Wikireader development - Ideas and improvements

Sean Moss-Pultz sean at openmoko.com
Mon Oct 4 10:34:34 CEST 2010


Hi Patrick

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Patrick Beck <pbeck at yourse.de> wrote:

> i own a Wikireader since a month now and i am happy with the base
> functionality, but i have a few ideas and improvements and i am looking
> for other users they owns a wikireader (and develeops for it).
>
> Openmoko has not stopped the development of the Wikireader, but i think
> it can be useful to have a nice community around the project. Till now i
> have only found the following ressources:
>
> http://thewikireader.com/
> http://dev.thewikireader.com/
> http://github.com/wikireader/wikireader
>
> and see not a list or any other communication - i think the community
> list is not so wrong :)

Yes currently these are the only places... if something is missing let
me know. And I see what we can do.

> ==Improvements:==
>
> - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland - There is a small block on
> the right with information (population, language, capital, etc.) I think
> that a very useful imformation - how can we add them to the Wikireader?

Most of these are templates and within these templates there's HTML
tables. Currently we remove all tables since we haven't found an
elegant solution to displaying tables on our screen (it's only 240
pixels wide). You can look at:

  http://github.com/wikireader/wikireader/blob/master/host-tools/offline-renderer/ArticleRenderer.py

And see where we parse out tables. If you have some ideas how to
handle this better, we'd love to hear.

> - Table of Contents would be helpful to get a overview about the content
> of the whole article

On our todo list... but it's still a while away. We're really just
trying to get the base language support really solid.

> - searching in a article could be very usefull

Agreed!

> - The scrolling it a bit poor, because you can't read anything on the
> screen when you scroll - on the community list was a small patch
> discussed:
>
> http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2009-December/058462.html
>
> That patch works no more, but from the descriptions i find it very
> useful. A new version from maleadt was published in September:
>
> http://github.com/maleadt/wikireader/downloads
>
> It's unstable and not as inuitive as the first path but it is a start
> for a nice usability on the wikireader.
>
> ==Problems:==
>
> - A other problem is that tables and other special layouts are not
> interpreted from the parser. See for example:
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kfz-Kennzeichen_in_Deutschland
>
> On the Wikireader you get only a list from 0-9 and A-Z without any
> license plates.

Yes. (see above explanation)

> So how can we fix the problems and get new features in? I am only a
> python programmer but i hope i can help. This Thread should be a
> starting point to discuss new features and collect bugs - i think that
> should help Openmoko, too.

Just about everything is done in Python that has to do with parsing.
So you should be fine. If you are interested in developing, get our
codes from github, let us know when you have something good, and we'd
love to pull it back into future releases.

Feel free to email us if you have any questions!

Sean



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