Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

Are you a Python developer, feeling envious of your C++-coding buddies cranking out N900 Qt applications with all those nice Qt Mobility APIs? No reason for envy any longer: The PyMaemo/PySide team is proud to present PySide Mobility: Python bindings for the Qt Mobility APIs! Combining the power of Python and the Nokia-sponsored PySide Qt bindings with the capabilities of Qt Mobility, you'll be spewing out impressive apps for N900 like never before!

Available APIs

In this first release for Maemo 5, we have bindings available for the following APIs:

• Bearer Management
• Contacts
• Location
• Messaging
• System Information
• Sensors
• Versit

How to install

The PySide Mobility packages are already available in the extras-devel repository. If you're a developer and want to install the full set of bindings, install the pyside-qt4 and pyside-mobility metapackages.

Documentation

PySide Mobility API reference documentation is available here:

http://www.pyside.org/docs/pyside-mobility

If you are interested in more generic PySide documentation, peruse this page:

http://www.pyside.org/documentation/

If you are a classic PyQt developer, the biggest difference between 'classic' PyQt and PySide is that PySide only supports the more modern, so called PyQt API 2. Other than that (and replacing the PyQt4 import statements with PySide), you are likely to be good to go. See PySide PSEP 101 for more information on the API differences:

http://www.pyside.org/docs/pseps/psep-0101.html

Examples

Several example scripts are available at

http://qt.gitorious.org/pyside/pyside-examples .

If you prefer a tarball, you can download that from gitorious as well:

http://qt.gitorious.org/pyside/pysid...tarball/master

Support & Reporting bugs

Although we have tested the bindings to the best of our ability, we cannot expect them to be free of issues altogether. Best ways to contact the PySide team are the #pyside @ FreeNode IRC channel and the pyside mailing list.

If you find any issues you suspect are bugs either in PySide or the PySide Mobility bindings, we strongly encourage you to file them at our Bugzilla.

Last but not the least: Enjoy! :)

Re: Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

Excellent, thanks.

Seems that the bindings are only available through command-line apt-get?

Re: Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

Yes, you're right. Only user/* section packages are shown in Application manager, and since PySide and PySide Mobility is just about the bindings, they go to "python". (Of course, same applies to any other python package, including python itself.)

Re: Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

damn! thanks for scrapping my need for getting qt development&compiling environment up to my computer :)

Re: Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

Excellent news. Alright, time to get back to coding. No more excuses. ;)

Re: Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

I'm sincerely sorry for that. Qt Creator isn't that bad, you know. :D

Re: Python bindings for Qt Mobility APIs now available
 

Forgot to mention in the original post: PySide is naturally available on the desktop as well, which might come handy when testing the code. The different download links are available at:

http://www.pyside.org/downloads/

Packages are available for the major Linux distributions. In addition to that, Mac OS X packages should be available via Fink (can't verify, I'm not a Mac user). Windows porting work is ongoing and we hope to have results really soon.

So far we haven't packaged Qt Mobility to other platforms than Maemo 5 since many of the most interesting APIs are missing e.g. on desktop Linux.