Year of 101s, Part 2 – Smart TV February

Summary – What was it all about?

February was my 101 on developing for the Samsung Smart TV; a bit of a random subject n the first place and I also managed to get quite off track by the end after a hiatus in the middle.

Part #1 – Intro

I started with an intro to what Smart TVs are.

Part #2 – App Development

Second was an overview of what apps are, how they’re developed and then got into developing a basic app.

Part #3 – Deploying Apps

Next I did a post about deploying the apps to your tv for testing

I had intended to give a detailed article on developing these apps since I had spent a lot of time in January researching these posts and couldn’t find a decent article anywhere containing this info.

However, during the writing of my second or third post I found a well hidden but utterly perfect article covering everything I had planned to write about; my post would have ended up being a reproduction of that article which is a waste of everyone’s time and not very nice for the author of the original article!

The more useful resources are:

• Build a Sample App
• Testing Your Application on a TV
• Coding Your JavaScript Application
• App development guide (PDF)
• Hello World

As such I had to think of something still related to Smart TV apps, but also interesting and different enough to be worth writing.

This is where the plan to do without the IDE came in and I tried to dissect the process and implement it manually.

Part #4 – Creating Packages without the SDK

I finally attempted to do without, Apache (done), generate the package (uh.. not quite), and scrap Eclipse (no dice).

What I gained from this was more headaches related to node’s async fun, and also opened up a few other avenues for future development; essentially I’ll be able to link Jan’s 101, Feb’s 101, and also March’s 101 all together!

Summary

Once I realised that Smart TV apps were just webpages, the creation of apps become kinda boring for a blog series. Deploying apps was still quite interesting, so I liked that one. The detail of creating an app was covered wonderfully in the other articles I found, so no point repeating that stuff.

A few things I discovered that weren’t really related; if you start your node server on port 80 and get a failure related to “ENV” and “process” that looks like it couldn’t access the port and you’re not sure what process is stealing that port, try [code]netstat -anbo | findstr :80[/code]

Next Up

Hopefully March will be a more fruitful month – I’ll be getting stuck into a tasty slice of raspberryPi!