Home to PyS60 Developers

So far, I have talked about flash games based on logic, their design, code modeling and given tips in Flash Lite. As some might know, I have been reading Python and J2ME for quite some time now. And in this post, I shall discuss how to program a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game in Python. I shall not discuss the depth involved in the UI design, but shall provide simple inputs.

Read more

A few days after the 25th, which is what the PyS60 team had made us believe would be a constant release date, version 1.9.6 has been made available. As can be seen from the release thread, the improvements are pretty numerous but minor. One interesting feature is the D-pad that appears at the bottom of the screen. Also, the documentation now has something that we’ve all been waiting for: an official guide for creating extensions

All in all it’s a good release, upgrade warmly recommended.

Have you already heard about Beautiful Soup ? Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser with a lot of useful methods to collect data from pages or for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree. In this post I will show some usage examples of BeautifulSoup and a link checker application for S60, combining BeautifulSoup and urllib.

Read more

Verbose now features in BoosterMedia’s mobile site gamesplaza.mobi. It can be found under the puzzles section. One can lookup here and download it directly on your mobile devices.

You can play the game and vote for it based on your experience. For those who have not played Verbose yet, its a game based on anagrams. The words don’t repeat easily and if you can not find the word, you can always get a hint.

Dot release

I have also made a Dot release for the same game, eliminating few bugs and also improved the User experience. It can be downloaded here. The Dot release would soon be available on Gamesplaza portal as well.

Lately I’ve been away from python, mostly due to the fact that the Publish & Subscribe interface is not available in PyS60, and I would realy love to use that to retrieve charging status, but also as a means of propagating information throughout my application, and sharing info between applications.
So I started to work with Carbide C++, the Symbian 3rdFp1 SDK, and all that… installed it in a windows virtual machine (since I’m on a Mac), and after some time I got an extension to work properly from the emulator.
Then tried it on the N95… Crash!… of course, I made some mistakes, so I fixed them. Then … Crash! … of course, the emulator ignores the security model… and on the device it needs to be handled right.
Finally, I got something to work on the device as well, it is not perfect yet, but usuable for at least the retrieval of several settings, amoungst which the ‘ChargerState’
One of the weird things I can’t explain is that when I define a class (Property) in my extension, it seems that the first method doesn’t parse the arguments properly. It keeps telling me method xxx requires no parameters (3 given)…
Adding a dummy top entry to the method table makes the problem go away…

If anyone can give an explanation for this behaviour, please do not hesitate to let me know!

In our last post we talked about multicast, a special range of IPs used to send messages for a group of machines. In this case, machines that want to receive message in such group must subscribe to it using socket options. However, it is possible to send messages for all machine in the subnet without any previous subscription using UDP packets and a broadcast address. All machines in the subnet must receive these broadcast messages even when they are not addressed to them. Such messages only will be discarded  in the network or transport layer, after checking the package contents.It is not difficult to understand why this kind of addressing was removed in IPv6, doesn’t it ?

Read more

Until now we have used only TCP in our examples due to its reliability. In fact, UDP could be used when reliability is not an issue or when you implement it in the application layer. However, UDP is your only solution when talking about multicast and broadcast. In this post we will explore the multicast topic from the programmers perspective (see the related theory in our last post). At this moment, I think it may be more interesting than generic UDP sockets issues (I will explore it later).

Read more

Following the last post, here’s the other implementation of ProgressBar, now using TopWindow.

The major advantage of this version is the possibility of use on applications that doesn’t use canvas, which was not possible with last post implementation.

Usage example:

pb = ProgressBar()
pb.set_text(u"Please wait...")
i = 0
for i in range(100):
    pb.set_value(i)
pb.close()
del pb

Some screenshots:

Read more

A quick post just to share a small class to display a Progressbar on Canvas:

Usage example:

#buffer could be a copy of canvas
progress = ProgressBar(buffer)
i = 0
for i in range(100):
    progress.set_value(i)
    canvas.blit(buffer)
progress.close()
del progress

I made four screenshots of this progressbar running inside an application:

Read more

Kameramation is an experimentation with mobile phone camera(s). Currently it shows what you can see with the camera, using circular view finder with a visual echo.

There is no practical purpose for this application
Read more