Wikipedia iPhone redux
Back at the start of the year, I blogged about an app I wrote that allows you to store a complete copy of Wikipedia on an iPhone/iPod Touch.
The app got more attention than I expected, with tens of thousands of downloads in the first month, which I think made it one of the more popular apps for the jailbroken iPhone. (Not anticipating any of this, the non-existent documentation and installer ensured many were confused, and so someone made a YouTube installation tutorial that has over 57,000 views at time of writing. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.)
I also released the app’s source code, and it’s been pretty fun to work with a lot of talented people in improving it. The OLPC crew took an interest in it, and thanks to some cool work from Chris Ball and Wade Brainerd, the iPhone application was ported to the XO laptop. Chris announced in June that:
We’re going to be shipping the result to Peru on tens of thousands of laptops in the near future, and it should go up to hundreds of thousands if the other South American countries with OLPC deployments decide to include it in their builds too.
When the iPhone 3G was announced, I didn’t originally intend to port the application to the new version of the OS. The original app was a short Christmas project, and now that I’m working at Live Current, I don’t have much spare time to hack. But after a few hundred emails enquiring about a new version, I eventually felt too guilty not to. So I spent a weekend porting it to iPhone OS 2.0, added a handful of new features, and I’m happy to say that the end result is now available in the App Store.