My first crack at Nokia N900 Maemo Python development

Got my shiny new Nokia N900 – to say that I’m happy is an understatement :)

For me as a long standing Linux user and Pythonista N900 has an unassailable advantage – its Maemo platform is Linux based and I can program in Python for the platform.

So it’s time to get my feet wet and learn some Maemo programming. I decided to take a stab at writing a small Anki client using Python and Qt. As a result I have a working but still very raw prototype called KTAnki that successfully runs on my N900.

For KTAnki I used PyQt4 library, though I should take a closer look at Nokia’s own bindings – PySide.

Here are some resources that I found helpful when prototyping my first Maemo PyQt application:

  1. N900 USB Networking
  2. PyMaemo QuickStart Guide
  3. Getting started with PyQt for Maemo
  4. PyQt Application Development On Maemo
  5. Hildonized applications for Maemo 5 with Qt4.5.3 and Qt4.6
  6. Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt
  7. Qt Reference Documentation

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 4:54 am and is filed under maemo, python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “My first crack at Nokia N900 Maemo Python development”

  1. Jan Krejcarek says:
    January 29, 2010 at 6:45 am

    Hello, I got my N900 two days ago and probably have similar feelings about it :-). Thank you for collecting and publishing the resources…

    regards,
    Jan

    Reply
  2. sikieiki says:
    February 9, 2010 at 6:01 pm

    Do you have any screenshots of ktanki?

    I am curious of what functionality it supports are since I would like to buy a n900 to get a phone + anki in one.

    Reply
    • Ruslan Spivak says:
      February 10, 2010 at 8:47 am

      I don’t have any screenshots at the moment but it has a basic functionality that allows you to repeat your words and synchronize your deck – just what I needed on the go.

      It’s not polished in terms of installation procedure on the N900, but I’ll be able to provide instructions on how to do that.

      Reply
  3. Mark Dennehy says:
    April 30, 2010 at 12:09 pm

    My walkthrough for getting up and running with Python on the N900:
    http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2010/04/29/python-on-the-nokia-n900/

    It took only 27 minutes to get from absolutely nothing to running the first HelloWorld.py on the phone. It did take the rest of the afternoon to install the full dev environment (including the emulated N900 used for testing), but mostly that was waiting on downloads. There’s only one real technical hitch, and that only affects 64-bit platforms (and yes, the walkthrough has the fix documented in it).
    Hope it helps…

    Reply

Leave a Reply