Offline Wikipedia on the Apple iPod Touch
Topic says it all. The iPod Touch (as well as the iPhone) is a great device. As my NAS it’s more or less an embedded device, too. And it shares an ARM processor.
The Touch has enough memory to hold the German (app. 900 MB, zipped), the English (app. 5 GB) or both Wikipedia databases. But there was no reader. Based on the ideas in the article “Building a (fast) Wikipedia offline reader” by Thanassis Tsiodras I’ve written a C++ program. It is in fact a small webserver, including a (simple) parser and a simple html renderer. And the ability to get the right wiki markup based on the articles title.
BTW: Nice to have a webserver on the Touch anyway, think of viewing pdf or so.
After dealing two days with the developer toolchain for the iPod Touch (same as the iPhone), cross compiling xapian and bzip2 (the later was easy) it is now running. Wow! It took 3 hours to get anything onto the device (using MacFuse, ssh-filesystem and WLAN).
Now the fun part just begins: Brushing up the renderend html, addind table support, adding a nice search page, adding a logic for disabling not working links (means not written articles).