In less than a day, Michael Sheldon has managed to port his Qt-based MeeGo Hartmattan app, Eyrie Music Identifier, natively via the Enlightenment Foundation Library (EFL) in Tizen. Eyrie is a music identification app that tries to listen to music running on the background and tries to identify its title and artist.

You must be all wondering how Michael managed to create a native app in Tizen. Well, good news(!) — Michael will be posting detailed instructions on his blog soon (EDIT: The full instructions are now up). While waiting for it, here is how he explained it to me in an email:

Hi Reggie,

I’m planning on writing up a blog post about it at the weekend, I’ll try to include as much detail in that as I can to help others get to grips with doing EFL stuff with the SDK.

However the short(ish) explanation is that yes, it’s certainly possible to write EFL apps with the current SDK release, but it’s not really integrated into the Eclipse based IDE in any meaningful way. I found after a bit of playing around that the SDK is actually based around scratchbox and the IDE simply drops into a scratchbox session when building packages, so coming from other scratchbox based environments (Maemo and MeeGo Harmattan) I knew enough to be able to jump in to the scratchbox environment directly and develop my application that way.

To get into the scratchbox environment you can simply run “~/tizen_sdk/SDK/build-system/toolchains/scratchbox2/bin/sb2″ (assuming the SDK is installed in ~/tizen_sdk/). From there you’re basically in a (slightly odd) debian system and can build either i386 or ARM binaries for use in the emulator or on real devices, and you have access to all the development packages in the Tizen repositories (which include EFL amongst other things). I’ll try and detail some of the main oddities in the system in my blog post later and go through in a bit more of a step by step manner how to start writing EFL apps, but that’s the general gist of it.

Cheers, Mike.

Links: Full Instructions