Samsung Developer Conference 2022

Wednesday, Samsung held its 2022 developer conference. A standout attribute of this conference is they invited people to attend in person; something I’ve not really seen in developer conferences since 2019 (for obvious reasons🦠). Ofcourse, for those that cannot attend, many aspects of the conference were also streamed from https://samsungdeveloperconference.com and from their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/SamsungDevelopers ).

Concerning the content, the conference felt a bit heavier on items of consumer interest. The keynote highlighted Know Matrix, Samsung’s block-chain based solution for security among their devices (not just phones), Samsung TV Plus, Gaming, Tizen, and more.

The sessions for the conference were available either as prerecorded presentations, or live sessions. The prerecorded sessions were made available all at once .

Android

In addition to making updates to their interface (One UI, coming to the S2022 series at the end of the month) Samsung is adding a Task Bar to the Tab S8 and their foldable phones. Samsung also covered support for multitasking; Samsung’s phones support running 2 or 3 applications simultaneously. Many of the multitasking features use standard Android APIs. Samsung has also made available a task bar on their larger screen devices (tablets, foldable phones) to enable switching applications without going to the home screen or task switcher. There ar multiple levels of support that an application could have for multi-window capable devices. One is simply supporting the window being resized. FLAG_ACTIVITY_LAUNCH_ADJACENT indicates that an application was designed for a multi-window environment. New interactions enabled by multi-window applications includes drag-and-drop from one instance to another, multiple instances of an application, and supporting “flex mode” (where either side of a foldable device is used for different purposes).

Some well-known applications already support features for these environments, including Gmail, Facebook, Microsoft Outlook, and Tik-Tok.

Presentations

Multitasking Experiences
LE Wireless Audio

Tizen

It’s been 10 years since Tizen was released in 2012. In previous years, has presented Tizen as its operating system for a wide range of devices. The OS could be found running on some cameras, phones, TVs, and wearables. The Tizen OS got a great footing in TVs; you’ll find it on all of the Samsung TVs available now above a certain size, some computer monitors, and a few TVs from other manufacturers. Its presence on other devices has also diminished, with Samsung’s wearables now using Android Wear and the Tizen phones being out of production. I encountered some of the “Tizen Everywhere” marketing, but it now appears to refer to the wide range of displays that use Tizen.

One of Samsung’s presentations concerning Tizen had its own timeline of Tizen’s evolution. I might make my own, since I’ve been interested since it was in its proto-version (Bada). Samsung announced Tizen 7.0. The features highlighted in the release were in the areas of

OpenXR runtime
Real-time Kernel
3D Rendering enhancements
Android HAL support
Cross-platform improcement
Natural User Interface Enhancements

I personally found the natural user interface enhancements to be interesting. It included a lot of AI driven features. Support for running Tizen applications on Android was also mentioned. I’m curious as to what this means though. If typical Samsung Android devices can run Tizen, then it gives the OS new relevance and increases the strength of the “Tizen Everywhere” label. Tizen has been updated to use more recent Chromium release for its Web engine. Tizen also has support for Flutter. Support was actually released last year. But compatibility and performance are increased with Tizen 7.0.

Samsung has also exposed more Native SDKs in Tizen 7.0 to C# and C from other SDKs. For .Net developers, Tizen 7.0 has increased MAUI support.

Presentations

What’s new in Tizen
Tizen Everywhere

Samsung TV Plus

This is Samsung’s IPTV service. It is integrated into the TV in such a way that it is indistinguishable from OTA channels. Entities interested in the services that this has to offer are most likely Advertisers. Samsung provided information on both making available one’s video content on Samsung TV and how to monetize it. While I don’t see myself as one that would be implementing features related to this, I did find the presentation interesting. Before a show airs (about 5 minutes before) the ad slots are available to advertisers to fill. The ad inventory is auctioned off.

Presentations

Samsung TV Plus
Home Connectivity Alliance

Gaming

The TVs support being paired with a Bluetooth controller and streaming games through the Samsung Gaming Hub. HTML-based games are served to the phone via what Samsung calls Instant Play. Samsung also showed off the features it’s made available for emersive audio within gaming environments.

Presentations

Dolby Atmos with Games
Immersive Experiences on Big Screens

Health

Samsung says they worked with Google to come up with a single set of APIs that developers can use for health apps. Often times, Samsung begins developing for some set of hardware features and later Samsung and Google normalize the way of interacting with those features. I thought these sessions would be all about Samsung Health (the application that lets you log your health stats on the phones). But the development also included their large screen (TV) interfaces with enhancements for tele-health visits. Collection of health related data has been enhanced on the Galaxy Watch 5.One of the enhancements is a microcontroller dedicated to collecting health data while the CPU sleeps. This allows the watch to collect information with less demands on the battery. The new watch is also able to measure body composition through electrical signals.

Presentations

TeleHealth in Samsung Devices
Expand Health Experiences with Galaxy Watch

IoT

Samsung’s SmartThings network now also includes the ability to find other devices and even communicate data to those devices. Like other finding networks, their solution is based on devices being able to communicate with each other. Devices can send two bytes of data through the network. How this two bytes is used it up to the device. 2 bytes isn’t a lot. But it still could be of utility, such as a device sending a desired temperature to a thermostat, or another device simply signaling “I’m home.”

Presentations

SmartThings FindMy
Home Connectivity Alliance

Other Sessions

There were plenty of other topic areas covered. I’ve only highlighted a few areas. If you would like to see the presentations for yourself visit the YouTube Channel or see the Samsung Developer’s Conference page.

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Samsung provides some Clarity in the Google Wearable Collaboration

At the last Google IO Conference, Google made a rather ambiguous announcement about their partnership with Samsung and watches. Samsung currently sells their Gear watches running an operating system that they made in collaboration with a few other companies. In the announcement, Google said that they were combining their Wear OS operating system with Samsung’s Tizen operating system. What exactly does this mean? There was not clarification given during the conference. Looking at the conference sessions, there were two sessions on development for Google’s Android OS.

Generally speaking, one can’t just combine two operating systems. They could build a different operating system that has support for the applications from another OS or take designs from the UI of an OS and apply it to another. But there isn’t anything meaningful in the phrase “Combine operating system.” Jumping over to the Samsung Developer forums, I found there were people with similar questions, all of which were met with the reply “We can’t give you more information at this time.”

Information was finally made available earlier this week. In summary, Samsung is going to adopt Wear OS (Android) for their watches. They said that they will support the existing Tizen based watches for another three years. That announcement was surprisingly more direct than I’ve seen Samsung be with other products that they sunset. What I’ve usually seen is that new versions of a product stop coming without any announcement being made (Their Tizen based Z phones, the Gear 360, and Gear VR headsets are all examples of products for which this happened).

If you would like to see the announcement yourself, you can view it in the YouTube video below. The part of interest can be found at time marker 11:25 and continues to the announcement of 3 years of Tizen support at time marker 16:38. What exactly is meant by “support” could still get more clarification. I expect this to at least mean that developers will be able to submit and update applications for the next few years, but Samsung will be giving significantly less resources to Tizen wearable.

This leaves Samsung’s TVs as their last category of hardware that uses the Tizen operating system.

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Creating Development Certificates for Samsung Tizen TVs

Whether you are developing for a consumer Samsung TV or for one of the commercial SSSP displays you’ll need to have a development certificate for your code to run. There is a difference in how the certificate is created for the commercial and consumer displays. But the process is similar off the same for both.

To get started you’ll need to already have Tizen Studio installed. Open the Tizen Studio package manager and make sure that you have the following components installed.

Samsung Certificate Extensions

If you don’t already have the component installed select it for installation. You’ll also need to have the SDK component installed for the version of Tizen that you are targeting (ex: “5.0 TV”). Once the component is present start the Tizen Studio Device Manager.

The device manager will be used to get the device’s ID (DUID) for consumer TVs and for installing the development certificate onto the display. For these steps to work the TV must have development mode enabled and must be set to accept development requests from the same IP address as your development machine; it will refuse request from other addresses. If you haven’t already enabled development mode I have another posts on how to do that
here
.

In the device manager there is an icon in the upper right corner of a phone connected a computer. Select this icon. It is for establishing connections to the device manager. In the window that opens you will see a list of devices that you’ve previously connect to. If the IP address of your display is there you can click on the icon of the on/off switch to reconnect to it. If the IP address of your display is not present click on the + icon to add it. When adding you can give the TV a descriptive name, enter the IP address, and the port on which to connect (usually 26101). Click on OK to return to the main Device Manager user interface and you should see your display connected. Right-click on the display and select DUID to see the ID of the display. Go ahead and copy it to the clipboard. You will need it in later on. If you have multiple displays for which you will develop repeat the same steps to collect the DUID values for the other displays and save them to a text document. Note that if you have both consumer and commercial displays that the DUIDs for them cannot be used mixed with each other. You can perform the following steps for all of your consumer displays at once and then all of your commercial displays at once.

Open the Certificate Manager. When it is opened for the first time you may be asked to select a location from which you want to import certificate profiles. Select Cancel here. You will need to create both an Author certificate and a Distributor certificate. Click on the + icon in the upper right corner to start the process of creating a new certificate. What you select on the window that appears is dependent on the type of display for which you are developing.

TizenCertificateTypeSelection

Commercial (SSSP) Display Steps

For the commercial displays select “Tizen. ” In the next step you’ll be asked to enter a name for the certificate profile. If you develop for other device types (such as the mobile device, watch, or the consumer displays) you’ll need to have more than one certificate profile. It will be good for them to have easily identifiable names. Enter a name here that let’s you know that this is a certificate for developing for a commercial display and select Next.

TizenEnteringCertificateProfileName

Next you must select an author certificate. If you’ve created an author certificate before you have the option to select it. If not then select the option to create a new one. I’ll assume that an author certificate has not been created yet. The minimal amount of information that you need for an author certificate is a name, a password for the certificate (don’t forget this password!). You can optionally enter your country code, State, City, Organization, department, and an e-mail address and a filename in which the key file for the certificate will be saved. Enter your options and select “Next”

TizenEnteringCertificateAuthorData

The last selection to make is whether you want to use the default Tizen distributer certificate . While this selection will allow you to submit mobile applications to the Tizen store it is fine for our purposes. Select it and click on “Finish.” With this you have a

TizenDistributerCertificateType

Consumer Display Steps

For the consumer displays when asked for the certificate type select “Samsung”.

TizenCertificateTypeSelection

On the next screen you’ll be asked for the device type. Select “TV.”

TizenDCertificateeviceType

Enter a name for the profile and select next.

TizenCertificateProfileName

Next you’ll select an author certificate. If you already have an author certificate that you’d like to use you can select it here. If you would like to create a new certificate (which you would do if you’ve never created one before) select the first option. You would also select this option if you had a certificate but it has expired. If you had a certificate that has expired you may want to select the option to create a new certificate and check the box that says “Use an Existing Certificate.” If you have an application that has been published to the Tizen store before and are creating a new certificate then you’ll want to use this option since an application’s ID is in part based on the certificate with which it was signed.

TizenAuthorCertificateInformation

Enter the your author information. Remember what your password is, especially if you plan to publish your application under this certificate. When you click on “Next” you’ll be asked to sign into your Samsung account. After signing in your Author certificate is created.

You’ll be presented with the option of backing up your certificate. While this isn’t required it is strongly encouraged. You will want to keep this secure as it forms part of the identity for your apps. But you are almost done. You need a distributor certificate

TizenBackupCertificate

On the next screen you are prompted to either create a new distributor certificate or select an existing one. Choose the option to create a new one.

TizenNewDistributorCert

Now it is time to use the DUID that you copied earlier. If it is already on your clipboard it will automatically be pasted into one of the entries for DUID. You also have the option to change the privilege level, but not really. The two privileges available are “Public” and “Partner.” Partner gives you application to functionality that isn’t available to everyone. But to use Partner level privileges they have to be granted to you by Samsung.

TizenEnterDUID

After you click on “Next” you’ll be greeted with a confirmation that the certificate has been created along with the path to the certificate being shown.

TizenCertificateCreationComplete

For Both Consumer and Commercial

Now that your certificates have been created you need to let the display know about it so that it can recognize applications that were signed with your certificate and allow them to run. To do this return to the device manager. Right-click on the your display in the device manager and select “Permit to install apps.” The display is ready to accept applications now.

Switching Certificate Profiles

If you are developing for more than one type of Tizen device you’ll probably have to change which certificate profile that you are using as you change which platform you are working on. When you need to change profile open the certificate manager. You will see a list of the profiles that you’ve set up and a check-mark next to one marking it as the active profile. If you want to change which profile is active select it from the list and click on the check mark in the upper right corner.

With the certificate created and selected you can now move forward with deploying an application to the display. Start off with a hello world program just to see that it works.

Tizen Compatible TV

Tizen 6.0 M2 Release

Tizen recently announced the release of Tizen 6.0 M2. The Tizen operating system is most well known for running on Samsung TVs and smart watches. It can also be found on Samsung’s high-end TVs, custom embedded systems, and Samsung has spoken of licensing the OS and service to other TV manufacturers.

This release provides developers with a new kernel, device drivers, middleware subsystems, and APIs. The new kernel includes improved support for the Raspberry Pi 4. Also added is a new C# API for power management. The key features that Tizen is highlighting include the following.

Supports On-Device AI Vision (Media Vision Human Recognition Reference Model – Hand Skeleton, Human body pose)
Supports Tizen 64-bit AI platform development
Supports NUI 2.0 (2D and 3D Unified Framework, OneUI 2.x)
Supports Flexible Media Playback Engine and Interface
Supports BLE Mesh Framework for IoT devices
Supports Customizable Home Framework
Enhanced AI Programming Interfaces for voice
Enhanced Wearable Gesture Framework
Optimized power consumption for wearables, up to 3% improvement.

You can find more information on the release from this URL: https://docs.tizen.org/platform/release-notes/tizen-6-0-m2/

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Changing the Default Tizen 5.0 Project for Samsung TVs

Tizen-Pinwheel-On-Light-RGB

When using Tizen Studio if you start a project from one of the templates for a TV you may find that the project won’t deploy to a Samsung Consumer TV. There are a couple of changes that can be made to take care of this.

One is to edit the config.xml. There are a couple of lines in it to be changed. There is an element named tizen:profile with a name attribute of “tv”. Change this to “tv-samsung”. The other is in a file that isn’t listed by the IDE named “.tproject”. Under the Platform element is a text value of “tv-5.0”. Change this to “tv-samsung-5.0”. I’ve found that even on a TV running Tizen 4.0 that these changes are sufficient to work. Just don’t use any Tizen 5.0 features on a display that is running an older OS.

Using WITS for Samsung/Tizen TV Development

One of the development scenarios that makes me cringe is an environment in which the steps and time from changing a line of code to seeing its effect is high. This usually happens in an environment with specialized hardware, limited licenses, or sensitive configurations leading to the development machine (as in the machine on which code is edited) is not suitable or capable of running the code that has been written. There is sometimes some aspect of this in cross platform development. While emulators are often helpful in reducing this, they are not always a suitable solution since emulators don’t emulate 100% of the target platform’s functionality.

When developing for TVs running Tizen(which will be more than just Samsung TVs) Samsung has made available a tool to reduce the cycles from changing code to seeing it run through a tool called WITS.

Setting up WITS

To Setup WITS first you need to have already installed and configured Tizen Studio and Node. The system’s PATH variable must also include the path to tizen-studio/tools and tizen-studio/tools/ide/bin (you’ll need to complete those paths according to the location at which you’ve installed Tizen Studio). You’ll also need to already have a certificate profile defined for your TV.

The files that you need for WITS are hosted on git. Clone the files onto your machine.

git clone https://github.com/Samsung/Wits.git

Enter the Wits folder and install the node dependencies

cd Wits
npm install

Next the folder there is a file named profileInfo.json. The contents of the file must be updated to point to your profiles.xml for your certificate and the name of the certificate profile to use. Windows users, note that when ever you enter a path for Wits you will need to use forward slashes (/), not back slashes (\). For my installation the updated file looks like the following.

{
  "name": "TizenTVTest2",
  "path": "C:/shares/sdks/tizen/tizen-studio-data/profile/profiles.xml"
}

Configuring Wits to Use Your Project

Wits needs to know the location of your project. Open connectionInfo.json. There is an array element named baseAppPaths. Enter the path to your Tizen application here. If you would like to make things convinent within this file also set the “ip” element to the IP address of the TV you are targeting. This isn’t necessary since you will be prompted for it when running a program. But it will default to the value that you enter here.

Running your Project

From the command prompt while in the Wits directory use npm to start the project

npm start

You will be prompted for a number of items. The default values for these items comes from the connectionInfo.json file that you modified in the previous section. You should be able to press enter without changing the values of any of these elements.

PS C:\shares\projects\j2inet\witsTest\Wits> npm start

> Wits@1.0.0 start C:\shares\projects\j2inet\witsTest\Wits
> node app.js

Start Wits............
? Input your Application Path : C:/shares/projects/j2inet/MastercardController/workspace/SystemInfo2
? Input your Application width (1920 or 1280) : 1920
? Input your TV Ip address(If using Emulator, input 0.0.0.0) : 10.11.86.62
? Input your port number : 8498
? Do you want to launch with chrome DevTools? : Yes

A few moments later you’ll see your project running on the TV.

Deploying File Changes

This is where Wits is extremely convenient. If you make a change to a file the application will automatically update on the TV. There’s nothing you need to do. Wits will watch the project for changes and react to them automatically!

TypeScript in Tizen

I was writing a program to run on my television and encountered a scenario that I’ve encountered many times before; an HTML enabled device supports a JavaScript standard that is older than the one that I would like to use. The easiest workaround for this is to use a tool that will compile from a more recent version of JavaScript (or something similar) back to the version that is supported by the hardware. This is something I’ve done when developing for BrightSign and other devices.

For targeting the Tizen based Television I decided that I would use TypeScript to accomplish this; in addition to getting access to some more recent features that can be found in JavaScript there’s we also get type checking.

A bit of work was required to get this working though. On my first attempt I tried includint the TypeScript files in the same folder as the project. This doesn’t work;when the project is being compiled the compiler will try to take these files and package them in the solution. This isn’t something that we want to happen. It’s necessary to have these files in a folder that is outside of the project folder to prevent this from happening. I moved the files and made a TypeScript configuration file that specified the destination to which I wanted the resulting JavaScript files moved.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    /* Basic Options */
    "target": "es2015",
    "module": "commonjs",  
    "sourceMap": false,   
    "outDir": "../tizenWorkspace/projectName/js"
    "strict": true,                           
    "noImplicitAny": true,                 
  }
}

This almost works. The next problem encountered is that when there is a reference to anything on the tizen object the compiler will complain about it net having been declared. The tizen object, not being a web standard object, is not something that is recognized by the compiler. There are two ways to handle this project. A work around would be to declare the tizen object as being of type any. With this declaration the compiler will just ignore what ever we do with the object and not complain.

I made a TypeScript definition file named tizen.d.ts in which to place my definitions. TypeScript already has an understanding of the interface provided by the Window object. To augment this I declare another interface that will be merged with the understanding that TypeScript has and added a definition for the tizen member there.

declare	interface Window {  tizen:any }

That works, but that’s also eliminating some of the type safety features that that TypeScript has to offer. Instead of working around the problem I wanted to address it. I wanted to provide the type definitions for the Tizen object.

There’s a project called Definitely Typed in which contributors make TypeScript definitions that can be downloaded and shared to other developers that are targeting the same environment. At first glance there appears to be existing entries for targeting Tizen within the collection. But upon further inspection it turns out that the definitions that are there (at the time of the writing of this post) are for targeting a cross development tool that also supports Tizen. that’s not what I needed. Instead of relying on community provided definitions I’ll have to make my own. When I’m done though I may have a definition file that could be shared through Definitely Typed. Since that repository is constantly being updated I would encourage seeing what it has to offer before using the code that I provide here.

declare	interface Window {  tizen:ApplicationManager}

This is when I start my descent down the rabbit hole. To define the ApplicationManager interface that is implemented by the tizen object there are a number of other interfaces that must be defined. Those interfaces have dependencies on other interfaces.

The interfaces for the various objects are documented and can be found on a Tizen.org page. Browsing through it there are some types mentioned that ultimately are strings of some type of another. Within TypeScript we can make a declaration that is similar to a typedef for equating some custom type to another.

type ApplicationId = string;
type ApplicationContextId = string;
type PackageId = string;

There is also a frequently used callback type for successes and errors of callbacks. The links to the documentation for the functions’ call signatures are broken taking me to a 404 page. I was more generic with defining these in my type definitions until I can get the specifics of the actual accepted call signatures.

type SuccessCallback = (...args: any[]) => void;
type ErrorCallback = (...args: any[]) => void;

The rest of the definitions are interfaces and follow the same patterns. I’m showing a few of the interfaces closer to the root of the definitions.

declare	interface Window {  tizen:ApplicationManager}
declare var tizen:tizenInterface;

interface tizenInterface {
    application:ApplicationManager;
}

interface ApplicationManager { 
    getCurrentApplication():Application;

    kill(contextId:string,
              successCallback:SuccessCallback,
              errorCallback:ErrorCallback):void ;

    launch( id:string, //ApplicationId
                successCallback:SuccessCallback,
                errorCallback:ErrorCallback):void;
    launchAppControl(appControl:ApplicationControl,
                        id?:ApplicationId, //ApplicationId
                          successCallback?:SuccessCallback,
                          errorCallback?:ErrorCallback,
                          replyCallback?:ApplicationControlDataArrayReplyCallback):void ;
     findAppControl(appControl:ApplicationControl,
                        successCallback:FindAppControlSuccessCallback,
                        errorCallback:ErrorCallback):void;

    getAppsContext(successCallback:ApplicationContextArraySuccessCallback,
                        errorCallback:ErrorCallback):void ;
    getAppContext(contextId:string):ApplicationContext;
    getAppsInfo(successCallback:ApplicationInformationArraySuccessCallback,
                     errorCallback?:ErrorCallback):void;
    getAppInfo(id?:ApplicationId ):ApplicationInformation;
    getAppCerts(id?:ApplicationId ):Array;
    getAppSharedURI(id?:ApplicationId ):string;
    getAppMetaData(id?:ApplicationId ):Array;
    addAppInfoEventListener(eventCallback:ApplicationInformationEventCallback):number;
    removeAppInfoEventListener( watchId:number):void ;    
}

There are a lot more objects that could be defined for Tizen. If you’ve come along this article checkout the DefinitelyType archives first. If you don’t find Tizen devinitions there you can download the version of the video that I have from here.

Enabling Development Mode on Samsung Tizen TVs

The modern Samsung TVs run the Tizen operating system. You can develop for these just as you might develop for the Tizen based watches. The Tizen TVs are locked down more than the watch is. To deploy to a Tizen TV you’ll need to both enable developer mode and will have to let the TV know from what address it will be receiving code. If it receives request from other addresses it won’t respond to them.

On the consumer displays there is no obvious way to enable developer mode. The option is hidden. If you open the apps browser (for seeing what other apps there are to install) you can open the developer mode menu by entering “12345” on the remote. A popup window will show from which you can select to turn developer mode “On.” If you are using one of the commercial displays (SSSP, or Samsung Smart Signage Platform) the method to enable developer mode is more obvious. If you open the TV’s menu there is an option called URL Launcher Settings. The developer mode option is within these settings.

On the consumer devices you’ll also be asked to enter the IP address of the machine from which the development will occur. This prevents other rouge devices on your network from doing anything to the TV. Here you should enter the IP address of your development machine.

After these options are set the TV needs to be rebooted before the changes are fully applied. you can do this by holding the power button on the consumer TVs for two seconds, holding the power off button on a SSSP display for 2 seconds, or removing the power source from the TV and reapplying it.

After the TV boots developer mode is now enabled. However the mode being enabled doesn’t mean that all of the conditions for deploying code have been met. You will need to generate a distributor certificate also. Samsung has this page with instructions for generating a certificate. In following these directions you will need the the Device Unique ID (DUID). To get this you first need to connect to the TV. I prefer to use the sdb utility that comes with the Tizen SDK. It is located in tizen-studio/tools (adjust this path according to the location at which you installed Tizen Studio). The syntax for connecting is:

sdb connect

Sometimes I have to type the command twice before it takes effect. After the connection is successful open the Tizen Device Manager. You should see the TV connection within the UI. If you right-click on the connection you will have the option of selecting the TV’s DUID. Select this option and copy the DUID to the system clipboard. Keep the DUID on the system clipboard and when it is needed during the certificate generation it will automatically be pasted where it is needed.

If you at some point find that you need the TV extensions, don’t have them installed, and don’t see them in the the package manager you can install them using these instructions. https://developer.samsung.com/tv/develop/tools/tv-extension/download/

Creating a certificate based on the Device Uniuque ID (DUID) is slightly different for the two classes of displays. For the consumer displays a Samsung certificate should be created. For the commercial displays a Tizen certificate should be created. It can be a little confusing with Tizen being a Samsung creation. But you may be able to make better sense of it from another perspective. The Samsung certificate is associated with the Samsung App store. The consumer displays access the app store and the certificate rules for that are different than for apps that have no access to the App Store.

Creating a new Tizen Project for Samsung TVs

The objective of this entry while basic covers an easy mistake to make. It is a mistake that I have made. I’ve got a new Samsung Series 6 TV and I tried to deploy a new project to it. Errors were encountered, frustration levels were raised, but eventually I encountered success.

The Samsung TVs are more locked down than some of the other Tizen devices that I’ve worked with. The more recent ones are more locked down than some of the previous ones. When things go wrong this is what you might see.

The TV I am using runs version 4 of the Tizen operating system. I make a new Tizen project and select to create the new project from the TV templates choosing Tizen 4 as the platform.

TizenNewProject

Attempts to debug the project created from this template fail. I get an error message stating:

Launching [your app name here] has encountered a problem
closed
   closed
     closed

The terminal output isn’t of much help.

Launching the Tizen application...
# If you want to see the detailed information,
# please set the logging level to DEBUG in Preferences and check the log file in 'C:\tizen-studio-data\ide\logs/ide-20191006_014055.log'.

[Initializing the launch environment...]
RDS: Off
Target information: UN43NU6900
Application information: Id(07DOxO8iKR.SystemInfo3), Package Name(07DOxO8iKR), Project Name([your app name here])
Unexpected stop progress...
(0.337 sec)

So what gives? There are two ways to address this that are essentially two paths to the same destination. The manual solution involves editing a couple of configuration options in the files config.xml and .tproject.

The file .tproject is not visible in the Tizen IDE. But you can still open it through file -> open. This file is an XML file. There is an element named that has a sub-element . I changed the value here to tv-samsung-540. The other change in config.xml is on an element of the form . This needs to be changed to .

Why are these changes necessary? I don’t have full confirmation on this, but I believe it has to do with differences between a generic Tizen device and Samsung Tizen devices. At the time of this writing I know of no physical implementations of any non-Samsung TV Tizen devices. But it does exist as a specification.

The other solution would be performed at the creation of the project. When creating a new project do not select from the TV project templates. Instead select the Custom project templates. Within these templates there is a TV template subtype. If you choose this project type then you will start off with the configuration files mentioned above having the values that are needed.

As the Tizen operating system and the development environment are updated year to year more readers will read this entry after a new Tizen version has been released than before. It is likely that the exact values that you include here will be different than what I have used. You may need to update the values accordingly. But hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

Developing for older Samsung TVs

If you already have a Samsung TV and want to start developing for it chances are you don’t have the latest and greatest model. But when you install the Tizen development tools they only target 2 operating system versions; the latest version that is out now and the version that is yet to be released in a year or so. Your TV is too old! So what can you do?

If you check the Tizen development forums the suggestion is to install an older version of the development tools. But that’s no fun! And it is possible to develop for the older TVs with the newer tools. Go ahead and install the latest versions of the Tizen development Studio first. While that is installing you will need to download an older version of the Extensions for TV. You can find them at this site. As you scroll through the available versions you will see that if you attempt to get a version older than the 3.0 version you can’t download it. Download the 3.1 or 4.0 extensions. Don’t worry, the extensions also contain the components needed for TV’s running the 2.3 and 2.4 Tizen version.

tizen extension for tizen sdk

After Tizen Development Studio is installed open the package manager. In the upper right corner of the package manager is a gear icon. Select it.

packagemaker

Expand the “Extensions SDK” area of the window to see the extensions installed and click on the + button to add an extension. A window opens asking for a URL. Leave the URL blank and click on the three dots next to it. You’ll now be asked to navigate to a local archive of the extension you with to add. Navigate to the file that you downloaded earlier and select it. The package manager will take a few moments to install the extension.

When you attempt to create a new project and look at the TV templates available there’s only the 4.0 and 5.0 projects. What gives? The missing project templates can be found under the Custom projects. Select “TV-Samsung v3.0.” Even if you have a TV running Tizen 2.3 this opeion will work. When you click the next button you’ll see the familiar project templates.

Listing Applications on a Tizen Device

In a Tizen project I was working on I found that Tizen Web alone wasn’t enough to help me accomplish my goal. For some of the functionality that I needed a native application would be needed (more on that in another blog post). Rather than completely write the application in native code I was going to use HTML for the UI and a native service for other functionality. This is a Tizen Hybrid application.

The Tizen documentation wasn’t quite clear to me on what identifier to use when trying to launch a service packaged with an HTML application. It mentions using the App ID. This didn’t work for me. I only figured out the right name to use when I tried listing all of the applications and services on the device.

Getting a list of the applications and services is done through tizen.application.getAppsInfo. This function takes as a parameter a callback. The call back is given a list of the applications installed on the device. For my purposes I was only interested in the id member of the objects that were passed back.

tizen.application.getAppsInfo(
    function onListInstalledApps(applications) {
        console.log("List of Applications:");
        applications.forEach(
          function(app) {
    		console.log(`  app.id: ${app.id}`);
        });
    });

Once I saw the output of this it was easy to identify the problem I encountered with launching the service.

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 10.38.17 AM — Output of app listing code

According to the Tizen documentation when launching a service the ID string used is composed of the package ID and the app ID of the service. The package ID can be found in the confix.xml for the web application. In the following you can see the package ID is “IVFd9Or08P”.

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 4.34.54 PM

The app ID can be found in then tizen-manifest.xml for the service project.

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 4.37.53 PM

The app ID here is “org.sample.service.” If you look in the output from the code sample for listing installed applications you will see that the service shows up as IVFd9Or08P.testservice. It is using the entry from the “exec” field instead of the appid field. I’m not sure why the documentation points to the appid only. But I’m happy to have figured out this problem.

Could not launch the xxx application because the xxx application is currently in launch.

If you get this error in Tizen Studio

Could not launch the xxx application because the xxx application is currently in launch.

The solution is simple. Just close and relaunch Tizen Studio.

Bixby Developer Studio

Samsung says they would like to have AI implemented in all of their products by 2020. From the visual display shown during the SDC 2018 conference it appears their usage of “all” is intended to be widely encompassing. Phones, car audio systems, refrigerators, air conditioners…

Samsung is inviting developers to start engaging in development for their conversational AI. Now they have made the same tools that they use for Bixby development internally available publically. The development portal and the development tools for Windows and OS X are available now at: https://bixbydevelopers.com

Galaxy Home, a Bixby enabled smart speaker, was showcased as a target implementation for the SDK.

The “Media Control API” will be available to content partners this December for adding deeper control into applications. Samsung says Netflix and Hulu are on board and will begin development with it next year.

The Samsung Frame TVs are also being opened to developers by way of the Ambient Mode SDK. This will allow developer content to show when the TV is in it’s standby mode.

Tizen 5.0 Released

Tizen-Pinwheel-On-Light-RGB

Tizen 5.0 was released a few days ago. This is a week in advance of the Samsung Developer’s Conference 2018. For those keeping count until now the most recent version of Tizen prior to now (4.0) could be found on the Galaxy Watch and Samsung TVs. There are Mobile devices that run Tizen. But I am in the USA and those devices are not sold here (so I won’t speak on them much).

What’s new in Tizen 5.0? There is improved IoT support, support for Bixby, and support for glTF. glTF is a format that aims to provide efficient loading of 3D scenes, but it is being added to Tizen with intent for it to be applied to watch faces. With the upgrade we are also getting improved debugging support and a new version of Tizen.Net. It also looks that they are deprecating the UI Builder tool in Tizen.

I get the feeling that I’ll hear more about this update when I go to the conference next week. I’ll post more from the conference as I find out 🙂

C# API for Display Control
Native API for Multi-LED control
Compressed File System
Low Memory Management
Upgrade to source libraries
- icu (60.2)
- sqlite (3.24.0)
- json-glib (1.4.2)
- wayland (1.15.0)
- efl (1.21)
Updated Watchface Complication Framework
App Control API
Minicontrol API
WebView Control added
Network Firewall
Bluetooth 5.0
Neural Network Runtime

j2i.net

Mostly Development, but what ever interests me at the time

Tag: Tizen

Samsung Developer Conference 2022

Android

Presentations

Tizen

Presentations

Samsung TV Plus

Presentations

Gaming

Presentations

Health

Presentations

IoT

Samsung provides some Clarity in the Google Wearable Collaboration

Creating Development Certificates for Samsung Tizen TVs

Commercial (SSSP) Display Steps

Consumer Display Steps

For Both Consumer and Commercial

Switching Certificate Profiles

Tizen 6.0 M2 Release

Changing the Default Tizen 5.0 Project for Samsung TVs

Using WITS for Samsung/Tizen TV Development

Setting up WITS

Configuring Wits to Use Your Project

Running your Project

Deploying File Changes

TypeScript in Tizen

Enabling Development Mode on Samsung Tizen TVs

Creating a new Tizen Project for Samsung TVs

Developing for older Samsung TVs

Listing Applications on a Tizen Device

Could not launch the xxx application because the xxx application is currently in launch.

Bixby Developer Studio

Tizen 5.0 Released