Tag Archives: S60

Running OpenTape on my Nokia N95

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I always liked the website Muxtape, and right around the time that the site went offline, a group launched an open source web application that allows you to run and share a mix tape on your own server. It’s called OpenTape, and while the idea is similar, they are NOT related to Muxtape.

OpenTape is amazingly easy to use. Just download the files, unzip, and upload them to your own webserver. From there you can use the web interface to set up and configure the mix tape you want to share.

But what I want to know is can I run OpenTape on my mobile phone? Specifically, my N95? If you want to try this yourself, here are the steps.

  1. Register and install the Mobile Web Server to your S60 compatible device.
  2. Download and install the PAMP package for S60 and install it on your compatible device.
  3. Download OpenTape and copy it to the htdocs folder of your Mobile Web Server installation.

Once that’s done, just go to the directory on your webserver, and voila, it works!

Notice that the URL is actually from my Mobile web site…

Once I set up the password, then it was still working just fine.

And after I added songs, i thought it was looking so good.

But then it never displayed any of my songs. Hmmm…

Not to give in so quickly, I started digging through the source code, and it turns out that the problem might be with the PHP package on my mobile. First, the /code/xspf.php XML file wasn’t returning any tracks even though they were uploaded in the folder and the permissions were set correctly. Digging further, it looks like the code is using an ID3 library to read all of the metadata about the Mp3 files, so maybe that’s not included in the PAMP package?

Anyway, I’m so close, but I’ll keep looking into this and see what kind of fix I can come up with.

Children’s PressLine – RSS and widget for S60

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I’ve been doing some pro bono web work recently for Children’s Pressline, a youth news service that trains kids to be reporters and editors who write articles for mainstream media partners. It’s a non-profit open to any child in NYC, and currently their news stories are being run in the NY Daily News, Metro, and the Amsterdam News.

The work I’ve done involves some basic tweaks to their website, setting up a Children’s PressLine Facebook page and creating a Children’s PressLine RSS feed that shows you their latest stories and links to the major media outlet running the story.

There’s not a mobile website, but just by having an RSS feed, that’s all you really need to get started reading the content on your mobile. If you’re reading this on your S60 device, you can just click on the RSS feed, and automatically subscribe to the latest news articles.

If you’ve got one of the newer S60 devices, though, then you can get a richer experience using this widget I made which pulls in the RSS feed and displays the latest news stories directly on your phone.

S60 widget (WRT)

You can download the Children’s PressLine widget directly, or scan in this QR code to get it straight to your mobile:

Get the widget

Total development time for this widget was less than an hour, and most of that time was just deciding which colors to use in the CSS. If you haven’t seen the Nokia Web Run Time, then I’d recommend checking it out as it’s going to be a great way to build quick applications for S60 devices. Right now, it’s only drawback is that it has almost no access to the device itself (e.g. GPS, Contacts), but Nokia has already announced these features will be included in the next major release.

If you want to see the source code of the widget, then just download the file to your PC and change the file extension from .wgz to .zip. Then open the zip file and all of the source code is there. It’s a very simple setup with one HTML page, and one XMLHttpRequest call to retrieve the RSS feed.

Let me know if you have any questions about how the widget was built, and I’m also interested to see how other people are using widgets not just for their personal use, but also to help promote causes they believe in.