Technical Ramblings

Although I love being able to develop things quickly and easily on my 3650, there’s a few major sticking points for me that I don’t understand. I know that my phone is considered an “untested” phone for this application: it’s almost the oldest Series 60 around, so I don’t expect everything to work nicely, or even at all. I was totally psyched when I learned that I was on the accepted list. Yet there are some things that bug me.

Lack of Documentation: Nokia has done an admirable job at documenting what their Python does and does not do, and has done pretty awesome, except for a couple things. First of all, there is completely undocumented UI funtionality in the Examples code that they give out. (Specifically, for the pop up choices: appuifw.popup_menu). I don’t know how much it bugs me that I looked through their entire PDF documentation 3-4 times looking for this feature described and found nothing. For a great project otherwise, to skip things like this when you’re releasing a public version is just a bit annoying. Additionally, 3 of the 6 references from the API reference don’t go anywhere: they’re just titles of publications, with no additional information. I believe two of these files are included with the distribution (I can’t check right now: The batteries of the computer I downloaded it to are dead), howeverm, to not even mention that and only list a title is again, quite silly.

Clear Lack of Testing: Again, as I said, the 3650 is not a “well supported” phone in this endeavour. However, there is a relatively major crasher bug in the Python distribution: when running in the Interactive Shell, if you press the “return” key equivilant while still on a word while using predictive text… it crashes.

That’s right, if you’re using a built in feature of the interface, it crashes. For no apparent reason. Doing something that most python programmers will do first, before anything. (The interactive shell in python is impressive, and is a good “sandbox” type environment to test small scripts out.) Granted, on a cell phone, the interactive shell users are going to be relatively slim: who wants to type on a phone when you can just type on a computer and send it over? However, to leave a standard python feature so broken is just silly.

Other than these two minor niggles, I’m very impressed, and hope to see the available UI interfaces grow over time: I’d like to be able to have as much control over user interface tools as Symbian native apps do, and I think Nokia would like to see that as well. I’m especially happy with the “location” module, which allows you to retrieve Network, Area and Cell IDs: I can now write my own tool to do MiniGPS-type cell storage, as well as uploading data to MeNow.

A list of standard modules which are included:
anydbm, atexit, base64, bdb, binascii, cmd, code, codecs, codeop, copy, copy_reg, cStringIO, dis, errno, exceptions, __future__, httplib, imp, keyword, linecache, marshal, math, md5, mimetools, operator, os, pdb, quopri, random, re, repr, rfc822, socket, sre, string, StringIO, struct, sys, thread, threading, time, traceback, types, urllib, urlparse (urlsplit only), uu, warnings, whichdb, xreadlines, as well as a “location” module for determining GSM cell info and “messaging” for sending SMS messages. Additionally, there is a UI Specific module, appuifw, the e32 Module, which offers some Symbian related utilities, e32db, a relational database module, and the e32dbm module, which offers an API to the Symbian RDBMS.

All in all, an impressive an useful subsection of the modules which most people use. The socket library has been extended to include a number of bluetooth functions, which apparently work quite well (I wouldn’t know, haven’t tried them yet.) I’m very pleased. It’s fun. But I think nokia could have waited just a little longer to ship this, to make sure that some things weren’t broken.