Hi,
I agree that - while pretty stable - there is still some room for improvement of
the zimlib.
E.g. better tools, incremental updates (very nice, although also quite a challenge
regarding provisioning of the updates). Furthermore, a location based index
would be very welcome
(To allow finding articles close to a location).
Regardless of this, I still believe that the most critical point for the
continued success of
the zim format, and offline wikipedia in general, is to have an automatic
wikipedia dump in place.
See Emmanuel's proposal
(
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Mediawiki_DumpHTML_extension_improvement).
I'd really hope that this can be implemented in the course of this year.
I very much appreciate if there is a zim-meeting this year. Even so I cannot
promise yet
that I can attend a zim-meeting at Linux-Tag in Berlin. Anyway, I'd acclaim if
we find a
sponsor, who covers parts of the travel costs.
Regarding my work on zim mobile phone apps, these are my planned next steps:
1. Release WikiOnBoard 2 for Symbian^3
Basically finished, except for translation.
Should be available in Nokia Store in the course of this month.
Main difference is the significantly improved user interface.
See
http://cip.github.com/WikiOnBoard/ for some screenshots.
Note, that this new version has basically been created in the course
of the attempt to implement a Meego version of WikiOnBoard. While
there is basically a working Meego Version as well, it has some major
usability issues (i.p. scrolling in article) which I cannot fix with
reasonable effort. Therefore unfortunately I've currently no plans to
release a Meego version.
2. Wikipedia-Android-App-Zim-Support
I did some work on this last September.
As now the official Wikipedia-App is released,
I think it's a good moment to continue working on the zim integration.
In addition I hope that there will be an english wikipedia zim dump without
pictures available soon (Emmanuel, any news on this topic?). The
picture loading performance issue is then much less relevant.
However, I hope that I can find a solution for the picture performance at least
for Android 4 ICS.
Best regards,
Christian