Teemu’s Blog

Finally it happened. It was announced today in the Forum Nokia Python section that a 1.4.0 final version of Python for Series 60 has been released. This is something that I’ve been waiting this for a long time since I’ve been kind of pissed of with the Symbian signing policy. And guess what… this final version of PyS60 has been officially signed by Nokia with all developer certificate capabilities so no more signing is required for Python application in order to access e.g., the GSM location or GPS APIs. How cool is this? Finally, it is humanly possible to develop applications for S60 mobiles. You can expect to see more PyS60 related stuff in this blog once the summer holidays are over. Until then, have a good summer…. I know I will.

I’m announcing a new software for Series 60 mobile phones called Fupper. It’s a Flickr upload tool written in Pyhon. Look here for more information.

As I got things going now, I decided to port (or more like package) the Python Imaging Library for the Maemo 2.0 platform. I decided to take the 1.1.6 beta release, since the 1.1.5 had some annoying bugs that made e.g., the pildriver.py script unusable. I hope that the 1.1.6 is more stable. You can get the deb packages for both armel and i386 from here.

Besides being a usefull Python library, you can use the included scripts to modify images on your 770. For example you can use the pildriver.py script to resize an image (larger.jpg) to size 320×240 and save it to a separate file (smaller.jpg) by typing the following line in terminal window…

pildriver.py save smaller.jpg resize 320 240 open larger.jpg

Huh, man it has been a hot summer here in Finland. It has been something like 30 degrees centigrade for a month now and I’m sort of thinking that this starts to be enough. Anyway, I haven’t been writing to my blog for quite a while now. I was on a vacation for some time and in couple of weeks I will go out for some more. Meanwhile, a lot has been happening with the Nokia Internet Tablet. The final version of the 2006 software has been released and now we finally have also a almost fully functional Python runtime for the Maemo 2.0 platform as well. Now it is time to start making some serious Python applications for the Nokia 770.

I bet that everyone that has the Nokia 770 knows about the Maemo Mapper. I’ve also been using it for some time know and finally yesterday I wen out and bought myself a bluetooth GPS receiver so that I can fully utilize the power of Maemo Mapper. I have to say that I’m impressed. It works like a charm. Btw… the GPS receiver that I have is Insmat InsSiRF III.

As we all probably know by now the Beta version of Maemo 2.0 and OS2006 has been released. Too bad that I forgot my Nokia 770 at work and I cannot test the new software yet. Of all the weekends, why It had to be now.

Anyway, I’ve been browsing through the Maemo.org site and I noticed that there was very nice Python tutorial there that includes lots of useful information. It seems that now it is really possible to develop fully working applications for Maemo platform using Python, since LibOSSO and D-BUS services are included. The tutorial has also very good instructions on how to make application installer packages from your Python applications.

The tutorial mentions that the Nokia 770 software images won’t include the Python runtime by default, but it has to be installed separately. This is quite understandable considering the amount of memory that is available on Nokia 770 for installable software. Also according to the tutorial the Pymaemo runtime package should be downloadable via maemo.org, but I haven’t found it yet. Anyway, the future looks promising.

Please also note that my previous tutorials do not apply anymore on Maemo 2.0 since hildon.App and hildon.AppView have changed to hildon.Program and hildon.Window.

I though that I set up a collection of the pymaemo tutorials I’ve written so that they would be more easily accessible. From now on you can find them at pymaemo.teemuharju.net. Of course, I still put them on my blog also. I haven’t written much new tutorials lately, but I think that during the weekend I could write about things like how to create a Hildonized toolbar etc.

Earlier, I wrote about the Raccoon web server that you can run on your mobile phone. I just found out that it has been released as open source. Also the gateway implementation has been released, so now you are no more attached only to the project’s own gateway. A brief look at the gateway install instructions seemed to be quite complicated, but I’m definitely planning to set up one to my home server.

This is the first, but rather small step towards having your mobile phone part of the Internet. Now all we need are flat fee data connections and I think lots of cool new stuff will appear. If you have a Series 60 phone, give Raccoon a try. You’ll be amazed by what you can do with it.

Besides working with the BitTorrent client, I’ve been also working with application that I call MaemoFlickr. I’ve been building this application from scratch and when it is ready it will be able to upload photos to Flickr using simple and intuitive user interface. The intention is that if you have camera phone or something you could easily upload the photos you’ve taken to Flickr. Future versions might include also some photo organizing features, but I think that for starters it is probably better to keep it simple.

Here are some screenshots…

Ok, now I’ve got the UI of the BitTorrent client somewhat Hildonized. I decided to move the start/stop button, the search field and the connection indicator to a toolbar at the bottom of the view. I think this makes it a bit more usable. I’m considering moving the upload rate adjust bar to the toolbar also, so that the main view would only contain the information about the torrents that are being downloaded or uploaded. I haven’t yet touched the other views, but I think those need less editing anyways.

The search bar on the bottom does not of course work yet, since it is not possible to launch the web browser form Python applications yet. However, this should become possible with the new software release and new pymaemo version. Then also MIME support for bittorrent files would be nice. I’ll look into that and then we have full blown BitTorrent for the Maemo platform. All I would need now is actual content distributed via BitTorrent that actually could be used in the Nokia 770. Usually videos are too large and those iPod mp4 videos does not seem to play in the video player. Anyone know any good podcasts that are distributed using BitTorrent?

As the readers of this blog have probably noticed, I like doing stuff with Python. I also like downloading all kinds of stuff from the Internet and what better way to do that nowadays than the BitTorrent. How convenient, BitTorrent has originally been written in Python. Here we go… I need to port the BitTorrent client on Maemo platform using pymaemo. I know there are command line versions of some other BitTorrent clients already available for maemo, but I kind of like having UIs. They make life alot easier.

The surrent stable version of the BitTorrent client uses PyGtk for the user interface so porting should go quite smoothly. I decided to give it a go and as I suspected it worked straight from the package. Of course I had to modify the .deb installer a bit to make it install using the application installer on the device, but otherwise nothing else was needed.

Here are couple of screenshots. As you can see, no Hildonization for the UI yet, but I’m already rolling up my sleeves so lets see when I can release the first installer package.