I've been working for a while on (and off) on making mindat work on portable devices. Well, my latest attempts on this have been on the iPod Touch (essentially the same as an iPhone, except without the phone, and with double the storage). With a little bit of hacking, the ipod can be made to run a webserver, so you don't even need wireless access to get content - as long as you have a full extract of the mindat.org mineral database on your ipod. Which, of course, I do!
Here is my pocket version of mindat
When you select a page, you can scroll down through the list of mineral names and varietal names. At the moment this is all there is, but my plan is eventually to have a version that has a page for every valid mineral entry - and with 16Gb storage on my ipod I could probably have room for a few photos too.
Detail available on the mineral list pages
Now, when will this be ready? Probably early next year. There will be two versions, one an online version you can use on the iPhone and other similar online devices, and the other will be like this, an offline version you can install to your ipod and take with you wherever you go. Much more convenient than carrying around a copy of Fleischers!
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The List, broken up into many sections alphabetically
Close up (bad photo, sorry) of the data view
If people want it, I might be able to get this version online for you to download within a few days. Leave me a message here.
Jolyon Ralph
14th Nov 2007 12:15am