I went to the PhoneGap + Wikipedia event at Adobe immediately after the Wikipedia hackathon. I heard about it that Monday in the irc room O_O and thought initially that I couldn’t go, because I usually have Spot the Octopus rehearsal on Mondays… but that week, some Spots were sick and others out of town, so I decided to attend the meetup instead. And I’m glad I did — we got more info directly from Tomasz and Yuvi about why we should care about a Wikipedia phone app, why they’re using PhoneGap plus what they learned, and next steps. MOST interesting: how they’re encouraging editors to edit by using location and presenting them with “articles around you that need improvement”!!!!!
Here are official links to slides (via @WikipediaMobile) and video (via @stevesgill). =D
I was also super-excited that someone asked a question about easily surfacing the content of a page. She was interested in making the content more accessible, because people today are overwhelmed by all these tags and information. Tomasz even got a microphone over to me so I could say how Neil and I did it in our app (we used parse, not query, and regexed out all the html tags, and Neil thought of taking out everything in tables to skip the infobox! haha. It’s a bit hacky still.) And when I sat down, my phone vibrated, and there was a tweet from Words With Bears teammate Jen saying that she’d seen me on the livestream… haha!
Then I talked to Hearplanet, which is providing text-to-speech MP3s of places of local interest for tourists/city explorers. They’re using Wikipedia as one of their channels of information. Fascinating.
My notes from Tomasz’s and Yuvipanda’s talks are below / through the jump!
weinre
WEb INspector REmote (phone)
debug.phonegap.com – gives you a full instance of that browser
used to be in webibl? now in coffeescript
html5
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