Gamepedia Viewer (Updated to 3.0)

[LividChihuahua]

I've been using Gamepedia for a while now and use it to keep track of what I have and what I am looking for currently, the only problem is that I forget to update the exported web version, either buying something I've already gotten or more often not buying something because it might I might have found it elsewhere and just didn't update. This became rather annoying so I took a half day and decided to fix it.

Update Again:
I have uploaded version 3.0 to GitHub, you can view it here:
The big change with this version is that it will now link with your dropbox account and grab your database directly. This way it's always up to date. There is still an option for a static file if you do not want to use dropbox to sync your database, but you will have to fork the repository and change a few things to get that working (details in the readme).

Sacrifices were made however, the app no longer works while offline (not that it was a particularly useful feature anyways).

Try out the new viewer at the link below. If you don't have your database on dropbox you can view a static copy of mine just to see how it works.
https://pgooch.github.io/GamepediaViewer/


Update:
I just updated the script to what I'm calling version 2.0. This version supports offline viewing of your collection and is faster on the search (once it's all cached). You can see it in action using my collection (940 games) as it's dataset here:
http://phillipgooch.com/github-examples ... diaViewer/
I talk more about it on my blog:
http://fatfolderdesign.com/945/gamepedia-viewer-2-0
The github has also been updated:
https://github.com/pgooch/GamepediaViewer
And if the new one isn't working or you would prefer the old one I branched it off, you can still access it here:
https://github.com/pgooch/GamepediaView ... ersion-1.0

Update: Dropbox changes the way the links were displayed, updated the importer accordingly. Tried to fix the app icon issue but no matter what I tried I could not get it to work (even by directly copy-pasting code from other projects that do work and from the official docs for it). Any insight would be great.

[Conor]

That is some impressive work, specially of reverse engineering many of the settings without any help. Thank you for sharing the project and putting it on GitHub. This is a great solution for those on Android as we will only ever have an iOS version of Pocketpedia.

I have added a link from the title to Doghouse (since I obviously use that a lot) to give easy access to more details without adding to the index template. Not sure if that something you would like to include but I'll send a pull request your way.

[LividChihuahua]

While it's not something I think i'd personally use I can see the use in it, I've gone ahead and merged the request, and I'll go ahead and push another update by the end of the week to make it an option at the top of the page and clean some other bits up (if we have the doghouse link he don't need the inline details, some of which I notice should be tweaked a bit).

Updated, I put the doghouse link as disabled by default because the inline data seems to have more details than I'm seeing there (and it looks a tad messed up on my phone, like it was designed for something a bit smaller), but it's a simple definition changed on line 6 and is also noted in the readme, thanks again.

[Conor]

That is even better, I did not think to add it to the bottom of the inline information, that is important as Doghouse will not save personal data that users might add to the inline information if they change the template.

We just finished the new design for Doghouse, I shall check mobile layout, but post a screenshot to Doghouse section of the forum of the issues on the iPhone and Alex can get on fixing them.

[LividChihuahua]

Just updated to version 2.0, now with offline viewing, A faster search (once it's cached), and a few different color themes to use.

[LividChihuahua]

Just made another little update. Dropbox changes the way the links were displayed, updated the importer accordingly. Tried to fix the app icon issue but no matter what I tried I could not get it to work (even by directly copy-pasting code from other projects that do work and from the official docs for it). Any insight would be great.

[tbutler]

Have you considered adding support for other *pedia databases to this project? It looks like it would be fantastic for my Bookpedia database... Thank you for sharing with the *pedia community!

[LividChihuahua]

I imagine the databased are not all set up the same, so without the schema for each app I would need to reverse it from the DB files themselves. That being said with a decently sized database from each app and some time I could turn turn it into a multi-pedia viewer without to much trouble.

[Conor]

If you would like the schemas do let me know and I can provide you the original Xcode .xcdatamodeld files that at least have a nice graphical representation of all the properties. But they are also pretty much what you would guess they are just like Gamepedia.

[LividChihuahua]

That would be nice, there are still some things I could never figure out how to derive from the databases (like the actual names of the custom fields).

[Conor]

Custom field names is a tough one. They are part of the metadata of the database file. They are basically a binary of an Apple plist in the Z_METADATA table under Z_PLIST column. There is a PHP library cfpropertylist I have used in the past to parse the binary and create a native PHP hash. The names of the custom fields are in "customNames" inside that hash.

I'll email you the xcdatamodeld files, in case they prove useful. You will need Xcode to view them.

[LividChihuahua]

Just thought I would post an update since it's been a while since I said I was going to make some changes to the viewer to support other pedia programs. After getting put on the back burner I have come back to it. While it was on the back burner I had to replace me phone and went with an iPhone, so naturally I wanted to make the new version iPhone compatible. There is a problem with that however, IndexedDB, what I use to store the collection, is currently not fully support in Safari (desktop or ios), and what is supported is buggy. Currently it is impossible to import the collection because iOS does not allow you access to the IndexedDB inside a web worker. This probably wont get fixed for a while know how things go. The current dev version does support all *pedias (well, it needs some new filter options for the other pedias) and custom field names. Outside of the iOS (and possibly Firefox/Opera) bugs the entry details page is not done and it needs some styling and offline cache testing. Generally it's not that far off working, but it would only work in chrome.

Right now, considering the iOS issues and the fact that I lack a device to really test the mobile aspects of I'm not sure what to do. I have come up with a couple ideas however.

• - Make another server side version of the script, lose offline caching for higher device compatibility.
  - Make a larger shared version of the site that anybody can create an account at and have it do all the server side stuff for people (easiest for the end user, hardest for me, and I'm unsure of what the server costs could potentially be not know what the *pedia instal base is and how many would even care about such a service).
  - Look into using another way to cache the data, we have a few options; pure localStorage (size limited), WebSQL(deprecated, would only ever work on iOS/Safari), JSON files in a cache manifest (unsure max size, searching speed may be to slow).

If anybody has any other ideas I'd love to hear them. As of right now my plan is to take a break from the project (again I know) and do a side projects (I got a wordpress plugin that needs some work, couple templates that need to get submitted approved, and had an idea for a super quick little project that I think would be worth a chuckle). I probably won't do all of it before I come back and at least explore the options I have here, since I am interested in having a way to view my collection on-the-go (and while I'm sure your guys mobile app is great, I don't need to be able to add stuff or do any of that).

[LividChihuahua]

Version 3 has been released and no longer has a server-side component. You can link from the github page directly to your dropbox synced database and start viewing right away.

https://pgooch.github.io/GamepediaViewer/

[Conor]

Whoa! It's like magic, that is so very impressive and speedy as well. I am going to write a blog post about it, once I poke around and figure out some of the magic that is going on and how you solved it without server side scripts. Thank you so much for sharing the update.

[LividChihuahua]

Thanks. I noticed that on the current version a large database gets really unstable. I've fixed it and am implementing some pagination in order to make the experience better on mobile. Hopefully those updates will come this week.