Yep, it had to be done. Above you can see SDLQuake running on Maemo x86. I haven’t tried it on the ARM target but I heard that it or a port of it should run just fine on ARM. Between various emulators and game engines, it shouldn’t be hard at all to amuse yourself with a Nokia 770.
No changes were required for this x86 build. ./configure, make and run-standalone.sh ./sdlquake.
There’s a new version out, 1.1.0 Pre-Alpha. Grab the .SIS installer for first edition devices (3650, N-Gage, etc) or for 2nd edition devices. Don’t forget to pick up the first edition or second edition SDK
I’ll read over the new API docs tonight and hope to find all kinds of juicy morsels.
Update: Erik Smartt fills in some details on his weblog. Thanks again to the whole Python for Series 60 team for all the hard work.
Calcoo, an RPN and algebraic calculator
Gnuboy, zoomed 3x using xgnuboy.
VTE terminal emulator.
More successful builds on Maemo x86 today. I’m still in the information gathering stage, trying to find projects that are worth spending more time on doing “proper” hildonization to. All of the above screenshots were derived from downloading a source tarball and running ./configure and make, nothing more. VTE was exciting because it didn’t fail out on dependencies that I can’t easily provide and with run-standalone.sh the soft keyboard just popped up. Having a decent usable terminal emulator is going to be a key item for a physical 770 device. The error-free build is encouraging.
When I have some more time I would like to package some of the apps that I have been tinkering with up in .debs for distribution, but I’d like to stress that everything I’ve posted in the last few days builds on x86 with little or no modification. They’re far from well integrated Maemo apps and I’ve only tested a handful on an ARM target (I’m waiting for the next scratchbox/qemu release to do any real testing), but it’s definitely a start.
There’s been tons of coverage of the Nokia 770 and the open source Linux platform Maemo that goes with it. Everyone is excited, with reason, but I don’t think that the significance of the 770 and the platform have sunk in yet.
We’re talking about a Linux based tablet with good resolution (800×480) running a custom GTK-based UI similar to Series 90 on a device with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 64 megs of ram, 128 megs of flash memory, and about a 3 hours battery life. The size is right too. Nokia have also been working with open source developers to adapt gstreamer for their uses, and the development environment is right there for you, enjoy.
I’m really excited by this page detailing porting gaim to maemo. The port isn’t trivial, but it’s not far from it looks like a lot of the effort went in to making it look and behave better rather than getting it to actually run. Here’s a screenshot that just knocked my socks off:
I have been (sort of) following these instructions and now have a (sort of) working maemo environment up and running. I’m psyched to see Python (2.3.3) as well as Perl (5.8.4) in the development environment. I hope that both of these end up on the device or at least installable as an option. I’d also really like to see Mono or Java running on this little thing.
I’m going to go tinker a bit more with the development environment (which uses scratchbox) and see if I can’t figure out what I’ve done wrong on the X side of things. It also looks like you can use QEMU to run apps compiled for ARM.
Related reading:
I get some nasty messages when I run af-sb-init.sh start and end up with the following almost (but not quite) working environment:
I used install.sh and then followed the installation instructions from there. I used this tarball as the rootstrap since I couldn’t find the file mentioned in the docs. I’ve got a shell, which is better than nothing, but I’m still working on a working X session…
Thanks to del.icio.us and the guys at O’Reilly Radar, I saw the fact that Google snagged Dodgeball fly by my aggregator this morning.
It’s always exciting to see a small company that you know a smidgen about get snagged by one of the big companies out there. At the same time I’ve got to say that I’ve always been a bit dissapointed with the commercialized version of Dodgeball.
I saw a presentation on Dodgeball a couple of years ago at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. It was still in a research phase but sounded very cool. By the time Dodgeball came to market it was a lot less event and a lot more emphasis had been put on social networking during the social networking bubble.
While I’m no longer excited about Dodgeball as I was years ago, it’s good to see a research project make it to commercial launch and then get picked up by as big a name as Google. If they got plucked by the big G, they have to be doing something right.
Via the guys at Mobitopia, it looks like there’s a patch to get Perl running on Series 60:
Please find attached the port of Perl 5.8.x and 5.9.x to the Symbian smartphone platform. The port is known to work in the Nokia Series 60 phones, but there is no reason other Series 60 or Symbian devices shouldn’t work. (Series 60 is a software platform on top of the Symbian operating system.) The port is copyright Nokia and licensed under the same terms as Perl itself. More details and the patches can be found in the file README-symbian-patch.txt included in the attached .tar.bz2, and in the README.symbian file.
Don’t expect it to be pretty, but it’s great to see it “out in the wild.”
Who will be the first to post an unofficial build?
I’m heading down to Sarasota, Florida later this morning for Orange Code Camp. I’m going to be covering the event for Orange as well as posting an article or two on All About Symbian and if I have any keystrokes left in me, hopefully a post or two in my weblog.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been on the lookout for pure python modules that run on Python for Series 60. I have managed to make use of a few cryptography modules (including Rijndael, DES, and Blowfish) as well as parse tag soup using BeautifulSoup.
While I was able to highlight some pure python packages and modules that worked well on Series 60, I really wanted to put together a quick simple app that was actually useful. After searching around for modules and services that would be great to access from a mobile device, I fell in love with John Goerzen’s dictclient.py. The module is a consise and well documented client that speaks the dict protocol.
Using Goerzen’s module, I have put together a simple GUI using the native widgets provided by appuifw. I was able to knock out the app in a little under an hour or so first by prototyping using the wxPython-based PDIS Series 60 Compatability library on my Linux laptop. From there a few iterations of tweak, test, tweak on my N-Gage (which is great for this type of thing because of the USB cable). Until my GoPhone SIM shows up tomorrow I’m without non-WAP data, so Gustaf was kind enough to test and send me a few stacktraces before I fixed a stupid typo or two in my code.
Screenshots
Installation
To use Dict2Go, you will need Python for Series 60 installed on your phone. If you have a 3650, 3600, N-Gage, or N-Gage QD you will want to snag PythonForSeries60_1stEd_SIS.zip. For newer phones (6600, 6620, 6630, 7610, etc) you are looking for PythonForSeries60_2ndEd_SIS1.0.1.zip. You will also need a way to put the library file dictclient.py in your Python libs directory. Christopher Schmidt sent in a much easier way to install dictclient.py:
For installing the dictclient.py, you can just send the file to your phone and install it as a Library module using the standard Python installer. There’s no reason to use Fexplorer or an MMC reader for that.
My way (the Taco way) is still an option, though it’s much harder than it could be. You can copy the files using an MMC card reader (or your N-Gage) or by transfering the file to your phone and using FExplorer. If you have installed Python on your MMC (which you should have), put dictclient.py in E:/System/libs. One the library is in place, you can either place dict2go.py in E:/System/apps/Python/my or just transfer it to your phone and install it from your inbox.
Download
Note: this is a quick but functional hack. I think that it’s quite useful in its current form, but I have lots of plans to make it more fault-tolerant and user friendly as well as add more features and functionality. With that out of the way, there are a few ways to download Dict2Go:
License
Dict2Go is released under the GPL, version 2 or greater, as is the dictclient.py library that does all of the hard work. A copy of the license can be found in the zip files and tarballs.
ToDo
As I’ve said before, this is a quick hack, but I like it. The dict server is currently hardcoded to talk to dict.org, but that can be changed by editing the source if you really want to. Dict2Go also grabs the first definition it finds. I hope to make both of these configurable in the future. I also have lots of plans for UI improvements including a main app loop so that you can look up as many words as you want until you are done. I will do my best to get new stuff out the door as quickly as possible.
According to the latest Symbian Community Newsletter, Nokia has begun shipping the 6680:
Nokia has started deliveries of the Nokia 6680, introduced just one month ago at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France. The Nokia 6680 WCDMA/EDGE imaging phone features Symbian OS v8.0a and Series 60 Platform 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2.
Be patient though. Just because they’re shipping doesn’t mean that you can walk in to a shop and pick one up. I’m definitely impressed by how quickly they went from announcement to ship on the 6680. If they easily make the April estimate on the 6680, things are looking good for say an early June release of the 6682 just in time for me to buy a new phone…
I stumbled upon a new set of boxes in the pay-as-you-go aisle of Target this evening. The new provider on the block is Net10. From the way I’m reading the brocure, it looks like they’re a subsidiary of TracFone rather than an MVNO on top of TracFone’s network. Their schtick is simple: nationwide calling costs 10 cents. They also reward the purchase of larger refill cards by making the minutes last longer. For example, a $30, 300 minute card lasts 30 days, while a $180, 1800 minute card lasts 6 months. They also charge 5 cents a pop for text messages, which is less than what most carriers charge their montly invoiced customers.
The phone selection isn’t spectacular, but they get the job done. Available phones include the Nokia 1100 (which honestly I think is pretty cute), Nokia 2600, the funky Motorola C155, and the Motorola V171. The phones are relatively cheap without the frills that you might get on GoPhone or Boost Mobile, but the service is obviously aimed at cost-concious consumers who value a bargain over bling.
TracFone has done a smart thing by targeting a niche that has gone largely untapped. They need to keep on their toes though, bargain hunters don’t have much brand loyalty and the space could get very crowded very quickly.
I ordered a new phone today, a GoPhone from Cingular. It’s a Sony Ericsson T237. It cost me thirty bucks.
You might wonder what the heck a guy like me is doing with a cheap little pay as you go phone. The short answer is that it’s part of the master plan. The long answer follows.
You see, my wife’s contract with T-Mobile is up in late May. Mine isn’t up again until October, but we’ve decided to take the early termination fee on one but not both accounts. I love T-Mobile but the only data plan that you can actually use with anything other than WAP is $20 a month. That’s just more than I’m willing to pay for (slow) GPRS. I really do love T-Mobile. They’ve been great to me, their customer support rocks, their in-store employees actually care and try to help. I just really need data.
On a side note, I’m really unhappy with the recent switch in T-Mobile’s customer support phone setup. They used to have a nice standard menu driven system that let me get the information I needed quickly and easy. Account information, minutes remaining, and other basic stuff was available from the menu. If I had a question that required a human, I chose the right menu option and had a kind and helpful customer support rep right away.
Now when I dial customer service (*611) I get confronted by an IVR that thinks she’s smarter than me. She probably is, but that’s not the point. After a short greeting she prompted me to ask her a question about anything.
“I would like to speak to a human please.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I would like to speak to a human please.”
“I’m sorry. Try asking me a question like ‘How many minutes do I have left?’ or ‘When is my bill due?’”
“I would like to speak to a human please.”
“I’m sorry.”
The IVR then listed about 5 or 6 things that I could ask for that sound suspiciously like the old “press 1 for…” list.
“customer support”
“Would you like to speak to a customer support representitive?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. Did you want to speak to a customer support representitive?”
“Yes.”
“One moment.”
I managed to supress the urge to throw my phone across the room and was actually calm by the time the customer support rep answered. She was kind and helpful as always, and as I inquired about the contract status of the two lines on the family plan, she said that she would be sorry to see us go but understood if we had to. I thanked her very much, told her that she was helpful as always, and registered my complaint with the IVR bouncer at the front door.
Where was I? Oh right. The master plan. So late May, early June, the plan is to switch both phones over to Cingular. They’re really my only option. I’m a GSM guy, so Sprint-Nextel and Verizion are out. Since I’m leaving T-Mobile, that leaves Cingular. I’m hoping that the Nokia 6682 makes an appearance at Cingular during the 2nd quarter of 2005 as predicted. It looks like the 6680 is poised to hit Europe in April as promised, so I have no reason to doubt that the 6682 isn’t on track for some in May or June. If the 6682 is delayed, I can still get a good price on a 7610 on contract, and honestly if the 7610 is my fallback, things aren’t that bad.
If we’re planning on making the jump pretty soon, it’d be nice to have a backup phone that speaks 850Mhz. I’ve got a ton of GSM phones, but they’re mostly 900/1800/1900. While these will probably work most of the time on Cingular, it’d be nice to have a “native” 850 phone as a backup. It’s also a good chance to audition the signal levels in our apartment and other places we usually hang out. I have to stand near a window if I want to carry on a conversation on T-Mobile, but I think that Cingular has better reception here.
Plus, with GoPhone, I can have data again. I can do things like use WirelessIRC or test network-enabled Python apps. It’ll be pretty cool.
To summarize: I’m leaving T-Mobile for Cingular some time in the next few months. I don’t want to leave, but T-Mobile just doesn’t offer me a data plan that I can live with. Their cheap plans don’t let you deviate from WAPland, and their unlimited plan is just too much for GPRS. I’m going to miss them though. They rock and I can’t say a bad thing about them (data aside). I’m wary of Cingular, since they lead the pack on customer complaints. I’m willing to give them a shot though if it means I can have EDGE and get a decent deal on a new phone on contract.
Sweet! I just saw the release fly by my aggregator and thought I would let everyone know: There’s a new Python for Series 60 release for 2.0SDK phones available at Forum Nokia. This looks like a small update for newer phones (6600, 7610, 6630). The only change in the release notes that I can see involves invoking an install dialog when downloading python files from the web rather that running them directly.
While this is a minor update, it’s forward progress. Hopefully the enhancements and extensions that have been demoed will work their way through the release process as quickly as possible.
Wow, it seems like I’ve been waiting for this for years. Oh wait, I have. Today UIQ released an SDK for their new flagship product, UIQ 3.0. The SDK is designed to work with either Metroworks CodeWarrior Development Studio for Symbian or Borland’s C++ BuilderX.
For more information and to download a trial version of the UIQ 3.0 SDK, visit their web site.
Yes, this is a lame April Fools joke. I wish it wasn’t though. Jim and I have been excited about the prospects of UIQ3 since it was pre-pre-pre-pre-announced what feels like years ago now. It has the potential to rock the low to mid-range market bringing “real apps” and “a real OS” to those free-to-inexpensive on contract phones. The other thing that rocks about it is that one code base can scale from low-end uniprocessor devices to top notch touchscreen and/or QWERTY devices. It’s really exciting. I just want it to see the light of day.
Speaking of pure python crypto, it looks like PyDES works perfectly too. This one will probably require bits of the Python 2.2.2 source in order to run though. Specifically it’s looking for binascii and time. All in all it’s quite lightweight and seems more responsive in both import time and encrypt/decrypt time as compared to blowfish.py. It’s still very slow compared to a native implementation, but should be fast enough for inclusion in Python for Series 60 apps.
DES and 3DES are available from this module. I can’t seem to find a reference to what license it is released under, so you might want to track down the author before writing an application around it.
Here’s the code for the demo above (taken from an example that ships with PyDES):
import pyDes
k = pyDes.des("DESCRYPT", pyDes.CBC, "")
print "Encrypting/Decrypting DES"
d = k.encrypt("Please encrypt my string")
print "Decypted string: " + k.decrypt(d)
k = pyDes.triple_des("MySecretTripleDesKeyData")
print "Encrypting/Decrypting 3DES"
d = k.encrypt("Encrypt this sensitive data", "*")
print "Decypted string: " + k.decrypt(d, "*")
After finding out how well BeautifulSoup worked on my N-Gage, I decided to try to find more modules that “just worked” on Python for Series 60. First up is blowfish.py, a project by Michael Gilfix. The file itself is not available directly from the author within the US, but Google cache can help with that.
The module is pure python, with absolutely no module dependencies. I have only tested it on the MMC with the full Python distribution on it, but this one (in theory) should work on a stock .SIS install without any addition python modules in your libs directory. It’s definitely not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it may be a good building block if you want to add some crypto to your mobile application.
Here is the code that is being executed in the screen shot above:
import blowfish
key = 'hey, look over there!'
print 'generating the fish'
fish = blowfish.Blowfish(key)
print 'Plaintext:'
text = 'testtest'
print text
print 'Encrypting...'
crypted = fish.encrypt(text)
print 'Encrypted.'
# Printing encrypted chars causes barf
print 'Decrypting...'
decrypted = fish.decrypt(crypted)
print 'Decrypted:'
print decrypted
I haven’t had enough time to work up a proper hack for this, but I though I would pass along an interesting discovery that I made the other day before heading out to PyCon. After hearing about how great BeautifulSoup is at scraping HTML and making it easy to get little bits from it that you need, I thought I’d have a go at running it on my taco. You know what? It worked. I was expecting it to barf on import, but no, it chugged along just fine.
Now unfortunately BeautifulSoup won’t work out of the box with the standard .SIS install of Python for Series 60. It relies only on SGMLParser, string, and types, but those three libraries have some dependencies themselves. Here is what BeautifulSoup requires according to modulefinder.py running on my Debian box:
These dependencies can be easily taken care of by dropping the python modules from the source distro in the appropriate libs directory on the drive you installed Python on.
One reason that BeautfulSoup “just works” on Series 60 is that the author strives to keep imports to a minimum and that the author srives to keep BeautifulSoup backwards compatible all the way back to Python 1.5.2. There are probably many modules out there like BeautifulSoup that are designed to be backwards compatible and platform independent that should work just fine on Series 60. As I find them, I will definitely point them out. I also hope to do some hacking on a few screen scraping apps that use BeautifulSoup and appuifw to present web data using native widgets.
Erik Smartt and Jukka Laurila gave an excellent, well attended presentation on Python for Series 60 on Friday morning. It’s a shame that they only had 30 minutes to present, as they could have easily talked for twice that or more on the subject and not run out of material. I headed down to the front row for a good view of it all, so I wasn’t able to take quite as extensive notes as I would have liked.
Erik started off with an overview of the Series 60 platform, something that he didn’t think he would have to do in a crowd like the the one at PyCon. While the number of Series 60 devices in the market vs. the total number of mobile devices isn’t very impressive, if you look at the smartphone segment, Series 60 dominates.
After the introduction, Jukka took over with some of the more technical bits. Python for Series 60 isPython 2.2.2 as a Symbian DLL and available in binary-only form (for now anyway) at Forum Nokia. It covers many of the basics that one would need, including sockets, urllib, threading, and an Application UI framework. (Also note that if you drop the Python 2.2.2 source distribution in <INSTALLDRIVE>/SYSTEM/LIBS directory, a lot of stuff “just works”).
Jukka then spoke about the porting difficulties that they ran in to because of the underlying Symbian architecture. Symbian C++ began before C++ itself supported things like exception handling, so they had to create their own way around it. Jukka then explained the realities of running out of memory on Series 60 and he also explained a little about ActiveObjects.
After the technical stuff came some demos! Because of the setup, they had to switch between laptop input and video overhead input (to see the phone), but the demos were still cool indeed. Jukka demonstrated the Bluetooth console so that he could pop up an interactive intepreter session on his Laptop (it’s a lot better than t9). After that he showed the requisite one-liner hello world app to pop up a native widget. From there he demonstrated some of the hardware interfaces that are (or will soon be) available. For example, in just a few lines in the console he was able to import the camera module, take a picture, saving the file, and then passing it to Content_handler to show the photo.
It also has a telephone. Jukka then typed import telephone and after another short line tried to dial a random phone number. He couldn’t actually dial because there was no signal in the Marvin center. For the final demo, Jukka showed the classic Snake game written in 99 lines of Python that utilize the as-yet unreleased 2d graphics package.
After the demos were over there were tons of questions, so many that the session actually ran over by a few minutes. First and foremost was the question of cross platform development. The guys explained that the emulator was only available for Windows but you could use the bluetooth console using Mac and Linux too. Full instructions on that are linked to on the Python for Series 60 Wiki. Also on everyone’s mind was “where’s the source?” Erik couldn’t give a timeline for that, noting that Nokia is a big company with a lot of lawyers, but it sounds like they are doing their best to move things forward.
I definitely think that the talk was a success. I really hope that the new modules demonstrated can make their way to the outside as soon as possible. Lots of games developers would likely jump on the 2d package, and give their first born for a crack at the PyOpenGL port demoed at ETech. I would personally love to see Jukka’s Snake make its way to the public under whatever license possible, because it’s addictive and would probably demonstrate the graphics platform quite well. I also think that it’s crucial to get these new bits of API functionality and other updates out to the developer community as quickly as possible.
We held a small BoF session in one of the Open Spaces this morning for Python for Series 60. Jukka demoed some oneliners, excercising the native widgets and excercising some of the available APIs. I was also able to take a look at someone’s FOMA phone running a Final Fantasy-like MMORPG running in Java on his phone.
One attendee had questions about cross platform development. The SDK tools that allow you to run code on the emulator are win32 only, but the bluetooth console works on Windows, OSX, and Linux. More information can be found on the wiki.
I haven’t seen a huge number of Series 60 devices (aside from Erik’s 7610, Jukka’s Charlie, my Taco, and a few others). Hopefully more people will come out of the woodwork after hearing Erik and Jukka’s talk tomorrow.
I love Pathway to Glory. It became my primary game and took up all of my taco time for a month or two. I made excuses to play it. I told myself that I would get back to doing something productive after I restarted this level one more, okay two more times. It’s worth every penny of $34.99
After a lot of dedicated play (and a couple of really tough levels) I beat the game. I actually beat it twice, because the first time I lost two of my maxed out snipers in the process of winning. I couldn’t bare being without them so it took another few days of downtime play to beat the game to my satisfaction.
My snipers were good. I would commonly play 2 of them even when the game urged me not to. After awhile my two best guys could quite literally be counted on for 4 confirmed kills a piece per turn. They could hit just about anything on the map within their range using 6 time units per kill. They were monsters.
After I beat the game the only interesting thing to do is hop online for some N-Gage Arena play. Our apartment is a dead zone, so no Arena there. I tend to be too busy at work and usually spend part of my lunch break catching up on my feeds, so no Arena there either. Once it warms up a bit I can probably play outside before class, but right now I spend time before class inside. Of course the buildings are virtual faraday cages, so I’m lucky to get FM reception for Marketplace let alone enough signal for GPRS.
At this point keeping the Pathway to Glory MMC in my phone just doesn’t make sense (I’m back to picking up tapes and sucking less at Tony Hawk). There’s a better reason besides boredom: Pathway kills my battery life!
I’m a casual N-Gage gamer. I usually have a game paused in the background, sometimes for days at a time. When I’ve got a few minutes to spare, I Alt-Tab as it were by holding down the little swirly key and selecting my game. This usually happens a few times a day when I’ve got downtime. Every other game that I’ve played has been fine with this. As long as the game is in the background I can get the usual couple of days out of a full charge.
Pathway just doesn’t behave the same. At first I wasn’t sure that it was Pathway, but I noticed that the taco was powering off completely at odd times. Maybe it would be first thing in the morning after the charge. Other times it would be later the same day. I thought that maybe my battery was going bad, but as soon as I stopped idling Pathway in the background I popped back up to my usual coupe of days of use per charge.
Has anyone else experienced this? This behaviour doesn’t make me love Pathway any less, it just makes me less likely to keep it in my taco running in the background. I’m more likely to have another game running in the background rather than waiting for Pathway to start up, start/resume a game, choose my guys and loadout and then start playing. A lot of the time my casual gaming time would be up before I had a chance to make a move. I’m hoping to have some more downtime while I have GPRS coverage, as playing Pathway on N-Gage Arena is total killer. I’ve only done it a few times but it’s lots of fun to play against a real human on your mobile phone.
One of the gems in the latest edition of Symbian Community News is a link toward the bottom to the Orange Code Camp in Sarasota, Florida. It’s scheduled for April 18-20 and sounds like an amazing bargain at $249 for 72 hours of hardcore learning and coding. From the program it looks like they’re going to cover the spectrum from basic technologies to Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Symbian development. It looks like there will also be resources set up to assist you in hacking together that killer mobile app.
The bang/buck ratio seems quite good here. $249 seems extremely cheap for a 3 day coding intensive miniconference. If money were no object I’d be there, but I’ve already commited to attending PyCon, another conference with an awesome value factor. I’m hoping to get a Python for Series 60 BoF session together during PyCon. If anyone attends the Orange Code Camp, please please please blog about it.