Technical Ramblings

With the advent of a language I can program on my phone, my first goal was to learn the language, and my second goal was to rewrite something that I think is an almost-great service, but missing a couple key features. With that in mind, I headed to work, first with my FOAF app. My work after that concentrated on a locative service based around cell towers, and learning the user interface aspects of the Python interface.

Last night, I got my first victory in both: I wrote a decent (although minimal) user interface, which was able to communicate information about my location based on cell towers I was near. You can see the start of the work at http://crschmidt.net/cell/ . As I just described it to another mobile user, it’s going to be “Like CellSpotting, without the suck.” Using services for anything is completely unneccesary, especially with how simple python makes it to build user interfaces. I don’t know how hard it is with the Symbian interface, but I want to make it better.

My code is pretty simple so far, but it works. I will be continuing work on it tonight, but I’m already seeing other people start similar work, and I believe in shared efforts. So, the code is available: the .py.txt is the Nokia python program, and the .php is the server-side script I’m using.

I will be working on changing the way things work a lot, but I just want to show some of the cool things that can be done via the exposed Python interfaces on the mobile platform. Note that the actual Nokia code is only a dozen lines: which builds a nice interface, allows you to edit the form, and to send the data off. There’s not much funtionality yet: not even a way to update your location without exiting and reentering the program. However, it’s a start, upon which others can build.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2004 at 11:22 am and is filed under Symbian Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.