Jurgen Scheible's Forum Nokia Blog

Interface culture workshop: 8 Mobile Demo's

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:58:22 +0200

(Video) I thought to share with you the outcomes of a 4 day Mobile Interface Culture workshop that I gave at the beginning of February at the department of Interface culture of University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. Find here the video of 8 Mobile Demos that were the outcomes.

The video shows quite a variety of innovative applications starting from an interactive audiovisual art installation, to two pervasive GPS based games, a Bluetooth multi-player game, an interactive drawing program via the N95 accelerometer, to a veterinary support tool, to a fertility checking application. In this Interface culture workshop we used the N95 accelerometer many times for building new types of interfaces. (Thanks cyke64 for the aXYZ module! It is fantastically helpful.) This shows that people love to design all sorts of new kinds of interfaces with gesture control using a mobile and that there is huge potential for innovation in this area.

As in my previous workshops, most of the participating students had never done any mobile phone programming before and only few had some programming experience at all. At the beginning of the workshop I was teaching the students for only 2 days how to program Python for S60 applications in hands-on style and on the following 2 days I helped them to produce 8 fully working applications based on their own ideas. All mobile applications are implemented with Python for S60 - even the flashy graphics UI ones.

In case your department or company has interest in running a Mobile Interface Culture or Rapid Mobile Application Prototyping workshop with outcomes as shown in the video, feel free to contact me. I can possibly help you out.

5 Mobile Demo's - Rapid Mobile Application Prototyping workshop outcomes

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:28:14 +0200

(Video) During last January I gave a Rapid Mobile Application Prototyping workshop at my University of Art and Design Helsinki in the department called Media Lab and I want to share the outcomes of fully working applications here with you via a Mobile Demo video. Some of the applications show the variety of areas in which students come up with ideas, others may spark inspiration e.g. when the phone is turned into an instrument using the N95 accelerometer (thanks Cyke64 for the aXYZ module !), or a walking robot is controlled via phone movement, or a collaborative Art piece is made by providing a mobile mobile multi-user application for interacting with a large screen etc.

Most of the participating students had never done any mobile phone programming before and only few had some programming experience at all. Nevertheless the New Media students managed to produce fully working applications based on their own ideas in 2 days. At the beginning of the workshop I was teaching the students for 3 days in hands-on style on how to program Python for S60 applications with the help of my PyS60 tutorial at http://www.mobilenin.com/pys60/menu.htm. After that the students formed groups and build their applications under my guidance in 2 days.

In case your department or company has interest in running a Rapid Mobile Application Prototyping workshop for triggering innovation for your own product portfolio, feel free to contact me.

My mobile phone has feelings, too - Nokia 5500: How to program the tapping sensor with Python for S60

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:36:41 +0200

See a 1min. video and find the code. When I was preparing today a course on 'creative mobile phone programming' with Python for S60 for an event next week, I added some exercise to my PyS60 online tutorial that utilizes the built-in tapping sensor of the Nokia 5500. While people have been doing great stuff already for a while with the Nokia 5500 sensor by building their own Python extension, I was happy to see a few weeks ago that Python for S60 v.1.4.1 came out with an own module called sensor (beside a range of other new modules and functions such as video recording, ....). While the sensor module of Python for S60 works nicely with the N95 spilling out rotation status information (see the code here), I wanted to get the module to work with the Nokia 5500 as a tapping sensor, so I can tap with my finger two times on different sides of the phone in order to trigger some other phone functionality.

The functionality that came first to my mind was text to speech, which is something nice for the ear and just takes one line of code: audio.say(text). This lead to the situation that I suddenly discovered that my phone also has feelings. What had happened? Out of fun I typed various sentences to be spoken by the phone, when tapping it on different sides. Among the sentences were e.g. "don't do this again!" or "I like that" or "this hurts" and "yes, I love you, too". When I put the ready Python for S60 script on the phone and tested it, it felt weird, but nevertheless so real. My phone complained to me that I treated it physically wrongly, or gave me some appreciation for what I did when touching it - it suddenly had feelings, too.

As mentioned before you can watch a video of the "my_phone_has_feelings" application here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exC1YICrM6Y) and test the script yourself making your Nokia 5500 to express its feelings. You can find the entire code (26 lines) as a Python for S60 script here: http://www.mobilenin.com/pys60/ex_5500_tapping_sensor.php.

This short incident triggered lots of ideas in my head what else I could use the tapping sensor for i.e. when an sms arrives, I tap the phone two times on the right side and it reads out the message (see code snippets for such things here), or when the phone rings, I'll answer it by tapping on the display, or I turn my phone into a joking machine that reads out good or bad jokes by randomly tapping different sides. Well, this might not sound like something new as such, but the point is that one can do all of that now in Python for S60 in an easy way with just a few lines of code.

Once again this scripting approach has demonstrated to me how easy and quick it is to get your idea turned into a working app. For those interested in learning to program Python for S60, there is also a book available called Mobile Python - Rapid prototyping on the mobile platform (Wiley) http://www.mobilepythonbook.org/ , which offers a quick path into programming Python for S60. Also my online tutorial is available at http://www.mobilenin.com/pys60/menu.htm.

I guess I'll write in detail in some of my forthcoming blog entries on how to use the Rotation sensor of the N95 with Python for S60, and also how to use the Nokia 5500 sensor as accelerator sensor. In the meantime I'll keep enjoying the feelings of my mobile phone - at least for a little while.