No one would have believed, in the first years of the twenty first centry, that mobile affairs were being watched across many timeless RSS feeds. No one could have dreamed that they were being scrutinized as someone studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few Perl coders even considered the possibility of life with other programming languages. And yet, across the gulf of the blogosphere, a mind immeasurably superior to theirs regarded a certain language with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, he drew his plans to use it.
Yes, I’m fed up waiting for J2ME‘s long development times and restrictive programming model. I’ve been watching Python enviously for a while, and I’ve decided it’s time I added another language to my developers toolbelt.
I’ve gone out and bought O’Reilly’s Learning Python 2nd Edition, and installed Series 60 Python on my Nokia smartphone.
I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and it all seems fairly simple so far.
Once I’ve got myself up to speed with the standard language, I’m going to move to the Symbian specific stuff. I may then treat myself to Programming Python and the Python Cookbook to get my skills up to a decent level.
Series 60 Python looks to be really full featured offering…
- 2D Graphics, Images and Full-screen applications
- Camera and Screenshot API
- Contacts and Calendar API
- Sound recording and playback
- Access to system info such as IMEI number, disk space, free memory etc
- Rich text display (fonts, colours, styles)
- Support for Scabale UI
- Expanded key events
- Telephone dialing
- Zip compression
- Networking support for GPRS and Bluetooth
- Native GUI widget
- SMS
In other words, the ability to do nearly anything you want quickly and easily on the phone once you’ve installed the Python sis file.
Another benefit of learning Python, will be the ability to script in Civilization IV. 😉