Intuition - Home of Wiki2Touch

Over at google code you now can download the sources of Wiki2Touch. The project is open source now under the GNU public license V3. Hopefully we’re seeing a lot of nice new features and fixes.

So everyone who like to contribute is able to do it now:

• Coding features or removing bugs. Maybe a better search, history or what else
• Writing documentation or other articles
• Designing the homepage of Wiki2Touch
• Creating new images or so
• …

If you cannot contribute anything but are felling that you like to do something consider donation. Not to me but to the “Tierschutzverein München e.V.”. This is an incorporated society which take care for animals. Donate directly on there homepage. A reason like “wiki2touch-tom haukap” is fine. The page is in German language but you should identify the PayPal/Credit Card signs on the right hand side.

Drop me a mail if have you donated. I will compile a list of donators and put it somewhere.

I really wanted to be sure: Not breaking anything. So I’ve checked the wikipedia dumps for de (ok), it (ok), es (ok), en (ok), fr (ok, but I can’t figure out the prefix for templates) and zh (which is Chinese, for the template prefix see fr).

Chinese is cool and it is working because of UTF-8 encoding. It simply works, Safary is able to display the letters. Wikipedia style linking works fine. I’m impressed! My first search phrase was the number “7″. A good start. I really can’t imaging how Chinese people enter letters. Maybe I will see it sometimes.

Maybe you ask yourself: Do I really upload every language specific database to my telephone? No! The sources for Wiki2Touch are compiling fine and running well on my Mac.

Yippy! Only one file! Fast as before. Cannot say if it is faster or not.

The codes for the indexer are already up on Google code. The url is http://code.google.com/p/wiki2touch/. Should be compile with MacOS, Windows or Linux. As soon as everything is ready I will upload compiled versions.

So expect a new version this weekend. Some more changes:

• Uwe will make an installer package. Great! Thanks a lot!
• I’ve cleaned up the “Media/Wikipedia” folder. Only the folders for the languages are left. I’ve moved the rest to the “Wiki2Touch.app” folder. You still can use the Wikipedia-Folder as the root for a webserver. Also true for Images.
• Out of the box there is a mini wikipedia database which holds help and better error messages. So after you’ve installed the version there is at least this database. So you get something else than “Article not found”. You get the reason why and how to fix it.
• Default port is now 8080 and can be changed.
• Default behavior of the server itself is to run a daemon. Just in case you need the command line.

Although the code is not bound to the iPhone/iPod Touch platform I’ve chosen to use that name. Basically because when I created the repository on google code the name “wikiserver” was already in use on sourceforge.

That also means that I’m going to upload the sources as soon as I learned how to set up a cvs system on my Mac. The project itself is up already.

I checked some of the suggestions here in the forum with not success.

Guess what: Since a couple of hours I’m a proud owner of an iPhone. Look on eBay if you need an iPod Touch/16GB.

As my model has only 8GB (the new 16GB iPhone are released today) I will enhance the indexer. It will also repackage the data files so that these should be a lot smaller. And further I hope to have everything in one data file. Copying thousands of files is not very comfortable.

This time this will be one independent program: Splitting (if necessary at all), repackaging, indexing. Maybe downloading the source. And from the start for Mac OS X and Windows.

Stay tuned.

First of all: I don’t have a problem releasing the source of the Wiki-Server application.

But that has to be done the right way: Opening a project on Google-Code or SourceForge. Why? To get a rcs repository so that more people can work together on the application.

Until today I only had one contact of a guy who would like to lend a hand and help in developing. After I’ve send him the codes I’ve never heard again from him. Hmm.

So unless there is no interest in participating in the project I will save the time setting up the project and releasing the sources.

Last week a friend of mine told me that there is an article on the German iPhone Ticker website. It compares some Offline Wikipedia Applications for the iPhone/iPod touch.

Here is the link:

http://www.iphone-ticker.de/2008/01/29/wikipedia-offline-die-ganze-welt-in-der-tasche/ 

You might want to know that there is another Offline Wikipedia solution. Have a look and Patrick’s site. Thanks Rizqi for the hint!

What I like about his application:

• The stripped down “database” files. Saves a lot of memory.
• Simple installation because of prepared indexes and modified download able data file (not sure if the later is allowed by Wikipedia).
• The way he’s doing searching. I really should add some AJAX stuff.

What I don’t like:

• How the articles are displayed. A lot of informations are simply not there because they are hidden by templates or tables.
• No language independence. You get English and that’s it.
  Patrick just dropped a note that you can use his software with other languages. More in the comments…
• To much bound to the OS/UI. I use my Mac to check new features and then I simply recompile it for the iPod Touch.

Joining both projects and then creating an easy to use indexer/data file creator for multiple platforms would be great.

Let me say thanks to everyone who’s actually involved or supporting the project in any way. Great support and way to go!

Timo, thanks for uploading the indexes and the rest to to rapid share. I appreciate it very much.

I’ve added the ability to let the user set the port for the server. Not released because neither the setting is stored nor retrieved from an eventually manually started server. Further I ran into a UI problem with 1.1.3. I don’t have 1.1.3 installed on my iPod touch, a friend of mine has on his iPhone.

While on 1.1.3: Looks like a lot of applications are not working anymore on that firmware. Mainly because the apps are started under the user account “mobile” and not “root”. Looks like that the mobile account is restricted. VT-100 terminal isn’t working anymore. Neither afpd.

For WikiServer it means that the server can be started from the WikiServer-App (and is running) but isn’t listing to the ip port. At least not 80. Maybe more luck with some higher port numbers (8080 or even more). Personally I will stick to 1.1.1 (or 1.1.2) until Apple releases the SDK by the end of the month.
Until then (on 1.1.3): You can start WikiServer using ssh as before and it works. But you can’t stop it with the application if started from the root account (using ssh).

Installation the software isn’t easy, I know. But here are some hints, annotations and tips as long as answers to the most questions:

• There is actually no convenient indexer. The indexing files are very large (en: 83 MB, de:17 MB). This is to much for my website. But it is possible to use Windows to index of course. Have a look at the comments.
• The web server “Apache” is not needed nor in any way involved. Apache cannot be used to server wikipedia pages. Of course you can use Apache for everything else, side by side.
• More worse, if Apache is installed, the wiki server cannot listen to port 80 and deliver pages. Port 80 is actually the default port for the wiki server and can only be change manually. Either change the server port for Apache or for the wiki server.
• To use a different port start the server from a command line (vt-100 terminal, ssh or so). Navigate to the “/Applications/WikiSrv.app/daemon” folder and run the server with “./wikisrvd -p 8080 -v-”. Instead of “8080″ you can use a different port if you like.
• I will add the ability to choose the port to the next release of the configuration program.
• The base path for the wiki server is “~/Media/Wikipedia/” (/private/var/root/Media/Wikipedia/).
• The wiki server can be used to deliver common html or other files. Simply put them into the base directory. This is then the root directory in the Safary browser. I.E. if you put “hello.html” into the folder ~/Media/Wikipedia/ you can load them in Safary with http://127.0.0.1/hello.html.
  Again: Apache is not used here!
• You can use Apache but then one of the servers (Apache or the WikiServer) must then run on a different port then 80.
• Everything that comes after the the virtual directory “wiki” (http://127.0.0.1/wiki/) will be threaded as the title of an articles and the software is looking for it. If found, the articles is displayed as a html page.

Hope it helps!