Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Localisation for #Kiwix

Now that the #Wikimedia Foundation has decided to concentrate on openZIM for off line readers, Kiwix has gained a lot of prominence because it is still the only software that uses it.

Functionality to make a selection of articles for off line reading is being developed by PediaPress. This will be done by extending the Collections extension.

The good news is that work is now under way to internationalise Kiwix. This will make it possible for Kiwix to be localised at translatewiki.net.

As the presentation of data in the openZIM format is separate from the data, other off line readers like WikiReader or OkaWix have the option to adopt this format as well. When they do, they will profit from the work by the Wikimedia Foundation as well and when they do there will be a healthy competition for the hearts and minds of our off line readers.
Thanks,
       GerardM

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, there is also a ZIM reader on Symbian (https://github.com/cip/WikiOnBoard/wiki/) which works perfectly on my Nokia E71, and I have seen a prototype of the same reader running on Android.

On Linux systems the two reader applications vido (GTK) and qvido (Qt) are available. While they are very limited in their functionality and GUI they were made to run on embedded devices (http://www.linux.com/news/embedded-mobile/netbooks/296251:a-review-ben-nanonote-gets-small-with-embedded-linux).

Apart from that there are people just using the zenoreader component which part of openZIM as a command line webserver.

Okawix, which is also a well-known and good offline solution has announced end of 2009 that they are switching to ZIM as well (http://blog.wikiwix.com/en/2009/12/07/okawix-et-openzim/), but I am not sure if that happened until now.

Pascal Martin said...

Well not yet for okawix, because there is no solution to zim for android platform.