Here at AnDevCon II was a first opportunity to get hands on with WiMM Labs new wearable Android device, the WiMM One. Of course my first question was if I could use our new Oxygene for Java to build an app for this tiny 1×1 screen.
I downloaded their SDK, which turned out to be an older build, so I had to talk to one of the developers on site to get a workaround to get it working with their emulator. They will be updating the download soon.
Once I got it running, I took their simple watch example application and translated it to Oxygene.
The translation was really simple. The Android Manifest and layout copied straight across. Since Oxygene for Android can consume any JAR, it was a simple matter of pointing it at their provided JAR libraries. The only workaround I had to provide was to create my own extension of the WatchActivity, which for my purposes was an empty class.
Once I fixed the syntax and it compiled in Visual Studio, it deployed to the emulator and started running . . .
Not bad for a few minutes on my laptop while laying in bed at the hotel. Of course the next step is to get it running on the actual hardware. At this point I only had one hour before my session on cross-platform mobile application development. I ran down to the WiMM both and got a hold of one of their developer devices.
A little work and we deployed my app to the application carousel, just in time for my session. The developers were a little surprised to see me using Visual Studio and Oxygene to develop for the devices, but even more excited to see it all working together.
It was really exciting to see this all really* just work* on entirely new hardware and form factor. The WiMM runs a modified version (scaled down) of the Android operating system and requires special libraries, but because Oxygene consumes and produces standard JAR files and we support the Dalvik compiler, it all just worked like it should.
I’ll post the code once I tested it with the updated emulator that will be released.
