Our small nonprofit, WiderNet, provides off-line access to thousands of Web sites for people who lack Internet connectivity (www.widernet.org).
Over 2,000 universities, schools, health care sites, and libraries in the developing world have adopted this solution, providing a bounty of educational information to millions of users.
We seek someone to develop a custom offline Android Web browser for tablets and smartphones.
Preferably, the core code would be a popular open-source browser, like Firefox, but altered to include:
1. A proxy that would translate a Web host to a local directory of the same name.
2. Links to custom help, search, and favorites.
3. Rebrand-ability to adapt (CSS?) colors, logos, and banners
4. Built-in PDF viewer
5. Easy mapping of MIME types to helper applications
6. A simple "reset" to defaults so each user can start anew.
The upside to working offline is that security and privacy are not much of an issue. The downside is that innocuous code, like a check for updates, can really pester a user that has no Internet connection. So stripping out excess code and Internet-specific functions is critical.
We assume that a rare group of administrators will actually rebrand the browser. The customizations will handled by a few techie people who will create browsers for multiple institutions and users. (A particular hospital will want clinical resources "favorited", a school for the blind will want to include screen reader, etc.) I envision a set of easy-to-read text config files and a directory of assets (like logos, text, and CSS) for each customization, along with a routine to merge the core browser code and the customizations into a deliverable browser.
