Hier noch ein weiterer Bericht von Emmanuel (User:Kelson), einem der
Offline-Programmierer aus der Schweiz.
Er hat zusammen mit dem Österreicher Christian, dessen Teilnahme am
Hackathon auch von Wikimedia Österreich finanziert wurde, an Wikipedia
Offline auf Android gearbeitet.
Grüsse,
Manuel
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Here a few things we have achieved during the Hackathon:
* setting-up qt4 dev. env. on Linux&Windows
* compiling and running the cordova-qt Wikipedia app port on Linux&Windows
* hacking the Wikipedia app. to make it loading zim contents (both
text&images)
* compiling the hacked app. for Android/ARM
* running the hacked app. on Android (emulator & Yuvi's device) and
loading contents from ZIM file runs well (HTML parsed in the HTML render
engine).
Unfortunately, we failed to display something (on both emulator&device):
although the app. was running, the whole screen was still black. We do
not exactly know was goes wrong, but we are pretty optimistic about
understanding the problem soon.
My conclusions: Cordova-qt seems to be a valid choice for the future
Kiwix framework. Prototype seems to be fast enough and the portability
seems to be really good (thanks qt&C++). It's reasonable thinking to
have a simple Kiwix-mobile app (providing a ZIM file picker, article
render and suggestion system) for this autumn. Regarding the qt4/qt5
version dilemma, it seems that what we do (introducing new protocols to
the render engine) should not really be different on qt4/qt5, so we
should not have many issues with it. We just need to wait the official
release the qt Android-port (end of 2012-begin of 2013) to use QT5
instead of qt4.
Regarding that perspective, would it be possible for you to sponsor for
Christian and me two tablets? It would be not only for testing purpose
but also for the dev. because the Android emulator is really slow and it
always takes many minutes to compile/upload/start the app... what really
slow down the dev. process. We thought to the Samsung Galaxy 2 which is
at the same time, powerfull enough and well used.
That's all, Thank you and Sumana for inviting us.