Application developer site/Description

Revision as of 09:23, 11 May 2010

Overview

From the experiences of Apple and Android, we can assume that, if we are successful, there will be many more application developers than platform developers. Similarly, their needs will be different, as they are more interested in using APIs than designing them. It could also be that they will not necessarily be interested in joining the Meego Community, and are more interested in being passive consumers of the technology. The audience will consist of both beginners who need simple, clear, tutorials/walkthroughs, and experienced developers more interested in code samples and reference documentations.

Objectives

The goal of the developer.meego.com site is to present and market the Meego Application Developer offering. This consists of web-pages supporting the following:

• Describing the Meego platform and SDK
• Advertising changes to the Meego Application SDK
  • This could also involve mentioning new Meego-ready products
• Teaching how to use the Meego platform for creation of different applications
• Teaching of new APIS
• Teaching specialized topics related to different UX
  • Power optimization for Netbook and phone UXs
  • Usability constraing in TV and phone UXs
• Describe how to get Meego applications into different application stores, and and the Meego community repository.
• Central location for fetching the SDK
• Central location for all information relevant to application developers
  • ideally indexed/cross referenced documentation
• Q&A for application developers
• Lead into the community
  • For those that want to dig deeper.

Potential Content

• SDK downloads, including integration with an IDE, a VM for testing apps that is ready to go with the latest version of MeeGo, sample code and documentation for off-line use
• An overview of the typical developer environment (a "hello world" for a developer with a clean Windows/Linux install)
• Detailed tutorials & manuals on developer tools for the platform
• API docs for all of the developer visible APIs on the platform (potentially with "preferred sons" - APIs that have a higher profile)
• A platform overview, explaining the role of various components & how to put them together to make more complicated apps
• A more detailed set of manuals of all things meego, covering localisation, packaging, system integration, HIGs, etc. (browsable, searchable, indexed)
• A copious library of code samples, liberally licensed, searchable, to help developers get started with a toolbox for things like drawing on a canvas, calling a DBus API, listening for system events, using core libraries, etc.
• Links to source code for free applications on the system (make it easy for developers to see how existing developers do things)
• An easy way to distribute software when it's written
• A knowledge base of content that developers augment with gathered wisdom

• Videos, screencasts, presentations of the Meego APIs and their use.
• Community introduction material - howtos, mailing lists, key people.

Comparison web sites

• Android
• Apple
• KDE
• Palm
• Qt
• O2Litmus
• Bada
• Intel
• Nokia
• Microsoft
• CPAN (Perl)

Location

• developer.meego.com??

Other suggestions are welcome.

Technical Requirements

• Drupal (with video support module)
• TBD

Site development

The site has several elements that need to be combined in the design:

• Marketing - it needs to attract developers.
• Informative - it needs to provide developers with the necessary information to do their work.
• Education - it needs to teach developers how to use the Meego APIs on Meego devices.

Site Metrics Collection

In order to measure the success of the site metrics need to be gathered. For example, number of SDK downloads, number of views of the Get Started video, etc.

The primary metric can be the number of applications on the community application repository, or a combination of the applications available from all the vendors of Meego devices.

Open Issues

These should be discussed in the forum.meego.com site, but are gathered here for now.

Can we place product specific content on the site?

One idea is that all Meego products should be hosted, even if they contain APIs that are not part of the Meego Platform. The idea being is these APIs can serve as input to the future evolution of the platform.

... Comments please ...

What is the policy on digital marketing on the site?

Do we allow device/product manufacturers permission to display device launch information on the site? i.e., Could LG, Nokia, Intel or Asus have a banner/flash advert when they launch a Meego devices, and if so, for how long?

... Comments please ...

Should application developers have their own Q&A forums or should these be combined with the meego.com forums?

The issue is application developers will (hopefully) outnumber the platform developers. This could create a lot of noise in the forums not related to the generation of the Meego Platform.

Currently this is not planned, as the application developers can be integrated in the community eventually, and their feedback to the platform developers is desired.

... Comments please ...

Any other open issues?

...