blog.teemu.im

Last weekend I was doing some travelling and ended up spending some time in Finnish city called Lahti. As I was standing at the railway station waiting for my friend to arrive I remembered reading some news that Lahti has built a WLAN network covering most of the city and that this network would be open for everyone. Naturally, I had my 770 with me and I tried to find this open WLAN using that. To my surprise I actually found an open WLAN network and I was able to connect to the Internet using that. It was nice to be able to check my emails and read interesting blog posts while waiting for a train to arrive. Sadly, there are not many open WLAN networks in Finland. In Helsinki there are only couple.

Btw, the display of the 770 seemed to work quite nicely outdoors. Of course, the sun does not shine much in here in Finland, but I didn’t even need to put the display brightness to full.

Earlier, I wrote about the Raccoon web server that you can run on your mobile phone. I just found out that it has been released as open source. Also the gateway implementation has been released, so now you are no more attached only to the project’s own gateway. A brief look at the gateway install instructions seemed to be quite complicated, but I’m definitely planning to set up one to my home server.

This is the first, but rather small step towards having your mobile phone part of the Internet. Now all we need are flat fee data connections and I think lots of cool new stuff will appear. If you have a Series 60 phone, give Raccoon a try. You’ll be amazed by what you can do with it.

Besides working with the BitTorrent client, I’ve been also working with application that I call MaemoFlickr. I’ve been building this application from scratch and when it is ready it will be able to upload photos to Flickr using simple and intuitive user interface. The intention is that if you have camera phone or something you could easily upload the photos you’ve taken to Flickr. Future versions might include also some photo organizing features, but I think that for starters it is probably better to keep it simple.

Here are some screenshots…

Ok, now I’ve got the UI of the BitTorrent client somewhat Hildonized. I decided to move the start/stop button, the search field and the connection indicator to a toolbar at the bottom of the view. I think this makes it a bit more usable. I’m considering moving the upload rate adjust bar to the toolbar also, so that the main view would only contain the information about the torrents that are being downloaded or uploaded. I haven’t yet touched the other views, but I think those need less editing anyways.

The search bar on the bottom does not of course work yet, since it is not possible to launch the web browser form Python applications yet. However, this should become possible with the new software release and new pymaemo version. Then also MIME support for bittorrent files would be nice. I’ll look into that and then we have full blown BitTorrent for the Maemo platform. All I would need now is actual content distributed via BitTorrent that actually could be used in the Nokia 770. Usually videos are too large and those iPod mp4 videos does not seem to play in the video player. Anyone know any good podcasts that are distributed using BitTorrent?

Jiihaa! Congratulations Lordi for winning the Eurovision Song contest . They really put up a show that made the other countries performances look pathetic (sorry for saying this, but it is true). Lordi literally set the stage on fire.

As the readers of this blog have probably noticed, I like doing stuff with Python. I also like downloading all kinds of stuff from the Internet and what better way to do that nowadays than the BitTorrent. How convenient, BitTorrent has originally been written in Python. Here we go… I need to port the BitTorrent client on Maemo platform using pymaemo. I know there are command line versions of some other BitTorrent clients already available for maemo, but I kind of like having UIs. They make life alot easier.

The surrent stable version of the BitTorrent client uses PyGtk for the user interface so porting should go quite smoothly. I decided to give it a go and as I suspected it worked straight from the package. Of course I had to modify the .deb installer a bit to make it install using the application installer on the device, but otherwise nothing else was needed.

Here are couple of screenshots. As you can see, no Hildonization for the UI yet, but I’m already rolling up my sleeves so lets see when I can release the first installer package.

Nokia has released a press release about the new upcoming software update for Nokia 770.

It does not mention the release date for the software yet, but says that it will be released during the second quarter of this year. This would mean that it would be released within one month. Lets hope this schedule holds.

Interesting thing about the press release was that it mentions the Gizmo Project. So it will have SIP also. Nice…

Edit:

There seems to be also a webcast of the press conference. I just missed the live feed but the site claims that it would be soon viewable on-demand.

Edit 2:

And this is what it looks like…

The biggest news for the last couple of days in terms of Nokia 770 has been the new VoIP software update that supports Google Talk. It has been announced as a some huge co-operation deal between Nokia and Google. Well, I understand that it is a great way to get lots of free press and I surely love to see more and more people get interested in this great device, but Google Talk has been open for quite some time already. Anyone can use their liblingle to implement a Google Talk client. So I think it is not a big surprise to see Nokia 770 support Google Talk.

For a long time now I’ve been very pro-SIP, probably due to my engineer background. At first, when I saw GTalk using Jabber I was thinking that what the hell is Google doing here. Currently, I believe that their approach was the right one. SIP is getting far too complex and SIP presence solution is lagging seriously behind. This is probably why Gizmo is using a double stack (SIP for voice and Jabber for presence) and Google’s solution was to implement voice features for Jabber.

Google Talk is probably the best way to go with the Nokia 770. Currently Google has the largest “open” community and a client implementation that works. However, I bet that the new software supports also SIP. If you take a look at the maemo roadmap you see that they are using Telepathy and Farsight to implement the VoIP. Both of them supports Nokia’s Sofia SIP stack.

From these news it is quite clear that we don’t have to wait the new software for too long anymore. And as you can see from the roadmap, the VoIP & IM are not the only new additions to the software. Probably even more than the VoIP, I’m waiting for the better support for Python.

gnuite on Itt forums wrote a post about a new GPS application he has been working on for Nokia 770. It’s called Maemo Mapper and I have to say it is a really nice application to have even though you don’t have a GPS receiver. It uses maps from Google and works nice and smooth unlike when you use Google maps via the browser. I cannot really comment anything about the GPS features since I don’t have one, but this application makes me seriously consider purchasing one.

Nokia has released a web server software that you can run on your mobile phone. The software is called Raccoon and it is basically a apache web server for Series 60 phones.

To make you phone truly a member of the Internet, you still need to register it to a server that gives it a URL and makes it possible to make TCP connections from outside to your phone. Sounds complicated and it is, but just blame the mobile operators. Test accounts are limited, but you can apply one and download the software from here.

Here is a default startup page of my mobsite, running on my Nokia 6630.

You can also do lots of cool stuff with the included concept demos. It is also possible to make your mobsite interactive using Python. How cool is that?