Confirmed - Wikipedia Offline Reader works on the iPhone with firmware 1.1.2
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Topic says it all. A friend of mine with an iPhone, 1.1.2, has installed the Wikipedia Offline Player and it’s working nice.
I’ve also created a nice icon for the home screen using Erica Saduns “OpenURL”. As soon as Apple releases the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch the installation will be much easier. Hopefully it will be in February this year as the promised.
Januar 10th, 2008 at 18:35
can’t wait for a nice and handy tool since i can’t get it to work how it is delivered now
keep up the good work
Januar 10th, 2008 at 21:13
Hallo!
I’ve been working on that last week as well and was happy with the result I developed 100% in php with the Apache / PHP packages available from StePackagaing… until I finally realized that this PHP package doesn’t have bzip support which kind of ruined it even though I was convinced it would fly when I took the time to upload everything on my iTouch…
Working well on my PC though, and I think there’s one thing my solution is good at: I’m not using Xapian as the search engine but a pure PHP solution that has the advantage of only taking ~180Mb for the index, and around 1h30 to create… and no compilation needed.
Since you’re much more advanced than me on this I’ll stop pmy efforts here and use your solution, but in case you’re interested in having a look at my search engine just drop me a mail.
The other advantage is that although Apache+PHP is not trivial to set up on the iphone, people may prefer running only one webserver rather than having many programs run an http server…
Anyway, great work you did, I’ll give it a try when I can compile Xapian
Januar 10th, 2008 at 21:58
Yann-
thanks for the comment and the kind words. As you, I’m not sure if Xapian is the right solution. On one hand it has a very fast search algorithm, even “like” searches. A direct search if you know for what you have to search for is easy (do a binary search). But the Wikipedia database has a lot of issues, and sometime template name differ in capitalization but are the right ones. Sometimes not. Ughh. Xpaian is able to handle that very well. But the index is large and takes a while to construct.
While we’re one templates: Finding and finally expanding them is really the worst problem. Something not solved with Thanassis solution.
I agree with you that it’s not very nice to have multiple webservers on the device. I’ve removed Apache from mine and using my solution. But that has no PHP support. Apache had some problems on my device, because a user account (apache) is missing and creating one is not so easy. So my logs are becoming larger and larger. And that on the system partition. The installation of Apache you get with the installer.app is not very good.
Yann, we should stay in contact because I’m really interested in an exchange to Xapian. Did you’re solution expanding the templates? I found out that that it needs a lot of time, even in a C++ application. I’m caching the templates now. So I’m wondering if PHP is fast enough for that. Expanding the templates is sometimes like getting 10 or more articles in a row.
I hope that I finally end with an application with downloads the bzip2 files, splits them, creates the index and ups it to the device. That would be really convenient.
-Tom