Over the past several days, I have attempted to develop simple apps on this platform. Native apps, not web apps.
The first stunning omission of the UI is that it has no pulldown menu. Yet on the Tizen website, there are four I can view right now as I type this. Popups are not the same and do not behave properly, so that is a major omission.
But worse, the application is downright unusable. I develop an application and attempt to use the Tizen environment to lay it out, it regularly corrupts its own resource files resulting in bizarre crashes or losses of work. Even a simple interface I developed in C# in about an hour could not be completed in this environment despite several restarts.
The biggest problem appears to be the names of resources and parenting of objects. If I rename any resource, it appears that it remains in various places in the code or that the name later gets reused and shuffled into the hierarchy of objects. The result? Many resources can no longer be found, the objects appear in the Native UI builder, but the source code can no longer find them.
I am not even sure how to report the bug because it is so final when it occurs. Everything is going fine, and then on next deployment, boom, all is lost. You end up with segmentation faults with a useless stack trace of assembly languate entry points.
The look of the environment is extremely professional. The Native UI Developer does not support many aspects of the UI, however, such as groups. But it does have a code generator and workflow generator built in. It is extremely cool, except it appears to overwrite code out of its marked range and does a poor job of isolating its "generated" code from the code written by the developer.
I did not believe the environment could be this unstable, so tried looking for updates, but have found none. I tried a diffent OS/environment, and the results were the same.
I have had so many problems with development in this product, I thought bug reports would be flowing and there would be a major revamping, but I have not seen that. It is my opinion tha tthe IDE is incredibly refined and well done with respect to its layout and appearance. But the interface is of no use if the underlying code to generate applications does not work.
I have tried the develpment tools on Linux (Ubunty Precise 12.04 LTS) and Windows 8. I know Windows 8 is not officially supported, but this doesn't appear to be the type of bug that is operating system related. Use of the IDE results in consistent bugs and problems with alteration of resource names, resource realighnment and code generation that make developing even the most simple app ridiculously difficult if not impossible.
What gives.? Am I missing something? Has anyone developed any native apps successfully with this tool, or are web apps the way to go?
Note I am using Java 6, which could be part of the problem, not sure Seems to run fine on the surface with Java 6.
Thank you for any help or input you can provide.
Frank