I knew it exists, but I haven’t looked into Python on series 60 until yesterday and I wish I did so sooner. My mind is just flooded with ideas of what to do and I can easily see myself wasting lots of time playing with it. I do wish it was possible to build stand-alone applications, which wouldn’t require a separate installation of Python. As such I believe series 60 Python is more or less limited to prototyping and personal use.

There’s one thing that is a problem for an old goat like me (over 30 and loving it). It’s a pain in the ass to type anything substantial on mobile phone and although some new phones (like Nokia N70) have predictive dictionary for my language, lots of them including mine don’t.

I do have an idea on how to tackle this problem. Most of us have a vocabulary of few thousand words (unlike Shakespeare, who I’m told used 36 thousand of them), but we only use few hundred of them in our everyday life. Therefore if my text input heavy applications would continuously build a dictionary of words typed by user, they would fairly soon get a usable predictive dictionary for this particular user.

There are downsides. You start with nothing and there’s a problem of how to build a dictionary without annoying. You could tackle this by staying in learn-only mode until your dictionary-hit ratio rises above some threshold (80-90%?).

There are also pluses. You get a dictionary that’s much better fitted to your user than a generic one, since it actually has words he uses. That is if I’m not underestimating dictionaries used in modern mobiles.

What would make it even better is if such dictionary would be standardized so any application could use it.

Update: I was wrong, you can make a completely stand-alone application in Python. Sweet.