Way back before the iPhone was available in South Africa, and before location based apps were commonplace, I had a Nokia 5800 phone (including a stylus!) that came with a useful SDK. I’ve always been crazy about maps and GPS, so I wrote a simple proof of concept that allowed a Nokia phone to send GPS location updates to Drupal CMS via XMLRPC.
Nokia ported Python to the Symbian S60 platform and named the project PyS60. The reference manual is available for download. By using the provided APIs and SDK, I was able to throw together a quick mobile app that did basic location tracking.
The concept of an app store was quite new at the time, and Nokia didn’t provide any publishing and packaging mechanisms for general developers. Still, it was a lot of fun and I contributed the WhereIs module and code to Drupal’s module repository.
