Get your Microsoft Visual Studio .NET ready, as Nokia 770 supports Mono, an open source alternative to .NET developed by Novell.
According to a thread on maemo-users, maemo will have VOIP support by the end of the first quarter of 2006.
That’s the story that’s described over on herraiz blog, and a port would improve the speed and responsiveness of the GUI, supposedly:
As the GNU/Linux version of wxWidgets is developed with GTK, it seems that the applications are very well integrated. For example, they are responsing to maximize to full screen events (with the hardware button). There are still some minor issues, as the menu bar, which is a window placed over the main window. Instead, it should use the Hildon functions for menu bars. Also the virtual keyboard annonyingly appears each time you click in the bottom part of the screen. I don’t know yet why.
Al over at 770Fan asks where is MobiPocket for Nokia 770:
They have stated that we need the Java Virtual Machine on the 770 before they are gonna develop a reader.
Dealing with personal digital certificates on Nokia 770 explains how to use free digital personal certificates for stuff like message signing. Caveat, though - digital certificates are not well supported by Nokia’s browser at the moment.
For those thinking of developing apps for Nokia 770, there are several articles posted in developer blogs. Over at WebNinja there’s a simple example of writing a 770 app in Python:
I really like python. I’ve actually been using it quite a bit lately for some projects for clients. I’m not a great python programmer yet, I still have to look things up fairly often. Not like PHP, where I could probably name every function and its arguments from memory. Anyways, I installed PyMaemo onto my 770 and did your basic “Does HelloWorld work?” kind of testing on it and then got down to business.
Teemu Harju is also running an introductory series on Python programming. Coding for Nokia 770 using Python - Part 1 talks about setting up the proper dev environment for simple Python app dev on 770:
In this first part I thought that I’d give instructions how to set up an easy configuration so you can easily code Python on Nokia 770 using your PC and also very easily run your applications on the actual device. I’ll also give an example of a very simple Python application that you can see below. It’s not much, but it is a good start.
In Coding for Nokia 770 using Python - Part 2 there are more PyGTK goodies with an example 180-line app:
I’ll explain here some parts of the example code, that can be seen on the end of this post with lines numbered. First of all lets start with the 1st line, in case someone is wondering what it is. It is there only to tell what application should be executed when this script is run in a shell. So you’ll only have to type “./uitest.py” to start the application from xterm.
For a quick intro to Python, check out Dive into Python.
A new HOWTO on using Bluetooth GPS device and GPSDrive app with Nokia 770. Pretty impressive project.
Roger Sperberg over at InternetTabletTalk shares his strategies for making 770 more useful:
So then came Joe, the text editor, and vim. What, a text-to-speech engine? Flite went on. And Granule for flash cards. The GPE-PIM trio. Happiest day? When Tomas Frydrych casually let slip how to install fonts. I put in a dozen I can’t live without (Maiandra, Trebuchet MS, Gardiner’s hieroglyphs). Comfort food for the eyes: Look, I control how text looks on-screen! I tried things out, I removed what i wasn’t using.
AOL’s EnGadget named Nokia 770 the handheld of the year. What’s exciting is that it won both the editors’ and the readers’ picks.
Henri Bergius, a motorcycle and open source enthusiast, according to the blog tagline, desribes his first day with Nokia 770:
Since the device runs Linux, I’m also looking forward to developing some Python applications to make mobile work easier. Especially I’m interested in exploring the use of position information to create the real-world Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galary. Placeopedia RSS feed will be an excellent starting point for finding “information near you”.