Progress report for week 8
I had to figure out some issues about Python for Series 60 this week. The first thing I needed to find out was how to manage to send an MMS from the phone via Python since this was not implemented in pys60. I posted some questions on the Nokia Forum, and some guy there posted a link to a contact page where I could contact Jukka Laurila, one of the pys60 developers at Nokia. I asked about an MMS module and if there were planning to implement that. The answer I got in the mail was not very positive.
“Sorry, but an MMS module is not in the works by us in the near future.”
Jukka also answered my question on the Nokia Forum shortly after saying:
“Sorry, but we’re not planning to implement MMS messaging support in the near future. If anyone else would like to prototype something then go right ahead.”
Before this I had glanced at the C++ API for Series 60, and it did not look very easy (at least for me) to send MMS messages, and when Jukka wrote in the forum that “implementing proper MMS support seemed fairly complex”, I lost the motivation to try. When these guys that had been working on this a long time thought it looked complex, I guess it would be a waste of time for me to give it a go. Because of this I need to figure out another way of sending an MMS. I could for example send a request to a server that might be able to generate an MMS, and then send it to the user that requested information on my whereabouts.
There are several ways of posting the information needed to the server. I could for instance download a map on the phone based in information from the GPS, and then post the map to the server, so it could forward it to another phone. Another idea I had was just to fetch information from the GPS, and send an xmlrpc request to a server, and do the mapfetching from there. That would be quicker and not that much data would have to be sent from my phone. I have to talk to Gunnar Misund about this before I decide on something.
The last week I have started on a couple of small applications trying to get to know the Python for series 60 API better. The first think I wanted to check out was the Inbox module that is new in the 1.3 version of pys60. It lets you have access to the inbox of the phone. You can now do neat stuff like binding a function to the inbox that gets fired whenever a message arrives. This is very useful for the type of application I am making where users can send me a message asking where I am, and I can automagically send a reply.
I have also looked at some xmlrpc stuff from the mobile since I might do that for this project as well since I can’t send MMS messages directly from pys60.
Well, that is roughly what I have been up to in the Location Aware Systems course last week. :)
