The Herd Of Kittens Python Development - Symbian Series 60

The Nokia 6630 is a nice phone (multi band, GRPS, WCDMA, Bluetooth, nice loudspeaker for speakerphone mode and alarms, long battery life and fast charging, and mp3 ringtone support.) It's also a not-half-bad camera (no zoom, but a lot of useful processing effects including a very slow low-light mode.) It's also a decent PDA (Symbian, bluetooth, ipv4/ipv6 over GPRS and 3G, and probably GSM-data too, and numerous applications.)

The really useful bit is that it is the first phone that I can write python code for. (I don't count pippy on palmos on palmphones, because it was a "python scratchpad", there weren't any interfaces to the OS - and worse, it was pre-2.0 python.)

The Amaretto team seems to get the value of instant gratification to developers - simply having an interactive Python available says that, but also that they shipped with things like the bt_console.py bluetooth console script; this lets the phone throw an interactive python prompt up on a nearby computer -- with a real keyboard -- with only a few clicks of the D-pad.

At this stage, some of the obvious little apps have been written - for example, something that talks to a Bluetooth GPS and logs locations for cell-tower ids. But there are more opportunities...

Applications

Some of these are brutally simple, but at least they show how to do some of the obvious things, with more comments than the supplied examples at least.

• mmmravs.py is an in-progress construction of the classic Palm "MMM Ravs" application. It's about half the size of just the C part of the Palm app, but will be much easier to extend - to include network menu update, more UI options, logging of orders (possibly supporting "suggest a dish I haven't had recently"...)
• bcpathtrace.py and bluecamerathreaded.py are the apps I wrote on the train from Stockholm to Gothenburg and during the first day or two of EuroPython
• After showing them off at a Lightning Talk, I went and duplicated most of the code from bcpathtrace.py and created unix_draw_album.py which produces JPEG images corresponding to what the Symbian version displays on-screen. Turns out that the Symbian-Python drawing classes are both more useful and more actually documented than PIL.ImageDraw, but there was just enough similarity to pull it off.