forvo-light

A lightweight web/android client to forvo.com.

A precompiled apk: https://sigwait.org/~alex/demo/forvo-light/forvo-light-0.0.1-debug.apk

2025 note: The apk still works, and the web version does too. I don't recommend trying to build it yourself, though--dealing with the 2017-era dependencies would be a nightmare.

Requirements

• Node 6.x
• npm i -g browserify babel babel-preset-es2015
• GNU Make

Compilation

An out of tree build:

$ git clone ...
$ mkdir _out && cd _out
$ make -f ../forvo-light/main.mk

Then copy src/ dir where your webserver expects static files.

Android

Because I have a silly requirement of using the app on ancient devices w/ Android 2.3, you can build the app only if you

• point ANDROID_HOME env var to the Android SDK Tools not newer than 25.2.5; using that version of SDK Tools, install SDK Platform 21.
• npm i -g cordova@4.3.0
• use a Node version manager, like nodever, for old versions of Cordova don't work w/ modern versions of Node;
• edit ../forvo-light/main.mk to make sure that Cordova is being run under Node 4.8.

After this preliminaries, type:

make -f ../forvo-light/main.mk cordova

It'll take a while, for Cordova will download a bunch of staff in ~/.cordova at its 1st run. The resulting apks should be in cordova/platforms/android/ant-build/.

Usage

You'll need to obtain an API key from Forvo. After the 1st run of the app, click on the 'gear' icon & enter the api key. The app will remember it in the localStorage.

Implementation notes

No web frameworks were used in the making of this app. You won't believe this, but it's still possible in 2017 to write simple programs w/o React or Angular.

Android 2.3.4 bugs

(Not that anybody cares)

• no HTTPS support for Audio()
• history.replaceState() doesn't modify location.hash
• error event in Audio() doesn't get fired in cases of 404, invalid format, etc.

License

MIT.

The icon: https://openclipart.org/detail/227474/pirate-parrot