Intuition - Home of Wiki2Touch

After the Easter break I’m going on to fix rendering bugs. In order to do that I have to finally add support for #expr and #ifexpr “templates”. Basically you can use them to do calculations. Samples are the pages dealing with years (i.e.e 2002). At the top of the pages is an area which list previous and next years, decades and centuries. Every link in this header is calculated based on the page’s name. Compare your screen layout and the one online and you will see what I mean. So Wiki2Touch is now able to render them as well.

Calculation are use somewhere else, too. I.e. the English article about New York uses them to display changes of the population in percent. The current version is not displaying anything here but the next will.

That was one of the last great challenges. Except for “math” support the rest is even simpler. I’m really glad to finally have that also implemented. I’m continuing iron out a few open rendering issues.

There is currently no new version available. The current is ten day “old” and still fine and stable. But you may have a look at my “work in process” list over at Google code if you like.

Tonight it’s 4 days (or 96 hours) after the release of 0.60. App. 3500 downloads according to Google’s download counter. 0.52 was slightly over 8000 in 2 weeks (or 336 hours) (every download includes on download by myself testing Sandfords installer script).

When I compare these numbers to the count of comments and posts here and on the forum I’m getting very very happy. The majority of free software using users don’t say anything unless there is a problem. Like me, too. But how much posts are there dealing with issues? Around 10 or so. If not less. Mostly installation problems. A good start.

That doesn’t means that there are no bugs. So the next version will more or less dedicated to fix rendering issues. But for the wast majority of articles there are simply no problems.

Anyway, it’s the weekend of Eastern and I will have a couple of free days. I will spent them with my family so don’t expect to much news in the next few days.

Thanks for all your support so far and have some nice days, too.

Maybe you already know Sanford Poon, the guy behind the installer support for Wiki2Touch. And maybe you already noticed that there is a second entry int the category “Temporary” once you’ve added “http://168weedon/i” to your installer sources (to install Wiki2Touch). The entry has the name “BossPrefs Wiki2Touch Control”.

“BossPrefs” is a separated tool which you may install to enable/disable certain services on your device. SSH, EDGE, Wifi and a lot of other things. And by adding Sanford script Wiki2Touch, too:

Great, thanks a lot!

(BTW: The screen shot above was done without any additional program. Only using the firmware 1.1.3 or 1.1.4. Have a look at http://www.iphone-ticker.de to see how to enable this feature. Sorry, this site is in German language only)

Yesterday I’ve updated my device to use the latest firmware 1.1.4. Using 1.1.2 before I really love the new features. Adding icons to the home screen and arranging them is great.

The good news is, that Wiki2Touch is running fine on 1.1.4. You only have to make sure that the articles.bin/images.bon and so on must go to “/var/mobile/…” instead of “/var/root…”. Same as in 1.1.3. If you’re using Sandfords installer source (recommended, the link is http://168weedon/i) you will be guide because it script created the folder structure below ~/Media/Wikipedia for you.

But there is one disadvantage. Wiki2Touch trys to create a folder named “cache” below every installed language folder (i.e. ~/Media/Wikipedia/en/cache) and stores preprocessed templates to that folder. That is way faster than processing them every time they are used. And that’s not working under 1.1.4. Wiki2Touch is actually not able to create the”cache” folder on it’s own. And that means it runs way slower than on 1.1.2 if you have templates enabled.

Workarounds:

• Disable templates (makes it faster but with a lot less information)
• Manually create a folder named “cache” below your language code folder and set the owner and/or rights in such a way that the user mobile is able to write file into that folder. “chmod -R mobile ~/var/mobile” may also work for you. You can tell if it’s working as soon as you see files inside that folder once you’ve displayed an article. You don’t need to stop/start the server, it will use the cache on the fly but be sure to have templates enabled.
• Live with it until the next version is out

Otherwise it’s working nice on 1.1.4.

If you like, over at Google Code, I’ve uploaded version 0.60. There are a lot of changes.

Diacritic aware suggestion list

Here is a list of the major changes:

• Diacritic aware search/support for simplified Chinese character conversion: I.E. “Ä” becomes “a”, hence the phrase “apfel” will find “Äpfel”. Chinese traditional characters are converted to simplified Chinese once. I don’t know if the later this is really working.
• Enhanced image support: The properties of images (size, placement, title and description) are take into account. Further, the smaller 120px thumbs are scaled up by the browser to 180px. Yes, they get blurry but that’s ok. I’m really impressed how fine it’s looking now.
• The indexer finds a lot more images. For the German edition over 440,000! If you install them all (I did that only on my Mac) you hardly never see “Image not found” anymore.
• Achim’s “uploader tool” was updated to reflect the new features.
• The suggestions list looks very nice now.
• By clicking the globe on the main page you will be taken to an arbitrary article.
• Much more smaller changes and bug fixes, for a complete list have a look at the Wiki at Google Code.

I’ve also compile a small list of screen shot. Have a look at here if you like.

Achim’s download and indexer tool evolved to be a simple and easy tool to get the offline Wikipedia database files to yor device. Sorry to say but I wasn’t so productive this week. I’ve only fixed the bug that the “Home” folder on 1.1.3 was “/var/root” and not “/var/media”. This is necessary on 1.1.3 for a more or less one touch installation together with Achims tool and the installer.But because this was the only change I did I will not release a new version only because of this single change.We’ve did some changes to the Google Code page and the forums page. First, you’re not able to make comments on Google Code Wiki anymore. Please use the forum instead. On the forums I’ve change the “feature request” section to “Feature request and bugs”. So let’s add bug also to this section. In the past it was a bit anoying to look into three different place to find out what’s up.

Maybe you don’t know but Achim Bursian joined the dev team. Welcome!

He’s finished the alpha version of a GUI indexer and transferer tool. You simple select the original Wikpedia database in his tool. It will then index the file and upload (!) it to the device (either the iPod Touch or an iPhone). Because the tool is using the USB connection the upload is much faster and more stable than using Wifi or so.

Sorry: Actually available only for Windows.

You find some more instruction on Google Code and discussions on the forum.

Great job Achim!

And once again a new version.

This deals with now finilized image support. I will describe how it works and how do you can create image packs over at Google Code (or in the forum). The tools to build the packages are out, too.

I was able to download app. 332,000 thumbnail images from Wikipedia (German Edition). There were smaller than the original once (120px instead of 180px). 2.85 GB!

But there ware way to get it smaller. I’m now using a version which “only” needs 1.5 GB. I will write another Blog entry about that in a couple of hours.

… now points to the Google-Code page for Wiki2Touch.

Anyway, I was able to download the images for the German Wikipedia. Thumbs with the size of 130px 120px (x-axis). Usually Wikipedia is using 180px. I’ve decided to use 130px 120px because most of the images are much smaller. I’ve got 333275 out of 343896 images. The remaining was either not found or to large. I’ve not downloaded pictures larger than 128 kBytes.

I’ve stored the images in two different locations: One with the source of WikiCommons, the other once with the source of the German Wikipedia. So maybe the ones from Common can be reused. I will put them to two different files. Speed on the device is fine and doesn’t matter. So there is no problem.

Actually I don’t know how large these two files are gonna be. And maybe I will drop some larger ones. I will keep you informed.

I try to get everything I have out this weekend. This will include changes to the application (support for a commons image file), the Chinese JavaScript fix, a language aware indexer (because of language depended image prefixes), configurable image prefix for other languages than English and German and of course the source for the image downloader.