Summary
And now for something completely different... Nokia has released the source code for its Python port to the S60 high-end phone platform as open source. Yay Nokia! I'm using this blog entry also to plug (again!) the art project MobiLenin by Jürgen Scheible.
What can you do with Python on a phone? A lot! Ten days ago I was visited by Jürgen Scheible, a German artist working in Finland, where he was a Nokia engineer for 8 years before quitting to become a Ph.D student and concentrate more on his art.
His latest project is MobiLenin - an interactive performance piece where passers-by (or, more likely, customers of a bar/restaurant) use specially programmed mobile phones to send in their votes for one of several variations of a constantly playing video clip of the artist in front of a backdrop of moving traffic, with a popular song on the soundtrack. The kicker (is that the phones are programmed in Python, using Nokia's Python port.
Jürgen is a big Python fan, and he was in the area to teach Python programming workshops for mobile phones at Berkeley and Stanford. He showed me some videos that he shot the week before during and after the Berkeley workshop; this is one of the best testimonies for using Python that I've seen in a while. The students all loved it, even the one who confessed being more comfortable with statically typed languages like Java, C++ and C# (most did not have that much programming experience). Jürgen has uploaded the videos to his website: http://www.mobilenin.com/. The tutorials are also be accessible from there; they are all in the form "expanation + sample code + screen shots" which makes them really easy to follow: http://www.mobilenin.com/pys60/menu.htm.
Another project he showed me was a collection of simple paint programs for his phone, also done in Python. Most of his scripts are between 20 and 100 lines of code -- the Python port makes all of the phone's incredible functionality available at a very high level: camera, internet, bluetooth, keyboard, screen, menus etc. Using these programs he snaps a photo, scales it, and uses it as a brush on a small canvas; then he snaps another photo, and so on; when he's satisfied, one button click uploads the photo to his online gallery. In this way he produces instant art that reflects his location, mood, and environment.
Jürgen is now back to Boston where he will be teaching at MIT until April.
Ha... I spent ages looking for an S60 model Nokia phone. Today I finally discover it's a platform, and there are lots of different Nokia models which use it.
Even worse, the phone I was *about to buy anyway*, from a friend, is a 3230 - which uses the S60 platform.
I showed the manager at the Sprint/Nextel store the list of S60 phones, and he said that it seemed to him as if only Cingular and T-Mobile here in the USA would support these phones.
Sure enough, when I went online only Cingular and T-Mobile/WirelessOne sold them.
Interesting to hear that you have developed a program which reads a bbc backstage data.Ia wondering,how complicated is it?I am trying to find out how to achieve a similar task....and go even further and try to personalise the content.But iam a newbee in python.so any ideas or comments will be appreciated. I wanna give it a try.
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