Let’s kick off the new year with a new series.
If you recall, Season One was about a presentation I gave at the first (Berlin, 2008) Maemo Summit, revisited and extended. Season Two will be about a presentation I would have given at the 2009 Summit in Amsterdam… if I had actually managed to attend, that is. This way I can salvage some of it, and maybe give some readers useful tips or ideas for new uses of their tablets.
This presentation would have been quite different from the first, if only for the fact that it was to be a 5-minute “lightning talk”. This format does not lend itself well to philosophical ramblings, so I intended to do what suits it best: a demo of an application, which I had created last summer.
As is usually the case, the idea for this app stemmed from an “itch to scratch”. Of course, as you may already have guessed, there is plenty of Python and Web protocols in this story, and some web2py, but in the end I had to dig into deeper and more complex stuff than I had initially anticipated, so that is not all of it.
In hindsight, the five-minute demo would probably have been quite a challenge to set up, as it would have involved at least two devices (one of them a tablet) communicating over three protocol stacks.
Hyakutake is the name of the resulting product. For the curious, it is also the name of an atypical comet which crossed the solar system in 1996. It’s a bitch to spell, but I find it has a nice ring to it :-)
The nature of the itch I’ve been scratching, and the reason for choosing a comet’s name, will be made clear in the following posts…