Smart TV 101: Wrap up

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:

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

netstat -anbo | findstr :80

Next Up

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

5 thoughts on “Smart TV 101: Wrap up

  1. I gave up trying to install Eclipse grrrr wanted to use it to try out Android apps.

    Currently installing RAD Studio and giving that a whirl. Apparently can write Android apps in that and Win 8 apps too. If you really wanted to.

    Raspberry Pi sounds right up my street.

    • Android app development may in fact be one of my later months’ 101s, so I’ll give RAD Studio a go if it means I can avoid Eclipse.. cheers!

  2. Hello Robin, thanks for great articles!

    Did you have any problems with re-deploying applications on the TV? I can’t find any information about what need to change (widget.xml, config.xml or zip filename or something else), when I trying to upload new version of same application. I have a feeling that TV just takes latest version from cache and not from my server.

    I’ll be glad to hear any suggestion, how to solve this common problem.
    Thanks in advance.

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