Bring The Entire Wikipedia Database To Your iPod Touch (and iPhone) For Use Offline!
by Jody Mitoma on January 31, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Something amazing has hit the iPod Touch front. One team calls it the iPhonePedia.app. The other, simply Wikipedia.app.
That’s right. There are actually two application versions of Wikipedia.com’s database that are available for the iPod Touch (and iPhone, of course).
One huge difference between the two is the size of the download. Wikipedia.app will require ~2GB’s of space, while the iPhonePedia.app will only consume an astonishing ~150MB’s!
Update (from Patrick [starter of Wikipedia.app] on Jan 4th, 2008)
…the iPhonePedia app needs you to download a dump from the main Wikipedia servers in addition to their 150MB file — so you end up
with 3.1GB of stuff (not 150MB). Wikipedia.app (the one I wroteneeds a little under 2GB (keeping this size down was one of the big
goals when developing it).
Here’s the basics on Wikipedia.app
What: An offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I wanted to write an iPhone app over Christmas, and so hacked this together during the break.
Why: It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of having the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. It’s the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy realised. EDGE is slow; search is slow; you’re abroad, in a plane, a tunnel, or on top of a mountain. You have an iPod Touch.
Size: It’ll consume about a quarter of your iPhone’s storage—the app, indexes and dumps are almost exactly 2GB together.
Completenes: This still has a lot of rough edges. Some articles can’t be opened, and it’s not too hard to crash the app.
Other: There’s also a mongrel-based ruby server for offline browsing on a PC (was used for debug during development). See sh/server in the source distribution. No screenshots yet.
Download
Application: Wikipedia.zip
Dump: enwiki-20071018-iphone.tar
Source: wikipedia-iphone-0.1.tar.bz2 (GPL)
Installation
Put the app in /Applications. Use something like Customize.app to get it onto your springboard. Untar the dump, and put the contents at /var/root/wp. If using Windows, check out the in-depth Windows installation instructions contributed by rebelxtnut.
Here’s the basics on iPhonePedia.app
iPhonePedia is a quite terrible name but summarizes it well: this project allows to run a local wikipedia database on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
You may be wondering what the hell is the point of wasting precious iPhone space for something you can just access onlie. Well, I personally don’t really see any, but I have an iPod Touch, hence the need for something offline and the smaller worries about disk space!
Check the following pages to know:
Sources:
- (iPhonePedia.app) http://trac2.assembla.com/iPhonePedia/wiki/FeaturesList
- (Wikipedia.app) http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/
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Posted in Application Related
February 1st, 2008 at 6:33 am
lol actually theres a 3rd one by http://haukap.net
February 1st, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Thanks for that!
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:53 am
I cant see the 150 MB one, 2GB is way too much for a 16GB iPod!
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Yea, it’s a little much for my 8GB iPod as well.
February 4th, 2008 at 4:04 am
iPhonePedia requires 150MB for the *search index*. In addition to that, it requires a 3GB dump from Wikipedia — so Wikipedia.app is over 50% smaller.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Thanks very much for that.
Sorry about the misunderstanding.
February 14th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I installed the Wikipedia.app and the 2GB dump, and other than a few minor quirks, this thing simply rocks. It’s so fun trying to “Stump Wikipedia” by throwing search after search at it. It’s truly amazing how much information is packed into this thing. You should now never have any excuse to not have something to read on your iPod Touch!
And as to the size, the 2GB hit is minor to me on my 8GB IPT because I’m really trying to leverage the IPT more as a next-generation PDA instead of a media player.
February 14th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Nice. Glad to hear it worked out for you. I have yet to install this Wikipedia app on my Touch, but I`m sure I will get to it soon enough. I`ve been really busy with other things as of late – especially today being Valentines day – hehe.