Intuition - Home of Wiki2Touch

Although we had very nice weather the last couple of days I was able to make some more progress on Wiki2Touch, the offline Wikipedia reader for the Apple iPhone/iPod touch devices.

Over at Google code they are doing some maintenance work so the Wiki isn’t available. Usually I track changes over there.

Beside some bugfixes I’ve added support for <imagetag> tags (sometimes used as {{#tag:imagetag|…}} as well). Tapping on these image maps isn’t support yet but they are at least displayed. You can see some of these types of images at the bottom of this screen shot:

A sort of an “On screen display”

More interesting is for sure the shinny black menu in the middle of the screen. It appears and disappears once you tap somewhere on the screen (you must not hit a link). Now you can easily go to the TOC, the top or bottom of the article or back to the search page. For those who like to extend this “menu”: It’s a simple <div> tag so you may add what you like.

Any more suggestions what I should add to this panel?

Once you’ve jumped back to the search page it will now show you the last search result. That’s even true if you reached the page due to an icon on your home screen or a bookmark entry. The last search phrase is stored by the server, together with the language you have used.

And if you have more than once language installed you know see a drop down box to choose a language as the one you like to use:

GUI support for multiple languages

Sure, if you have only one language installed the select box is hidden.

If everything turns out fine I will release the updated version on the next weekend.

Skylar, the manager of the community source iPod Touch Fans, has listed Wiki2Touch. Thanks a lot!

You will find it under the “Misc” category. Maybe not the proper category, but the managers of the community sources are asked not to create categories on their own. So where else?

Skylar told me that he expects up to 150.000 downloads in the first month. That’s more than 10 times more as before.

I don’t expect that everybody will finally useit. The process of putting the necessary data file onto the device is still way to difficult and inconvenient for most of us. Guess what’s next on my list At least the build in help is a good start.

Yesterday night I’ve got a little bit crazy. Only to see how it looks I’ve uploaded the Chineses Wikipedia database. Here’s a screen shoot:

At least it looks nice to me.

So enough for now, back to work.

I’ve just released the latest version of Wiki2Touch, the offline WikiReader for the Apple iPod Touch or the iPhone. It was a long and sometimes stony way from the last version up to this. Trust me.

So whats new? As I’d said in the past, this version deals with rendering bugs. So it has no new features. Or decide for you’re own if you like to name one or the other change a new feature. Here is a brief summary:

• Template caching works without any change of rights now for firmware 1.1.3/1.1.4, too. If you’ve not modified anything in the past while using 0.60 together with firmware 1.1.3/1.1.4 you will see the articles now displayed much faster once the template is cached.
• Support for #expr/#ifexpr parser functions. Have a look at articles like “2008″ (the year 2008). Mainly all the links in the head area are computed by the use these new functions.
• Preliminary math support: At least the text from the math-tags is extracted and displayed with a gray background for better readability and the math symbol “Pi” is displayed as the Greek symbol. Nothing else.
• More than 30 changes for better rendering support. The changes covering smaller issues like to much spaces or line feeds, correct handling of headlines, reference lists and enumerations, up to the support of sometimes very complex templates (i.e. in the English edition articles like “Al Gore” or “George Washington”. And a bug which crashed the server was also removed.

You find a complete list over at Google Code (see the links on the right side).

Still one of my favorite screen shots from the tests

I’m glad to finally have this version out. I have lots of ideas for new features, starting from enhanced multiple language support, followed by making the server faster, adding a full text search index, support for certain Wikipedia namespaces (categories, portal, …) and so on.

But all this is useless without a stable basis. And, although I know that there are some minor issues still left, I think this version is it.

Installer support for the latest version was set up (thanks Sanford).

While on the subject “installing”: There are no major changes to the indexer or the articles database. You DON’T need to re-index anything or have to re-upload the “articles.bin” or the “images.bin”. No changes here! So as soon as the update shows up in the installer simply hit the button. A restart of the server after the installation is a good idea.

Have fun with the new version,

Tom