Jolla reveals Sailfish UI and announces SDK for app developers

Jolla made a significant announcement related to its Sailfish OS at the Slush startup conference in Finland. Apart from introducing the SDK, it also showed off the UI for the first time. The important fact being that it was targeted at not only mobile phones, but also devices such as car navigators, tablets and televisions. Effortless multitasking was among those features which were highlighted ambitiously by showing off different applications that were running directly on the homescreen, without forcing the user to enter into an application dedicated to each of the several functions like calling, listening to music etc. Battery life and network signal indicators have been moved to the lock screen in order to save screen space. More features like the Pulley menu, peeks at status information and personalisation tidbits like the Ambiance tint in the UI which picks the colour from the picture on the screen make the platform even more innovative.

The SDK, which is available at the Sailfish website, consists of Mer Core’s tools, Qt Creator, Jolla UI Components, Sailfish UI framework and Sailfish handset application interfaces, revealed a press release. The platform further aims to make Android applications compatible in order to tackle the inevitable app shortage the platform is going to face upon its release.

It might however be a little too early for the developers to start developing apps specifically for the platform right now, but as of now things like a basic simulator are not yet available and are yet to be worked upon. Since it is based on top of the Mer project, it can use the same tools that are used for developing on that platform. As of now, the only way to do that is to build a copy of QtCreator and Designer yourself, and which is definitely not an easy task.

There is also a video which demonstrates the whole thing :

For more videos and introduction visit the Sailfish OS wiki and follow Jolla’s YouTube channel.