Lyon 2015

This page summarizes the action plan for the Kiwix mobile hackathon 2015, a WikimediaCH effort to improve Kiwix mobile related solution.

Goals

Release a solution to allow to create quickly a bundle Kiwix4Android+ZIM

• App should allow to quickly/easily get the content (the content should be available in the app or as a companion file)
• App appearance/branding should be customizable
• App description and publication process in the Google Play should be able to run from the command line
• Solution should allow to automatically update bundles if Kiwix app or/and new version of the content is available
• Solution should be able to deal with hundreds of app

Fix bugs on Kiwix for Android

• Fix Kiwix for Android compilation on OSX
• Fixed Help menu item on Android linking to Welcome page
• Harmonize Android SDK/API versions between linux and osx
• Close tab behaviour problem on Android
• Unable to download an epub
• Add HTML audio/video support
• Title of the "Open ZIM file" view has the wrong language
• Kiwix should keep the fullscreen settings
• Try to publish multiple APKs for kiwix (one per arch) to save on size/bandwidth
• Fix compilation of zimwriterfs on osx
• Add categories to ZIM

FFOS hackathing

Play around with FFOS hack to read ZIM file. Try to setup a roadmap to publish Kiwix for FFOS.

Output forecast

• New version of Android with many bug fixes.

• Three automated generated apps:
  • Medical encyclopedia (English)
  • Encyclopedia of Venezuela (Spanish)
  • Wikivoyage (English)

Achievements

• Install Mobile frontend extension on openZIM and Kiwix web sites
• Optimize the TED talks template for mobile phones
• Optimize the Youtube scraper template for mobile phones
• Speed up mwoffliner by introducing --skipCacheCleaning option
• Make new version of the "Ray Charles" demo ZIM file for Android
• Make the Android app support epub and pdf reading
• Fix search box in landscape mode
• mwoffliner able to deal with private wikis
• Install zimbalaka at http://zimbalaka.openzim.org/
• Improve manageContentRepository.pl to remove outdated files
• New offline version of Encyclopedia de Venezuela
• Removed legacy support for Android Gingerbread and succesfullyy updated all dependencies and refrences
• Fixed zimwriterfs compilation on OSX
• Fixed Kiwix Android compilation on OSX
• Upgrade Kiwix for Android to use API22
• Add new zoom functionality to the Android app
• Merged the Activity with the Fragment (this has been the main cause of crashes in the Android app)
• Redid the Settings screen of the Android app
• Added an entirely new tab system to the the Android app
• Add new ProgressBar to the WebView of the Android app
• Updated the Android app to Material Design and updated a lot of icons and string resources
• Created a a script to build Custom Apps (Kiwix Android + content) either as Play Store Expansion file or embedded in ZIM file
• Checked that Evopedia can read ZIM file with ServiceWorkers + iframe
• Publish bundles of Wikimed and Wikipedia in Bambara
• Created a script to automatically upload APK (and expansion file) to the Play Store
• Created a script to update Play Store infos (details, listings, images)
• Created a script to generate Android icons for Custom Apps
• Updated Kiwix Android build process (dependencies, updates and our script: build, sign, install, etc)
• Proof of concept of Kiwix for Firefox OS

Impact

Kiwix for Android is now well installed in the Android landscape, global rating is really good (4.33/5) and the most successful offline reader for Wikimedia projects. But, although this good performance, we only have 25.000 users having it installed. We think that the app under-performs in term of audience. To our opinion, one of the main reason is that it is too complicated for end users to deal with individual ZIM downloads. An other reason is that people are interested in content and not in the app, and they search that way and don't find Kiwix. Having one dedicated app per content should help us to reach a broader audience and increase the number of Kiwix users by many factors.

Method

Let 3-4 Kiwix developers meet during a week to make this step.

Place

Lyon, France

Agenda

1st -> 8th June 2015

People

• Emmanuel
• Renaud
• Rashiq
• Nicolas (remote)

Costs

Around CHF 3.000.