Chumby widgets on the Nokia N82
May 20th, 2008 | Published in Development, Mobile, Nokia, Nseries, S60 | 2 Comments
So I recently purchased a Chumby. According to UPS, it’s on its way here, and in anticipation of its arrival I’ve started reading about how to make your own Chumby widgets. Turns out, the widgets are all just 320×240 FlashLite 3.0 movies.
This is wonderful news.
Why? Because my phone also runs Flash Lite 3.0. So now if I’m going to go to the trouble to make a Chumby widget, I can design it to work on the Chumby and on my Nokia device. As a quick test, I grabbed some of the existing Chumby widgets and tried to see if they would run on an N82.
Out of the box, two widgets worked great — the MTV News widget and the Chuck Norris Facts widget. Some of the other widgets like weather and NY Times launched correctly, but I need to pass them some configuration details so they know what content to download from the web. That’s the next step.
Bottom line is that if you have an Nseries device that runs FlashLite 3.0, then check out Chumby as a source for games and things that you can load straight on your device. And in case you need proof, here’s Chuck Norris Facts running on an N82.
Yeah, yeah the video is kind of fuzzy, so here’s what it looks like on a real Chumby.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:00 am (#)
Hi,
I’m also pretty exited with Chumby since I knew about it (four days ago). Unfortunately they don’t ship anywhere but the US (I’m spaniard) so I decided to give it a try in virtual mode.
I managed to get the widgets and it’s parameters so I can see them in my Nokia N81 (pretty similar to yours N82). You just have to retrieve your profile XML, there you can found the arguments to pass to the SWF. Sadly you can give arguments in the flash player on the mobile so I tried hacking the virtual Chumby. Now I managed to have a stand alone chumby.swf that loads my virtual profile and delivers the widgets I seleted on the web site.
I had to learn a bit of flash on the way, and the result is that not all gadgets can be played. Human clock, for example, can’t (it seems it want to resize a really big bitmap. Other widgets have minor issues like mobile interaction (no touch screen here). I’ll gather some of them working and upload a video to You Tube.
I you or anybody here is interested I can put some more information. For now I’ll just put the video, so you can believe me.
Cheers,
Xamar
July 29th, 2008 at 8:26 am (#)
I recorded a video and published in YouTube. The URL is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29lYybzpNko
Apart of the memory trouble in some widgets theres another that also affects the official Virtual Chumby is something related to widgets parameters being sent. Facebook, for example, doesn’t work inside this Flash movie, but called from firefox with all it’s parameters in the URL it works like a charm…
I will continue working on it…