S60 Open to new features

TechCrunch reviewed the action at the recent Digital Hollywood conference, which included a presentation from TurnHere, a video start-up based in California. They are producing a series of short (3-4 minute) films about different places in the world, created by independent filmmakers. The current selection includes films about popular and more obscure places, most of them in the US.

The S60 angle is that you can watch these (MP4) videos on your S60 phone without any additional processing. It's hard to download the videos directly to your phone, so you'll need to transfer them from your PC or Mac.

Let's see, short, mobile-ready videos, location-based content... could there be a mobile business model here?

[Update Aug. 23] I discovered today that the videos on TurnHere are in (at least) two different formats. This one, for example, uses the AVC video codec, and will only work on S60 devices that support it, such as the N93. For other devices, you need to convert the video. Other videos use an MP4 video codec that works on a wider range of S60 devices, including the E61 (tho' I still need to verify this).

-Oren

I answered my own question from an earlier post, about options for synching USB Mass Storage (MSC) devices with Winamp. The gUSB plug-in for Winamp adds support for MSC devices, and so lets you copy music to your phone directly from Winamp. It doesn't do much more than that, however. There is no real synchronization of tracks or playlists, and no way to specify which folder on the phone will store the music. In other words, you're better off just copying your music to the phone using the Windows File Explorer, as Phil described in the See into S60 blog.

[Note: on E-Series devices, MSC is called "Data Transfer". Thanks to S60Tips.com for this info.]

Of course, Winamp now supports MTP, so you can connect your N91 or other S60 3rd Edition N-Series phone that way as well. As you might expect, though, the Winamp support for MTP is not as complete as what you find in Windows Media Player; it doesn't sync playlists, for example.

Perhaps a better option, if you use Windows and prefer not to use iTunes or Windows Media Player, is MediaMonkey. The free version of this media manager also recognizes MSC devices, but provides much more flexibility. You can specify where on the device to store your music (for example, organized in folders by artist and album), and set up automatic synchronization of tracks and playlists. It can also update the metadata and album art in your collection, by downloading information from Amazon (your choice of several countries). This is a fairly easy way to add album art to your music before moving it to your phone.

A quick note: the Forum Nokia blogs announced a new discussion group in Forum dedicated to porting applications to S60 3rd Edition.

-Oren

If you're a Last.fm user (or know someone who is), you may know about Audioscrobbler, the engine behind Last.fm. Audioscrobbler provides a plugin protocol so that music player applications can update the server with the music you play, and exposes a set of public web services that let you access data and recommendations about Last.fm members and their favorite music.

What I haven't seen (so far) is any mobile interfaces to the Audioscrobbler database. In an attempt to fill this gap (and encourage others to experiment), I wrote a couple of simple Python scripts for S60 devices that demonstrate some of the query features of the Audioscrobbler API (This also gave me a chance to learn Python!). Read on for the details.

Of course, Last.fm is not the only social music game in town. Other services, like MusicStrands, are already experimenting with mobile clients, and offer their own public API's.

Thanks to Jukka for that gracious introduction. I'm looking forward to carrying on with the blog, and I hope to maintain the excellent standard that Jukka has set.

But first, it's time for me to leave for my summer vacation. I'll be away for a week, and back to posting after that.

In the meantime, here's a question to chew on. We're already seeing several tools on S60 for uploading your photos and videos to the web, and I've seen at least one nifty tool for searching Flickr from your S60 phone. The question is, what's next? Will we see these services integrated more directly into the platform, and if so, how? For example, perhaps you could search for photos and videos based on info in your Contacts, or from location data.

Let me know what you think.

-Oren

I'm back in the office, after a total of four months of absence. The last month I had my summer holidays and it was great! I hope you've had some time to relax too.

During the summer I made some personal choices regarding my job and joined the same team where Tommi is working. I'll be concentrating more on the various applications running on top of S60, than on the platform itself. Many of those have been highlighted already by Tommi in his superb blog.

Unfortunately all of this means I won't be writing in this blog anymore. But instead of closing down the thing we chose to continue and find a new blogger in the Multimedia team. And you know him already: Oren has been contributing to the blog since the very beginning and has already made several posts during the summer. I trust he will carry on this "great experiment" and make the blog his own.

I want to thank you all for taking part and contributing. This has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have (what a cliché, but so true). I'll be surely following the blogs, commenting and who knows what in the future .) If you want to reach me via email use the friendly address jukka(the-at-character)s60.com.

Be seeing you :)

-Jukka

We just added a Wiki to our Internet Radio for S60 open source project. I started things off with a basic User Guide and FAQ, based in part on your comments to earlier blog posts. Please add information about your experiences using the application and developing with the code.

-Oren