Intuition - Home of Wiki2Touch

The “ImageGetter” is a Microsoft .NET framework application which downloads the images for Wiki2Touch. It’s not a cofortable or nice application, but that will be change now.

Here is the story:

I have a free day today. I’ve planed to start a new indexer for Wiki2Touch. Some reasons are to get more control over the articles contents and metadata. Further to join downloading and indexing article together with image retrieving into one application. Then taking the article categories into account in order to create packages only containing some but not all articles. Think of all medical related ones or all excellent ones. Support for some special namespaces (i.e. “Portal” or so) along with math support in the end needs a new indexer, too. And yes, uploading the results to the device.

I’ve decided to use the .NET framework from Microsoft. There were a couple of other option: C++, Java, PHP and so on. I like the .NET framework best and developing is much faster and less prone to errors than using C++. And also I love my Mac I still think the VS.NET developing environment from Microsoft is the best I can get.

When I got my Mac more than one year ago I first tried Mono. Mono is an open source project which allows you to run Microsoft .NET Framework based applications on non Microsoft operating system (like Linux, Mac OS X). I was disappointed in these days, it was not working for me, even not for very simple applications.

Anyway, because I only needed a few hours I’ve written the “ImageGetter” for Wiki2Touch in C# (.NET Framework 2.0). Now I was able to download the images for Wiki2Touch. But I was not completely happy with the result. The application didn’t runs directly on my Mac. I had to use Parallels which allows to run Windows on OS X.

But that has changed: Today I’ve compiled the “ImageGetter” using the latest version of Mono. And it worked right from the start. On Apple OS X. I only had to exchange the hard coded path separator char (”\” on Windows, “/” on Unix, now I’m using the value provided by the framework). Here is the result:

The “ImageGetter” running on OS X using the Mono framework.

Speed is fine: It downloads the images not slower than the version running under Windows. And for what reasons ever it crawls to more than 440.000 images I already downloaded in only 2 minutes. I don’t know why that is so fast on OS X, compared to Windows.

I see no reason why that shouldn’t work on Linux, too. The guys from the Mono project did a great job. The ImageGetter uses MD5 hashed, has a GUI, and downloads http content using threads. I’m impressed.

But it even getting better: The open source “SharpZipLib” library works without recompiling, too. This library is needed to decompress the Wikipedia article archives. The job the former “Indexer” did.

Conclusion: Everything is set up to create a nice and feature rich GUI based front end for Wiki2Touch which runs on Windows, OS X and Linux which is easy to use for everyone. I’ve just started.

I will upload the slightly modified sources to the Google code page during the day.

This entry was posted on Freitag, Mai 2nd, 2008 at 12:18 and is filed under iPod Touch/iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.