, notification and step count. I have a few ideas on how I want it presented, but that element of it should be fairly easy once the core elements are sorted.
At this point I will confess I am a hobby coder. I have coded in c++, Matlab, opengl, some proper VB6 cowboy code and a bit of thick client .net over the years. I haven’t coded properly for ten years or so. I have dabbled in some fat client bespoke apps, but nothing serious. My experience of Java is very limited, but I do know OOP but its a C++ (more relaxed Uni teaching) than anything else…
I have spent probably the equivalent of a full working week trying to piece together some alterations to the code of the example watch face.
A smooth ticking hand, removing of the ‘stretch’ you get when you display on a rectangular rather than square, a few tweaks to the back ground and finally trying to get the battery information on the screen.
I have looked at the recently renovated Tizen.org website, I have viewed Google and YouTube and as many blogs as I can, but to find example code that a ‘hobby’ coder can direct and use is really hard.
Tizen seems pretty good and does seem to have some potential, but with everything nowadays, you need a momentum to build up behind something for it to work. Samsung are brave going for Tizen, but I can see why they don’t want to be in the pocket of Google.
For them to succeed, they have got to make it easier for the causal coder to make use of the Tizen OS and wearable plugins.
My determination to get this to work comes out of frustration that the watch face I want doesn’t exist. I will get it my watch face working, and I think k it will be useful to quite a few people when I do manage to get it sorted, but it is taking a LONG time to get it up a d running. When bought a Windows Phone (HD7) just after they were released, getting an application up a d running and installed was incredibly easy. Using Tizen is not.
If I could ask for some changes it would be:
– get a wearable video or something similar sorted to allow casual coders easy ways into coding on Tizen
– get some more (there are a few on Tizen.org) code snipets out there for people to use (copy) into their code
– improve the IDE so that it is far easier to get things installed and debugged (from I can see, debugging is nonexistent for wearables*)
I will keep trying, and post when I have made progress…
* I come from a VS IDE arena, that is why I can’t see to understand the debugging in Tizen wearables, VS has it on a plate for you, Tizen IDE doesn’t seem to.