blog.teemu.im

Nokia has released a search application for 6630, 6680 and 6681 phones. It will be bundled with these models, but you can also download it from here. Seems to work quite well. It uses Yahoo Search for searching websites and images. It has also some preconfigured local search services to search for local companies and services. The user interface was far better than in the search engines used through a mobile browser so this might actually be even an application that I might consider using.

Now I’ve gotten this far in my Python for Series 60 project. The app is called Mosaickr and you can see a pic of it below. At the moment it fetches a random picture from Flickr and then puts the picture into pieces. What I still need to do is to shuffle the pieces and make them move using arrow keys. When I get this ready I will put it on my site for download. Hopefully soon…

I think I’ve now figured out the problem of parsing Flickr’s XML-RPC responses using Python for Series 60. Mike from Flickr mailing list was kind enough to point me to use ElementTree to parse the xml responses in handy tree structure to use in the application. All I need to load to my phone is xmllib which is already required by xmlrpclib and therefore installed already. To use ElementTree I need to load ElementTree module. Then because the Python release doesn’t include any ready parsers yet (I haven’t yet tested the pyexpat) I also need to load SimpleXMLTreeBuilder module . This should work, although I haven’t had yet time to test it on the phone, but since these modules have no other dependencies, they should work fine.

OK, the Python for Series 60 experiments continue. I’m somewhat sure about what I’m going to do with this. I’m going to develop a game called Mosaickr. Simply it’s a game that loads a random picture from Flickr and then it breaks the picture into blocks and shuffles them. Then you simply have to put the blocks in right order. Nothing too fancy but a good way to get familiar with the GUI API of Python for Series 60. Let’s see how it goes…

Yesterday evening I started playing around with the Python for Series 60 installation on my Nokia 6630. I’ve always liked to code in Python. There is just that something in that language that I like. And I like the fact that the name comes from Monty Python. Anyway… I started experimenting Python for Series 60 using the Flickr API. I chose to use XML-RPC to connect to the API since that seems like the most simple solution to use.

The first problem naturally came from the fact that there is no xmlrpclib module installed in current Python for Series 60 release. Anyway I managed to get it working by taking the xmlrpclib and xmllib modules from Python 2.2 release and putting them in my phones python folder along with my test script. So now XML-RPC works and I can connect to Flickr API.

Then there was more problems. Flickr API is kind of limited in that sence that when one is using XML-RPC to connect you get the replies back in XML format and not in XML-RPC format. The latter format would be a lot easier because now I need also an XML parser to parse the reply from Flickr API. Ok… I’ve got the xmllib module working, but that is not the best solution for parsing XML in Pyhon. I did some experimenting with pyexpat, but couldn’t get it working yet with the Series 60 emulator so couldn’t decide yet whether to use it or not. If only Flirck would send those XML-RPC replies in correct format.

So the project continues… I’ll keep you posted.

Few days ago I’ve found a game that really suits for a mobile device. I’s called Alien Pinball and like the name states it’s a pinball game. Some ten years ago I played alot a game by Digital Illusions called Pinball Illusions and I was really pleased that this game is guite close to that experience. A game is easily played because it only takes two buttons to control the pinball table and that makes the mobile gaming experience very pleasant. I really recommend you all to try this game out. To my opinion, the best mobile game out there. Only complaint is about that there is only one table in this game, but hopefully there will be more soon.