Intuition - Home of Wiki2Touch

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.

This is mostly a bug fixed version. But you’re now able to get the list of hits right from the start. So I removed the “Go” button because it’s not necessary anymore.

The “article not found” bug for the English edition is also history.

Image support is in and a packager for images is also available (OS X and Windows) but the spider, which downloads the images, is not ready yet. But the indexer spills out a list of used image names now.

So if you’re focusing problems (mainly the users of the English edition) update to this version. Otherwise stick with the previous one. Over at Goodle code I’ve added a list of changes.

I’ve spent the day to add better image support to the Wiki2Touch reader. The old style is still working (simply put the images you like to the “Images” folder). The new style is one file where all the images (only thumbs) are in. Just like the articles.

I’ve also written a program to download the images from Wikipedia. But that takes a while! It’s not done here.

In the end not every image will be available. Here’s why:

• Some images are to large, even as thumbs. A lot of animated gifs for example. Yes, we can try to reduce the size.
• A few number of images can’t be found at all. That’s because it’s unclear where the images are stored. “Commons” or other areas.
• Last but not least: For some images I can’t get the name without completely rendering the article. If an image is used only inside a template it’s not easy to find the image. Because there is no Wikipedia style link. This link is created after the template is expanded. Yes sure, there are the database dumps for the image database.

While we’re on templates: The “facts” are nearly all the time displayed using templates. Infoboxes like company information, cite information, plant information and so on are templates. Not having template support is more worse than not having pictures. Look at the screen shot below: The facts about Apple are not display without having template support. You simply don’t get the information you want.

Only the text but not the facts.

I’ve continued the work to get the application more user friendly. This time not the indexing process but the application itself. I know you will love that new feature:

In fact, some AJAX style code which gives you a list of the first 25 found articles after you’ve entered the 4th letter.

One more feature: A magnification glass gets you back to the home screen. On a long article simply touch the title bar and then the new icon. Ready to enter a new search phrase. Yes, you can return to the top of a web page by touch the title bar. Here is a picture of my beloved article about “Apple”. Also notice that an annoying rendering bug was fixed (the phonetic text link is now displayed correctly):

So grab yourself a copy. It’s already up at google code. Because the indexer has not change (much) you don’t need to build a new index. Copy and start!

P.S.: Hiding the browsers address bar didn’t works on 1.1.3 so I left that feature out.

P.S.S.: Now when I look at the first screen shot I think to myself: The go button isn’t necessary anymore. I will remove that in the next version.

As promised I’ve uploaded the newest version. Download it at the google code page.Whats new?

• A new indexer makes it a lot more easier to use. Simply download the desired articles bundle from Wikipedia and start the indexer with “indexer [name-of-the-downloaded-bundle]”. After a while (English app. 50, German 12 Italian 6 minutes) there is only one file called “articles.bin”. Put that on your device and your done.
• The indexer is available as an executable file (Windows version is coming soon is included). No development tool or experience necessary anymore.
• A build-in Wiki database which displays error messages a lot nicer and also has a help page.
• You can turn of the feature that templates will be expanded. Sure, a lot of info is lost then (for example the nice period system on the articles about an element) but it is much faster. The decision is up to you.
• The port can easily changed and is now 8080 by default. This prevents problems with Apache (if installed but that is NOT necessary for Wiki2Touch).
• The home page has a “Help” button.
• Cleaned up “Media/Wikipedia” folder. Only the folder for the installed database files are left. Everything else…
• … is gone to the “Wiki2Touch.app” bundle. That makes installation much easier.
• Wiki2Touchis now “Open Source”, based on the GNU license V3. Source is freely available.

Certain rendering issues will be addressed in the next version. Thanks to Nicolas (from iphone-ticker) for running the forum. Also thanks to Kim and Uwe for starting to help. Before I forget: Uwe is working on an installer package. But he’s also busy IRL.