MobMid'08 Tutorial

Tutorial: Fast Prototyping for Mobile Phones with Python S60

Agathe Battestini, agathe.battestini@nokia.com
Nokia Research Center
Palo Alto, USA

Abstract

Mobile phones have become powerful platforms for developing applications in a wide-range of fields: voice and text communication, video and imaging, location-awareness, productivity tools, social networking, business, traveling, blogging, games, sensors, distributed networks, web services, and more.

Since its availability in 2005, Python For S60 (available for smartphones that run Symbian Series 60) has become a programming language of choice for researchers, students and developers who seek to quickly prototype and deploy mobile applications.

This tutorial provides:
- An overview of the Python modules specific to the phone: location, positioning, contacts, camera, sensor, telephone, messaging.
- An overview of the UI components: lists, canvases, input fields, graphical functions.
- A sketching approach for fast prototyping.
- An overview of the connectivity capabilities: access to Internet resources, 3G/GPRS/Bluetooth/Wifi connections.
- A walkthrough of code and applications that demonstrate what Python For S60 can do.

The tutorial consists of lectures, demonstrations and offers the possibility for attendees to get hands-on experience. A knowledge of Python is a plus for the attendees, but is not required, as Python For S60 is a relatively lightweight scripting language.

Author Biography Agathe Battestini joined the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki in 2004. She is located now at the Nokia lab in Palo Alto. She holds Masters degrees in Computer Science from University of Technology of Compiegne (2001) and Georgia Tech (2003).

Her primary research interests are context awareness and mobile user data. She explores mobile applications that generate and adapt to context data, and how they can be integrated into novel web-based services and bridge the mobile device and the web. As part of the Semantic Graphics project in Palo Alto, she explores how different sources of heterogeneous information can be mixed and composed into compelling interactive visualizations.

Since the release of Python S60 in 2005, she has used it as the main development language for prototyping low- and high-fidelity mobile applications in the fields of context-awareness, sensor data processing, and web-based services.