Old wishlist thread - feature requests now tracked in SourceForge

[eriksmartt]

There's already a short feature wishlist on Matt Croydon's wiki (http://www.postneo.com/postwiki/moin...honForSeries60), but we should probably start a thread here as well.

From the wiki, the currently listed requests are:

- Compression library of some sort; zlib, gzip, bz2, zip...
- Access to Bluetooth MAC Address
- Access to IMEI
- Access to the camera, microphone and speaker
- some way to find information about other peripherals - e.g. to know if a handsfree set is in use, if a keyboard is present, etc..
- Access to the Address book
- An input box that allows t9
- Create/Update/Delete-access to the Calendar and ToDo databases

From other threads/blogs/requests, I've seen:

- simultaneous bluetooth and gprs connections
- smpt/email modules
- a graphics API
- ability to view images
- access to the SMS inbox

Is there anything else you'd like to have, or perhaps additional details for the items above that are important?

[korakotc]

Access to call log history.
gsm_location return the name of the cellsite.
Sending MMS.
Access to clock/alarm (eg. random alarm)
Signal level, battery level
Make phone call (as easy as sms_send(...) )
Disk free space
changing profile
real 'relational' sql (e.g. (py)sqlite )
... and on and on...

If I were to choose what I would like first, I wish I could have
1. Graphics (GUI)
2. Address book (Contact) and Call log
3. Camera

[eriksmartt]

Originally posted by korakotc
... and on and on...

The "on and on" is important stuff. Are there additional specifics?

Originally posted by korakotc
If I were to choose what I would like first, I wish I could have
1. Graphics (GUI)
2. Address book (Contact) and Call log
3. Camera

How do you see the interaction with the Camera working? To me, it seems like there are two parts:
1. Being able to non-interactively take a picture. This would mean that a background application could snap a photo at any time without using the GUI or user input. I could see this being used in web-cam like applications where a device can be setup to monitor a room.
2. Providing direct screen drawing of the camera's view, much like the standard Camera application does. I'm guessing that appuifw would need a "camera/video" widget and output from the camera could be toggled on/off to this widget.

Any additional thoughts on how you would like to use the Camera API?

[eichin]

I see two big use cases - randomly grab a picture, noninteractively, and have the user take a picture and do something with it when it is done.

The latter might be done with a hook to the existing camera app, especially if it let one use all of the features directly (night mode, fake zoom, that sort of thing.) Example actions I would then take include "talk to the bt gps, store the time and place with the picture (maybe in EXIF metadata, maybe in a db on the side), post the picture immediately to flickr with that data as tags" or alternatively, "something like cardscan - take the picture, find a barcode in it, scan it, hit amazon with it" (Do we have an equivalent of classic python's "webbrowser.open()"? That would make that simple too...)

Another interface that would be interesting to experiment but perhaps less generally useful is one that gives a very fast snapshot, possibly of a subset of the image, as somewhat raw pixels... this would let you implement the "optical mouse" trick, for example, and while that's not hugely useful (though consider: point camera at ground, walk around, have the map automatically scroll...) there are some interesting experiments one could do with it (how about "auto panorama" mode: wave the phone slowly left to right, the camera automatically figures out when to take another snapshot for (later) assembling into a panorama. This is the kind of thing that takes the phonecam from a "not very good camera that happens to be in your pocket anyway" to "even better than a regular camera", at least in theory :-) )

[eichin]

re smtp/email modules: that falls under "include everything that works anyway now that you have a full socket.*" -- smtp, poplib, nntplib -- after all, someone's already demonstrated using socket to talk out port 25 "the hard way" to send mail, and xmlrpc apparently just worked too. Saves having to copy them over...

[eichin]

I want a python script to run on incoming calls, and sms/mms messages. Even being able to hang around and "notice" that one came in and act is probably good enough, especially if we get an inbox-accessing module, at least for the sms side.

trivial example app: I have nagios send me an SMS trigger on drastic problems. It hits my phone, it does a signature check on the message, and then directly fires up the browser pointing at the full nagios status page so I can process further -- as in, my phone vibrates, and by the time I get to a discreet pause in the conversation, the web page is on screen, without 5 minutes of button mashing. (Yes, this is much better than getting the info in an MMS, because once I've got nagios up, I can click on "dealing with it" or "ignore that for now" directly.)

Another example - my boss calls (or anyone from "the office" based on the MessageGroup their number is in) and likewise, a "what might be wrong" status page comes up... or even a simple "after I hang up, ask me for a few words (or a voice memo?) and log them along with the time-spent to that customer's consulting log."

(Of course, about half of this needs ssl to stop crashing on the 6630; the other half is "hooks that get incoming call numbers/groups" plus webbrowser.open()...)

[korakotc]

My ideas about how I would play with Camera API is
- Create an enhance camera app (eg. with frame/filter)
- Image processing eg. object recognition, barcode, game input
by showing the camera with different colors
- Augmented reality, something like mosquito game, but can
be much more if image processing is done well.
- Or simply allow 'camera input', by filling form with image data
in addition to just plain text fields.

Eichin's idea about python script to hook into incoming/outgoing
call/sms/mms/email is what I mean by number 2 (Address book
and call log). I wish I could write script to automate/augment
any communication I do. (it could simply calculate statistics)

All these wishes are like daydreams. Python for s60 is like dreams
come true already. Thanks for everything so far (and in the future).

[jeclarim]

Icons are very useful to decorate listboxes and tabs.
Then we could have the Grid widget which is barely meaningful without them.

For this, I believe we would only need a bitmap API to be able to load icons and masks from MBM files.

[lost_goblin]

As python hacker and developer it's anoying not to be able to take advantage of the latest language features or to run my my programs on Series 80.

[dbvic]

Originally posted by eriksmartt


- Access to the Address book

Or at the very least, read/write access to c:/system/data/contacts.cdb :-) [Assuming it is a native database we could "play" with e32db...]

A graphics lib would be nice, would it be only to display an image in app.body [instead of None :-(]

[jplauril]

Originally posted by dbvic
Or at the very least, read/write access to c:/system/data/contacts.cdb :-) [Assuming it is a native database we could "play" with e32db...]

A graphics lib would be nice, would it be only to display an image in app.body [instead of None :-(]

You _can_ display an image using Content_handler. That spawns the standard Series 60 image viewer widget, that supports all kinds of functions like zooming, rotation, fullscreen mode, sending the image and so on.

[Manuzhai]

Originally posted by eriksmartt
- Access to the Address book
- Create/Update/Delete-access to the Calendar and ToDo databases

I especially think these are important. Would be very cool if we got these.

[brunomlopes]

- Access to the Address book
- Create/Update/Delete-access to the Calendar and ToDo databases

Those two to me are showstoppers, since I wanted to be able to sincronize all my contacts and calendar info with my cellphone ...

[craigos]

Just to let everyone reading this thread know, I just took a picture using Python, using the Miso Library linked off the wiki page mentioned in the first post.

From the posts here, it didn't seem that people were aware of this module.

Here is their test_camera.py sample code (in the Miso src download).

import miso

def write_file(fname, fdata):
    fp = open(fname, "w")
    try:
        fp.write(fdata)
    finally:
        fp.close()

data = miso.take_photo()
print "got %d bytes of data" % len(data)
write_file("c:\\testphoto.jpg", data)

Craig

[korakotc]

Let me add another feature: Vibration
I saw Vibra Control API in the SDK and I
would like to create an alert application with it.
(might need to use the clock as well)