Jolla Sailfish app development: LUT Code Camp

[Article under edit]
February 24. - 28.2014 Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) arranged an open Sailfish OS coding week for their students

Comments from LUT and Jolla after the cource to be added later. Hopefully some information about the apps developed will be included too. ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

February 24-28, 2014 Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) arranged an open Sailfish OS coding week

Photo by Kalle Kareinen, IT student, LUT

LUT Code Camp: Students encoding software for Jolla phone's Sailfish operating system

Lappeenranta University of Technology arranged a week-long intensive course Code Camp to computer science students. Cource included teamwork to design and build software for the finnish mobile phone company Jolla's new Sailfish operating system.

The course started on Monday, February 24 with the theory and ended on Friday, February 28 with a playful competition which took place between the students, judged by the teachers and representatives from Jolla. Jolla also lend 3 devices to the students for a month, enabling them to get familiar with it and have a deeper insight to the development.

"There is a strong win-win situation for both our students and the business guests, as the company (Jolla) may introduce software platforms for future programmers, and students and staff (LUT) will have the opportunity to explore the company's fresh technology first-hand," says junior researcher Antti Knutas.

Code Camp cource offered the basics of just finalized Sailfish operating system. Then, students developed applications utilizing the skills learned. In-depth learning of practices, and the details and good practices could be found on their own and the team's doing.

"Code Camp aimed at achieving the same team working atmosphere which is needed in working life. At the same time a recent technology is learned. Previously, we have taken courses on web, tablet and game programming, and now the smartphone programming," explains Knutas.

Technical expertise of the course was offered Jolla by the company's technical expert Pami Ketolainen and interest group coordinator Alberto Martinez.

"The new operating system is investing on easy user experience. Sailfish operating system works with gestures and a person can at the same time to do many things, e.g. to download a file at the same time as the user chats, writes e-mail, uses Skype or plays a silent game," says Martinez who participates in a course on Tuesday.

"Initial Special features include the fact that there are no solid buttons, but the phone is used with gestures. Users can run several programs at the same time and use the applications via so-called  shrunked icons [translator's note: active covers]," Knutas explains.

Source: LUT (translated from finnish)

Jolla - Developers Dream Phone

 

 

 

 

Jolla - Developers Dream Phone

After three days of the first Jolla Smart Phone sold in Finland, experienced and Linux oriented customers are already sailing in deep seas with their Jolla's. In the net we can already find instructions about how to install Google Play into this phone, and a video showing how nicely GTA3 is running on Jolla Sailfish OS.

So modifying the Jolla's OpenSource Sailfish OS is possible, and Jolla has made it easy too - In the phone settings you can change the phone to Developer Mode (caution on this, this is really ment for experienced users). No other mobile OS offer a developer mode, but in other systems like Android this can be done a bit trickier, via rooting the phone.

 

It's obvious that Jolla hasn't offered this option without purpose. As they aim to wide use of their gesture based operating system worldwide, there are few benefits for themselves offering this option.

Some possible benefits to Jolla for offering customers a Developer Mode:

• Jolla is looking for the best individual developers to hire them
• Jolla gives part of their own work to the community, and via that offering better updates faster to all their customers (this kind of community work is common in Linux based, OpenSource enviroments)
• Jolla is hoping for users to develope some of The Other Halfs
• Jolla needs native Sailfish Apps fast, and this is one way to offer complete test devices for all interested in developing
• Jolla's Sailfish starts to spread around the world directly via the community
• Jolla gains the votes from experienced mobile enthustiastics, and gains some marketing value via them

I see Jolla's phones as a huge marketing fleet for the Salefish Operating System, which seems to be the main product of the company. In future we might see Jolla running campaigns where they award their customers for their work to develope and spread Sailfish all around the world.

Jolla's strategy by Stefano Mosconi:
 "Our plan is a three-phase one: first, we’ll do phones that are Jolla-branded. Then we’ll do co-branded phones – “Sailfish by Jolla.” And then the third wave will be to license the OS to third parties so that they can build on top of the existing open-source project -which we plan to keep open-source- and then we’ll differentiate with the UI."

"Give a million ships to free, open minded sailors and follow them visiting all the harbours of the world, equipping their ships even better and showing their nice ships to their friends, inviting them to sailing with them"

to JollaTides by Simo Ruoho
soon to be Jolla sailor