I think what I’d like is for the webcam on the Nokia N800 to do more than just make cam calls.
I’d like to be able to pop out the webcam and connect not to another N800 but an app somewhere on the web that captured the video transmission and stored it online*.
Hm-m. How about an app that runs on my PC and captures the video I send over my local wifi network, and I can upload it to the net later?
Or how about just an app that captures the video on my 4GB card in the N800?
See, the thing about the webcam in the Internet Tablet is that it’s portable, but it’s still connected to a computer. So why not add up webcam + tablet + mobility + wifi and do something internet-y?
* You can get 25 gigabytes of free storage for such videos at
mediamax or pay $3/mo for 10 GB at
omnidrive.
About three years ago, I ran across a really lightweight wiki that included a built-in server. Installing and running it locally was a breeze, which meant I could use it for making notes and cross-referencing them. It was written in Ruby and I exchanged a few emails with the developer, who had gotten himself sidetracked into a bigger project, building a Ruby-based web framework. The code wasn’t finished, but even a non-programmer like me could see the elegance of Ruby and how deftly it was used in the wiki.
The wiki was (and is) called Instiki (”instant wiki”), the developer was David Heinemeier Hansson, and the framework he was working on became Ruby on Rails (an accomplishment which led O’Reilly and Google to name him “hacker of the year”).
Given Nokia’s embrace of Python, I have despaired at Ruby ever becoming a viable language for developing apps on the Nokia Internet Tablets. (I say “despair” because I can understand Ruby but don’t really grok Python.) Then yesterday I ran across a blog how-to on running Ruby on Rails on the N800. And a little digging here at ITT reveals a thread discussing some of these matters. Someone even notes that there’s a Google Summer of Code project to build Ruby bindings for Maemo.
Ruby on Rails on the N800! Real possibility of developing Ruby apps on our NITs — I like the way this is turning out!
