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

---- 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.