Earlier this year the Wikimedia Foundation adopted the ZIM file format by openZIM[1] as its standard for displaying web content offline. ZIM is being developed since February and already has come a long way. It is working nicely and running smoothly even on embedded devices such as the Ben NanoNote[2] as well as the Neo Freerunner[3].

This flexibility and portability the project owes to its internal structure. Instead of a single, complex process, OpenZIM is designed to run in between existing applications. The ZimReader acts as a web-server allowing the user to browse the wiki’s content with any browser available. The ZimReader as well as the ZimWriter, used to generate the ZIM files, are written in C++ and thus platform independent. ZIMlib can also be used as a drop-in, to make your application instantly ZIM-aware. The specifications of the ZIM format can be found on the project’s wiki[4], alternative ZIM implementations - in your favorite programming language or framework - are welcome.

The heart of the project however is the ZIM format[4]. It is designed to be an efficient and universal way of storing large wikis in a single file. It can be used to compress virtually any data from a given database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQlite or Oracle) scheme or from a collection of files. “With ZIM we are trying to introduce a standard for offline wiki applications”, the project team explains. Applications on platforms such as the iPhone, webOS or Symbian are also invited to join and with the Wikimedia Foundation already preparing automatic ZIM generators for the Wikipedia, it is only a matter of time.

The holy grail of ZIM is offline editing. “This is a must”, Manuel Schneider, who is leading the openZIM effort, said and surprisingly added “The road is clear and the mechanisms in place, all that is needed is implementation”. The project aims to have this ready next year. The process how to merge edits back is currently being discussed between different projects and the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

Of course, there have been several attempts in the past to create offline versions of the wikipedia and other wikis. However, what was missing was a cleanly structured and thought-through approach to solving the issues at hand. Open standards and collaboration, spanning across multiple platforms and areas of expertise, are vital in such an endeavor. OpenZIM is just that. A project were both, Wiki writers as well as application developers, meet and work together towards this standard.

“Bringing Wiki content to offline devices in a standardized and exchangeable way, using open standards and free software”, is a bold and big goal indeed, but the openZIM team is going to tackle it one step at a time. As mentioned earlier the ZIM implementation is already functional and has been used in both commercial and free products. The current construction sites are the article categories and full text indexing as well as increasing performance while minimizing the memory footprint.

If you want to get involved in the openZIM project or have any questions or comments check their wiki and contact them via their mailing list[5].

1. http://www.openzim.org
2. http://www.qi-hardware.com/products/ben-nanonote/
3. http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner
4. http://openzim.org/ZIM_File_Format
5. http://openzim.org/Mailinglist

my trip to Paris has many nice aspects, one of them I spent more time on irc today than over the last few weeks combined. One thing that popped up was vmx’s write access to the paroli git.

Today I finally managed to activate it. vmx has been helping mdt to merge the tacheles and master branches to allow proper development again :) Of course there is more refactoring, so the tacheles branch is still there, but with a different purpose this time :)

vmx uses paroli on debian and as I said has been very helpful and involved in many discussions lately. So I say thank you and welcome vmx :)

In related news:

Due to my laziness, which convinced me not to set up a mailman on my server, we have created a google group to enhance our communication, as we are getting more developers, which are all eager to add their own ideas and touches to paroli.

You are all invited to join the discussion there and guide us to making paroli a better application :)

Stay stuned :)

/mirko

After yet another long period of not blogging here comes one of these rare occasions.

Several things I want to run through :)

I think it is official now that Angus will not continue to pursue the path of a separate distribution but put his time and effort towards a stable branch in SHR. I am not sure yet what that will mean for paroli but I hope not too many bad things :)

In general I can say that the project is still up and running and that we make progress, in small steps but progress. Just the other day did vmx and mdt complete the merge of the tacheles branch and master. This brings a few changes in the background and in essence means a lot of work as most of the services will have to be adapted. However, I am very happy about this as it was time that the core of paroli got cleaned and restructured to make things more flexible and usable.

I will try to get on to this and I have heard that more and more people work on small things surrounding paroli. Please do not be put off by me not responding instantly or taking a while, if you think it is too long, just pinch me again. I want to give more developers access to the git itself as I see me as the bottleneck right now. So let me know if you wanna join and do things with us :)

The merging will also allow paroli to more easily run on top of pyneo[1] without loosing support for fso.

As for myself I am working a lot on Qi Hardware[2], mainly spreading the word, getting software and hardware developers interested and supporting them with what they need. So if you wanna help out there let me know :) One of the great parts of my job is to distribute “early access hardware” to new projects in our projects effort [3]. So yesterday I received 13 samples. 2 went to OpenWrt[4] right away as they are building the “official” image for the Ben NanoNote.

I was terribly excited to finally hold a “Ben” in my hands and I wanted to share a few pictures [4] with you. I hope you like them :)

I will visit a few places and conferences over the next couple of weeks/months. So I might be coming to your area :) I will post when and where I’ll be and always love small meetings in pubs or likewise to discuss Qi Hardware, Paroli, the NanoNote or whatever else comes our way :)

Have a good one,

/mirko

[1] http://www.pyneo.org

[2] http://www.qi-hardware.com

[3] http://www.qi-hardware.com/2009/08/27/qi-projects-launch/

[4]

Ben NanoNote Top

Ben NanoNote opened

NanoNote compared to Freerunner

it has been a very long time since I gave an update on the paroli project. A lot
has happened since, the most dramatic change, of course, being the shift of OM’s focus away from smartphones and towards Project B, this brought with it staff cuts on the paroli project. Where there were 3 people before, only one is left for now, me :)

However, development on paroli continued and I think it has come a long way since. I wanted to give an update on the functions and features as well as problems that I currently see in paroli.

What is new:

• a settings app which includes:
  a switch allowing to change from fullscreen to windowed mode
  (in settings hit: Display -> Profile and wait a few seconds)
• a basic wifi manager
  you can enable and disable wireless and scan for networks as well as join them (incl encryption)
• most of the fso settings such as Delivery Reports for messages, Call diverting, profile configuration and PIN settings
• gprs settings
• Time settings
• basic Network settings (on this page you will also find which Network you are currently registered with)
• the design should now be displayed correctly regardless of the window size (it is all relative values now, only some images have pixel values)
• visual feedback for most buttons
• when registering fails, paroli will continue to load and continuously retry to register
• message forwarding (hit the number in message details) was fixed
• problem with 2 incoming calls fixed (for the time being paroli only allows one)
• hitting the desktop icon a second time *should* check whether paroli is already running and if so not start a second instance but show the homescreen instead (this should in theory be handled via dbus however we do have troubles with that for the time being)
• when you shut down paroli using illume’s topshelf, a window will be displayed asking you whether you want to keep paroli running in the background, which allows you to keep on accepting calls etc
• and many small fixes all over the place

known problems in paroli:

• not all buttons give visual feedback on click
• some buttons are really hard to hit
• too little documentation
• screen registers input events even if paroli is busy
• calling not stable (seems like a mix of problems in paroli and in the framework)
• too few error messages
• graphics part too slow
• missing certain settings as well as a cleaner settings grouping
• connman sometimes stops answering to dbus calls and paroli is not handling that very well

the next steps:

• fixing, fixing, fixing
• get settings for bluetooth pairing (mainly for audio headsets)
• get gps settings (activate/deactivate)
• pim switch backend to opimd once it is ready
• fix design flaws (size and feedback)
• try to switch graphics backend to use libeflvala to gain speed
• major code-cleaning and optimization

I am sure there are other areas that deserve attention as well. If you want to dive into paroli and improve it, I am happy about any help I can get.

If you find bugs please report them to:
http://www.paroli-project.org/trac

If you have fixes/patches send them to mirko [at] openmoko.org or if it is a huge number of fixes and you wanna dive deeper into paroli let’s talk about git access.

Happy calling,

/mirko

The best way to try paroli is by installing the latest om2009 unstable:
http://downloads.openmoko.org/distro/unstable/NeoFreerunner/

and soon the next testing image.

You can also download the source at:
http://git.paroli-project.org/?p=paroli.git

or the package from:
http://downloads.openmoko.org/repository/unstable/armv4t/

PS:  for screeshots and general feature overview check http://www.paroli-project.org/running-paroli/

But it got me dreaming, dreaming of a paroli release party. Of course, we are almost through with milestone 2 and I am very happy that we handed most of the stuff over to the QA team, but it is not the real feeling yet. So I thought of challenging the team and me as well as other connected and highly appreciated people to the following:

Release of Milestone 3 by march 13th. It should contain a reliable paroli-core, usable apps - i/o, people, msgs and tele and be available on an image that comes with paroli pre-installed and showing in 480×640.

It might sound a bit eager seen that we face lots of problems along the way, but I have faith and trust in the team to manage this.

Charlie who has been building the basis in the form of tichy and is fighting problems like extravagances in the gui department or api changes in fso and python.

Jeremy who is biting his way through a very neat design implementing as much as possible in edje and embryo to create an almost independent design.

And of course Angus, who is not part of the paroli team, but still contributes a lot to the progress, by building images, the packages and hinting at inconsistencies and possible problems in design and code.

So how about it, we get the release and you the party?

Paroli Milestone 3 party in your area? Let us know what you think.

/Mirko and the paroli team

It outlines how to create a simple app, write a simple service and do some basic interaction with edje.

You can find the tutorial here : starter-kit.pdf

and the corresponding files (paroli-src as well as tutorial src) : startup.tar

Have fun :)

/mirko

and don’t forget:
website: http://www.paroli-project.org
bug tracker: http://www.paroli-project.org/trac
source: http://git.paroli-project.org
api: http://www.paroli-project.org/api

Some highlights:

Paroli comes equipped with a launcher now, which will handle the loading and display of paroli applications. We made this choice because we realized that we don’t have the capacity to follow this path right now. However the code is still flexible to keep all possibilities on the table for later.

Furthermore we focused on cleaning the code a bit and creating a solid base which will speed up the process in the future. To give a better insight in what paroli is and how it works we have put the api online and it is viewable on the paroli website.

We have taken down some of the application subpages on the website and will updated them with descriptions and pictures of what we are trying to achieve.

There is a FAQ section which needs more input, so we would encourage you, if you have questions, post them as comments to the FAQ page.

We also updated the running paroli page and split it into a “from source” and “from package” section. Due to package building problems there currently is no package available, we are feverishly working to resolve this.

We are confident to continue on our path and will keep you updated.

/the paroli team

website: http://www.paroli-project.org

bug tracker: http://www.paroli-project.org/trac

source: http://git.paroli-project.org

Our last update was a while back but development continued and, despite sickness, vacations, Christmas, New Year’s as well as jet lags, a lot has been accomplished.

Most importantly, you can now find a paroli package in the testing repository[1] which can be installed via opkg.

The package[2] is at pre-alpha state but the main phone functions are available and ready to be tested. Please note paroli is not considered a daily phone app, yet. You will find it can be rather unstable at times and might not always react the way you would expect ;) We hope that with the help of the community and lots of hard work we can reach a state where paroli can be considered reliable soon.

Information on how to run and use paroli can be found here[3]

We also have opened a new base for information, updates and bug tracking:
http://www.paroli-project.org

The main part is a blog which we will use to inform of small changes, publish tutorials and interesting facts we discover along the road. The page also contains a rough overview of our goals and how we plan to get there, it is a bit scarce right now, but will be filled up  continuously.

Our new bug tracker resides at http://www.paroli-project.org/trac . It is rather virgin up to now so we encourage you to test paroli and note your findings ;)

We also moved our source repository which can now be found at:
http://git.paroli-project.org/?p=paroli.git;a=summary [4]

As you can see the paroli has great plans for 2009 and we hope some of you will join us and follow our efforts.

/The paroli Team

[1]
http://downloads.openmoko.org/repository/testing/armv4t/

[2]
A rough overview about how this package differs from the last tichy package:

Tichy migrated into paroli-core and is now a vital part of paroli.
It is a slimmed down and more paroli focused version. Among other things EFL is now the default graphical library and the starting process has been optimized.Yaml was replaced with ParseConfig due to performance issues.Plus lots of other small, nifty details.

[3]
http://www.paroli-project.org/running-paroli/

[4]
checkout via git clone http://git.paroli-project.org/paroli.git