Good Evening Jukka. Thanks for taking the time to talk PyS60. Your Wiki articles were a great start.

Some comments on what seemed like still unanswered parts there:

- You have some control over the settings of the camera such as resolution, type of flash and so on. I think it's best to refer you to the documentation:

http://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pys60/PythonForS60_doc_1_3_22.pdf

Everything you might wish for is unfortunately not covered by the current camera module. These include things like triggering the focusing on cameras that support it, and preparing the camera for taking the photo while the viewfinder is displayed. Every time you say camera.take_photo() it does a full restart of the camera which is suboptimal and causes a large shutter delay. This is something we should address in the future.

- For audio recording we currently have the limitation that setting the sample rate or codec isn't supported, so the fidelity of the recorded sound is hardwired to a level suited mainly for recording speech. Again, something for the future.

- As for portability, these guys have indeed run their Python code on both desktop and S60: http://pdis.hiit.fi/pdis/download/

They have a wrapper that emulates the PyS60 appuifw API over wxWidgets. I haven't used that much, though.

If you try to make something portable between desktop and S60 you should remember that PyS60 is still based on Python 2.2.2 - check that you have Python 2.2 on your desktop as well.

OK -- I'll make sure my destkop install is 2.2.2. Speaking of the desktop install, it typically comes with IDLE, right? How useful will that tool be for PyS60 work? You suggest anything better?

I'm not really an expert on IDEs. Emacs has been good enough for me for 11 years. I still think that if anyone wants to pursue a career in programming, then they should consider learning Emacs. Sure, there's a long learning curve, but there's also lots of power and the good thing is that you don't need to relearn things every few years. Emacs will outlast most or even all fancy IDEs we have today.

Opinions of course vary. Dedicated IDEs do have a lot of good points, and recently I've moved to Carbide for a lot of my development. With the pydev package it makes a decent Python editor. There are also other Python IDEs available, both commercial and free, but I don't have much to say about them since I haven't tried them properly.

I wasn't aware of the pydev package for Carbide. I'll check it out.

I just checked out the http://pdis.hiit.fi/pdis/download/ project. Looks like it could be a good fit for integrating the mobile and desktop services I'd love to create. It's worth some digging ...

If anyone else is on line, feel free to post your own questions.

And of course everyone who's interested is welcome to participate on the fine PyS60 discussion board we have at Forum Nokia: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=102

Hello Jukka and Kevin ,

Best known as cyke64 on the pys60 forum , I want to ask to Jukka when the Pys60 1.4 stable release will be released. The last answer was end of 2006 but it is near end of 2007 now ;)

You made a very good job on this 1.3.22 version (pystones has reached 900 on the N95 and even to 1200 on the N93 !!!

Cyke64

Hi Cyke64. For those who haven't met you over on pys60 forum, you want to post a URL to pystones?

Hi cyke64 :)

Yes, the 1.4 release is indeed late from the originally anticipated schedule, and this is mainly due to bug fixes taking more time than we thought. We're improving things as fast as we can, and this is also a matter of where we draw the line between fixes we do before the release and fixes we do after the release. If you would consider the latest 1.3.x release already good enough to be called a production release, then you can already use it. 1.3.22 is already quite close to the final 1.4.

"1.4" is really just a name. It's a statement that _we_ think this is now good enough for production use. If you think the latest 1.3.x release is already enough for _your_ use, then no one is stopping you from using it today - and conversely, if someone isn't happy with the quality level in 1.4, they can wait for 1.4.1, 1.4.2 or whatever number of bugfix releases we put out.

Thanks again for the time. One last question before I let you start your evening. Over the last week or so I've been impressed, bordering on shocked, at how easy it looks like workign with PyS60 is likely to be. It leaves me with the eerie feeling I'm missing something. What would you say the biggest mistakes a beginner like me are likely to wish they avoided making?

These are some of the most common nonobvious mistakes:

- Doing too complex things in UI callbacks. It's actually pretty hard to explain what "too complex" means in this case without explaining the whole Symbian active object framework. The way PyS60 handles active objects currently is suboptimal, and can lead to situations where code that looks like it _could_ work fails due to subtle reasons.

I've been giving a lot of thought to how this could be made easier to handle, and I have some ideas, but they'll happen only after the 1.4 release.

- Not remembering that all strings destined for the screen should be Unicode.

- Using an object that wraps a native resource (files, sockets etc) from a different thread than where it was created. This will crash the interpreter immediately.

Yes , Jukka is right

Using an object that wraps a native resource (files, sockets etc) from a different thread than where it was created. This will crash the interpreter immediately.

In e32 pys60 library you can use e32.is_ui_thread() boolean function (see documentation !)

For pystones testing on Nokia look for this talk on the forum : http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=99610

Thanks for this interesting chat !

BR
Cyke64

Thanks for the link, and for the threading tip. Dealing with threading in PyS60 is something I know I need to research, because I know threading in Symbian OS is something I don't yet know well enough to predict.

Thanks. I'm somewhat familiar with Active Objects, so that warning hits home. I've also noticed the code I'm seeing all uses unicode in strings -- thought that was localization convention, not screen display requirement.

Hi,

I couldn't participate in the discussion yesterday, but I hope these two questions are still relevant:)

1. I think most of the application logic is usually initiated from within user callbacks (keys, softkeys). So how do we do these forbidden "complex things"? In another thread?
2. So there are a few constraints with PyS60, like with the camera module for instance. In such circumstances, is it possible to easily extend the Python code with a C++ module, which would do what is needed?

Thanks for the discussion. It was a great idea!

Jan,

I have not yet worked through the details, but I'll share what I know now and hope that if I'm steering you wrong somebody will step in.

1) It seems as though much of the UI work needs to be done in the main thread -- I don't yet know how or if that impacts usability if the UI function takes time to return. According to the documentation http://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pys60/PythonForS60_doc_1_3_22.pdf
5.1 appuifw: Interface to the S60 GUI framework
The appuifw module offers an interface to the S60 UI application framework. Figure 5.1 provides an
overview of the Python for S60 environment for UI application programming.
Note: The services of this interface may only be used in the context of the main thread, that is, the
initial thread of a UI application script.


Here are some Wiki entries that might help http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/How_to_handle_keypress_easily and http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/How_to_add_a_submenu

2) Absolutely. In fact, that's one of the great appeals of Python. Not only can you extend Python using C++ modules, but you can prototype the C++ module in Python and then replace it with the C++ module WITHOUT CHANGING THE REST OF THE PYTHON CODE. At least that's what I've read -- haven't actually done it yet. If you're interested, the language works in the other direction as well -- you can embed a Python interpreter into your C++ code. In know in the desktop and server spaces this technique is often used for field configuration. Check out some code: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/How_to_embed_Python_in_Symbian_C%2B%2B

With that we'll end the live portion of this thread. Thanks again to Jukka for coming, to Cyke64 for participating, and to all those who have been quietly listening. Feel free to continue posting questions to this thread and in the DiBo http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=102

Above all, I encourage you to TRY SOMETHING! If you have an idea for something you wish your Nokia phone could do, but are imtimidated by the thought of learning Symbian C++, you owe it to yourself to check out PyS60.

Have a good day.