Kitsilano Software is in a pretty inactive state.
Most of my energies are now being fed into doublethinkco, which is currently just a “label” for Kitsilano Software, but which might end up becoming the new name of the corporation.
doublethinkco is all about Independent technology for the emerging sharing economy. Block-chain. Decentralization.
Mobile Linux is still the platform, but the focus is on decentralization.
Kitsilano Software has joined the Tizen Association.
We were announced as a new partner in their press release on the eve of the Tizen Developer Summit 2014 Shanghai.
I announced in August that Tizen and Kitsilano Software would be spending some time apart, because Tizen was broken.
Tizen is still broken, but I really want Tizen to succeed. I want to help. I hope that Kitsilano Software can help more as a member of the Tizen Association.
This doesn’t change our primary focus, which is Mono for Sailfish. Our existing MonoTizen work was focused on OSP, which has been ingloriously assigned to the dustbin of history between Tizen 2.3 Alpha and Tizen 2.3 Beta.
Kitsilano Software are bringing C# to Sailfish, with the Mono for Sailfish project.
See guest article on Mobile Linux News for more details.
Xamarin finally released Mono-3.6.0 on 13th August 2014, so we can finally ship the matching RPMs for MonoTizen.
Here are the installation instructions.
SEE Tizen is broken. We will be spending some time apart.
Next up for Kitsilano Software is probably the creation of a Mono for Sailfish project, and the migration of our efforts to that platform. Working on QtSharp will certainly be more straight-forward there. Stay tuned for more updates on that project.
I’m very sad to have to say this, but the Tizen Project is broken, and we’re going to be spending some time apart. It makes no sense for Kitsilano Software to spend any more time or money on building MonoTizen at the current time.
The Tizen OS has got amazing, world-changing potential, but the organization and communication on the project as a whole is terribly broken.
I could publish a long laundry list of specific issues and there are many. I would be happy to have a more detailed discussion with anybody who would like to listen and who has any ability to change things.
For now though, I’ll keep the feedback really simple.
For collaborative projects to work you need trust between partners, you need to do what you say you are going to do and you need lots of open communication.
There is no public roadmap for Tizen Mobile, the most important profile. Despite devices being promised on multiple occasions there are still no devices. The Unpacked event in Moscow was cancelled with 48 hours notice and no reason given. There was no further public statement for another week or so. That statement, when it finally arrived just said that there was no future roadmap. I have no idea what is going to happen in the Tizen project tomorrow, let alone next week, next month or next quarter, because there is no public information.
No third parties can build a business with no public roadmap.
It should be no surprise that the ecosystem is not where we would all like it to be. It makes no business sense for third-parties to engage given all the uncertainty. The worst thing about the apparent cancellation/delay of the Samsung Z phone is that the release of that phone would have given the whole Tizen ecosystem something to anchor on.
100% revenue share is a great draw, but 100% of $0 is still $0. We need devices and fast.
I really enjoyed myself at the Tizen Developer Conference, and I would like to publicly thank everyone who has helped me get started with Tizen, and welcomed me into the community. I hope to be back in the future, but for now we are going to spend some time apart.
It appears that Mono-3.6 has finally been released, so we will release matching Tizen RPMs either later today or tomorrow as our parting gift to Tizen.
I really hope that the Tizen Project can change, and can work in the spirit which the governance changes for Tizen 3.0 indicated was planned.
I wrote a blog post in June 2014 talking about EA’s silent technology releases to http://gpl.ea.com, and what a shame it was that these releases were not publicized and celebrated, and made into a more usable form.
The code has been released publicly for several years, and anybody can doing whatever they like with the code as long as they comply with the licensing terms of the releases. I recently discovered, for example, that Paul Hodge created an EASTL fork nearly 4 years ago!
So with the help of Mahram Foadi, Kitsilano Software have done what EA should have done a very long time ago – created usable Github repos for these packages.
START HERE => https://github.com/kitsilanosoftware/EAWebKit
At the time of writing the repos only work for Win32 configurations, using the published SLN and VCXPROJ files with Visual Studio 2010 Express (with updated related paths assuming peer co-directories for all packages). It should be possible to extend that to Win64, PS4 and XBOX One, using the shipped content from http://gpl.ea.com, and perhaps to get them working for other platforms, like OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, unless critical content has been stripped from the packages. Generating the build files using CMake or premake is an obvious next step.
My challenge to EA in creating these releases is:
EA are only meeting their absolute bare-minimum legal requirements. They can and should do much more, in my opinion. I hope these repackaged releases help to kick-start that process. The PR benefits alone would make it worthwhile.
I could never achieve that aim as an employee. Perhaps I can do more to help with that now I am outside of EA?
Best wishes, former EA colleagues!
Bob “The Builder” Summerwill, 30th July 2014 (assisted by Mahram Foadi, another ex-EA-employee)
MonoTizen-1.0.0 has been released at monotizen.com.
The guest article at tizenexperts.com contains video clips showing it in action.
The WearableC64 project has been hived off from Kitsilano Software into a new sister-company – Kitsilano Games.
Kitsilano Games is a Vancouver-based software development company, focused on retro-gaming for mobile, wearables and consoles.
See Kitsilano Games website for more details.
HTML5.NET could be a real target platform. Multi-selectable for PCLs. You would use the MVVM pattern to share code across multiple native platforms (iOS, Android, WinStore, etc) and HTML5. Just like Xamarin native, but for the web as well.
Visit the HTML5.NET website for more details.
UPDATE: This project should actually be called MonoHTML5! And there is interesting overlap with Unity’s IL2PP project.
The aim of this project is to get a Commodore 64 emulator running on the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch, to enter in the Samsung Gear App Challenge. App submission needs to happen by 17th July 2014. This device only provides an HTML5 API, with no native API support exposed, so the emulator will need to be Javascript based.
Visit the WearableC64 website for more details.
Kitsilano Software 