Archive for the ‘python’ Category
This is going to be a long post, I’m going to go over a bunch of stuff, so feel free to go and fetch some coffee before reading it 
We’ll be talking about Google Summer of Code, Project Memphis, a kick-ass community project using Canola and also the pending release.
After working on Canola for the past couple of months, finally we get to see it released. Hopefully people will like this new version, which is both faster and more stable (or less stable, I’m never quite sure which one we picked). We’re now back following the latest revision of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which allowed us to make the UI experience alot smoother (check it out by going to the Photos section). Also there are a bunch of new features and lots of bugs fixed, so try it out yourself and tell us what you think. Hopefully now development of Canola will get back to more regular releases, and we’ll start seeing more external plugins being developed (such as the flickr plugin being done by Thomas Schimdt, available here).
For this release we went above and beyond the call of duty, doing tests that no one had ever done before (at least to our knowledge). That’s why we can say, with much confidence, that Canola works perfectly while drinking in Buenos Aires:
Canola in Buenos Aires
Testing in other capitals will ensue. Cheers !!!
Last week I gave a course on Python for S60 as part of the Mobility Week event in São Carlos, held on the USP (University of São Paulo) campus there. It was a 12 hour course, divided in three 4 hour sessions. Gustavo had already blogged about the event before here, so I’ll just add a few comments about how my course went.
The first day was just an introduction to development on cellphones, and since some of the people who were attending had never worked with Python before, I also gave a really fast Python introduction. We finished this first day with a few examples of software that were developed using pys60. When preparing the course, I wanted to find some really nice examples to show that Python enables people to quickly develop applications that were probably going to take at least a few weeks with C++ or JavaME. One really nice example I found was Cellphabet, a software that uses the Cell Tower information your cell phone provides to transform a path you walked into an english word (his post explains the design alot better than I possibly could in one sentence). Since the source code wasn’t available (it was hosted on a wiki that had to be taken offline due to spam), I contacted the author and he was quite happy that I was planning on using it as an example. We started talking and he asked me what I was going to tell them Cellphabet could be used for. When I replied that it could probably be used for security (which is one of the reasons he listed on his original post), he gave me an answer that completely took me by surprise :
Yes, that was one of my prime concerns, the other was romantic. If a
lover wrote his partner a message by walking for a few hours non-stop,
it would be saying a lot. So the message becomes ‘the medium’. It is
no longer a short message, it becomes a long message.
After ending the first day with this most romantic example, we spent the following session going over the Symbian API and doing small examples. Unfortunately we did not have test cellphones available, so people had to work with emulators.
The final day was open for each student to develop their own project. One of them has already been published, an wordpress tool for S60 devices (blog post in pt_BR here). Hopefully more will follow.