Porting Wikipedia Mobile to the BlackBerry PlayBook

Update: Now Available at BlackBerry App World.

It all started from a tweet late sunday night:

OK Wikipedia app for android must be the best phonegap app ever. > 4.5 stars. Top trending on the market. > 350k installs. All in 2 weeks!—
dave johnson (@davejohnson) January 24, 2012

The Wikipedia guys created an amazing phonegap app for android and iOS and had open sourced it here.  Quickly looking at the source and running the app in ripple it was clear that this would also make a great app for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™.

After forking the repo I put the contents of the app up on my personal webserver and used a webworks app I wrote that points to it.  This allows me to quickly test and develop webworks apps on the simulator or a real playbook. You can pick up my config.xml here. A good tutorial on setting this available on our support forums.

Once I got the app running on a real playbook I noticed some rendering issues in Ripple and in the simulator. Because we at RIM want to provide the best tools available for development I logged a bug for ripple and forwarded off a screenshot of the incorrect rendering in the simulator to the proper channels.

Once I had the app running on the PlayBook and had done some smoke testing it felt good so I updated the build script and quickly had a proper PhoneGap app ready to be pushed back to github.

Just finished a port of the @WikimediaMobile app to the @BlackBerry #PlayBook. Easy since it used @phonegap github.com/gtanner/Wikipe…—
Gord Tanner (@gordtanner) January 24, 2012

The news spread fast …

@gordtanner Awesome! Send us a pull request and join us on irc #wikimedia-mobile (freenode)—
Wikimedia Mobile (@WikimediaMobile) January 24, 2012

We are currently working on merging the code into the Wikipedia branch and getting it into AppWorld quickly.

If you would like to check out the code for yourself you can pull down the code and build it yourself from github.

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