Hi again!

(My other big projects are on hold for Chinook, and they're all really boring without an actual device to test them on, so they're on pause.)

I'm not pleased with how GrandCentral works on my N800: it's not nearly as useful as I'd like in either it's mobile or full mode. It barely works on my cellphone, so that's out too.

I took about an hour today and pieced together a Python GrandCentral command-line app that can also be used as an API.

For example:

The only external requirement is uTidyLib (utidylib.sf.net) because GrandCentral doesn't send out XML that minidom will handle. I'm setting up my Scratchbox dev environment again, this time under Ubuntu 7.10: I'll be releasing a deb of uTidyLib shortly after that.

The code is largely undocumented but is quite simple, and works as advertised on my Windows test box. It relies on parsing GrandCentral Mobile, and does so in a very specific fashion, so it may break in the future.

My next step will be wrapping this in a UI, although I may turn it in to an RSS-generating CGI script first.

What I'd like:
Testers (this runs on any desktop computer with Python and uTidyLib installed, should be painless
N770 testers (mine is in storage, along with most of my life, and I want this app out soon!)

I will set up a garage page once I have user-installable deb packages, and if there's interest I'll release my alphas here.

While I don't have an internet tablet yet, I'm going to get either the N800 or N810, to be decided upon release. However, I just wanted to say that I absolutely love the idea of this app, especially with the Gizmo support on both the hardware and with GrandCentral (free calls? perfect!). My hope would be that there is a way to dial contacts and also see an iPhone-esque visual voicemail once you get the GUI made.

My Treo is barely usable on GrandCentral either (despite two players capable of streaming MP3, neither of them will automatically play the voicemail when clicking play), so this would be great.

Palm Treo or Windows Mobile Treo?

If it's Palm, GL, but if it's WM, I could piece something simple together in .NETCF for you.

The contacts API is already stable and in Python, so that would be easy: in fact, syncing the two would be GREAT for me...hmm. Dialing could be handled via clever URI use, too.

hey this is a great start....

i am thinking about grand central integration with twitter. ideally you'd be able to place calls from the twitter command line via a bot of some kind; e.g. you'd post the string

d call mom

into twitter, and some combination of events would happen on the "call" bot listening to direct messages to look up the handle "mom" somewhere to connect it to the record for the person associated with that handle and initiate a call to your default phone to connect you to their default phone.


i have not seen the API yet that initiates a call, but I can't imagine it would be all that hard if you're already parsing the mobile client.

Palm Treo, unfortunately for Grandcentral (tried WM, couldn't deal with the worse one-handed support found even in the Palm variety of WM. Hopefully when the smartphone and WM platforms are integated to one OS, then WM will work for me, otherwise I'm pretty stuck if Palm dies off.)

edwardvielmetti: Right now I'm working on getting rid of the utidylib dependency, since I'm having extraordinary trouble porting it to Maemo. I believe I could get something like that put together, but it might be pretty slow --- I could write a J2ME app to handle that (I'll probably write a J2ME GC client soon anyways, as it works really poorly on my cellphone!)

jhoff80: WM is terrible to use, Palm is terrible to write for.

Ignore the previous post!

Here's a new version based off of HTMLParser (sigh, I miss my minidom already) instead. It should run directly on the tablet, or on any basic Python 2.4+ installation.

Now to write a UI. Time to dig up the GStreamer docs!