Encyclopedia
By Steam Heavy Industries
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Description
Encyclopedia provides complete copy of the Wikipedia encyclopedia on your iPhone/iPod - meaning no internet access is required to search and view articles. This app is the fastest and simplest way to browse Wikipedia - and it works in a plane, on top of a mountain, in a tunnel, and in other countries. (Or, if you're an iPod Touch user, whenever you don't have wifi.)
When you first launch Encyclopedia, you will be required to download a copy of the Wikipedia database, which will occupy about 2GB of space on your device.
For frequently asked questions, please head to http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/faq.
FEATURES
- No internet access required
- Complete text of the English Wikipedia*
- Instantaneous search of article titles
- Fully functional links between articles
- Navigation trail, so that you can easily engage in the usual whimsical Wikipedia browsing.
REVIEWS
- "The only game in town" - ZDNet
- "One of the Seven Must-Have Offline Apps For Your iPhone/iPod Touch" - New York Times
- "It's the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy realised" - Desinformado
- "It was one of the reasons I bought an iPod touch" - Lennart N.
- "It's the best and most useful iPhone app I know" - Alexander C.
Please note that this application's developers are in no way affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. However, a portion of the revenues will be donated to the Wikimedia Foundation to support their work.
* Some parts of articles that aren't very useful on a mobile device (such as references) have been excluded, but all of the actual article text is preserved. In addition, only proper articles are downloaded - image descriptions, user profiles, etc., are not included.
Customer Reviews
A unique app but may not be for everyone.
The app (Encyclopedia) is just exactly as described and as the pictures show. It is a natively stored (ie., static) database of all of Wikipedia's text. It has a no frills user interface: a search bar at the top and plain text presentation without images. It is perfect as a reference for those who need to use Wikipedia but do not have access to 3G or WiFi.
The app does have some drawbacks, however. Even though all of the information is held on the device, articles are not loaded instantaneously and can in fact sometimes take quite some time to load. After noticing this, I became curious as to how this app's article load times compared to the load times of another Wikipedia app (ie., Wikipanion) that requires web access to get its article content. So I conducted a little experiment. I recorded the amount of time that it took this app to load 20 different articles and compared those times to how quickly Wikipanion loaded the same articles via WiFi and 3G. I conducted a one-way ANOVA for these times and found that Wikipanion via WiFi loaded articles significantly faster than both this app and Wikipanion via 3G. In addition, there was no statistical difference between the load times of this app and Wikipanion on 3G. The mean load times for the 20 articles were as follows: Encyclopedia - 8.15s, Wikipanion (3G) - 8.67s, Wikipanion (WiFi) - 4.45. So Wikipanion is capable of loading articles as fast as this app via 3G and significantly faster than this app via WiFi. Bear in mind that Wikipanion was also loading the images in the articles. So it seems that as cool as it is to know you have the entire text of Wikipedia on your phone, it will probably save you time and money to just stick with Wikipanion. To conclude, this app may not be of much practical use to iPhone owners who usually have access to either WiFi or 3G; however, it may still prove useful to iPod Touch users who do not often have WiFi access.
One other issue to note is that it took me an incredibly long time to initially download the 2 GB database as the developer's servers kept timing out. This meant that I had to close the program and open it back up so that it could reconnect to the servers to resume the download. I had to do this at least 30 times and probably a lot more. It seemed that the servers repeatedly timed out like this within only a few minutes of resuming the download on average, but this may have been a result of me downloading the app on the first day that it was available in the app store. It is also notable that I do not see in the developer's description nor anywhere in the app a listing of how current the database is.
A for concept, D for execution
It's a great idea, but with crippling flaws. My main problem with it is that the authors have no idea how to write a search engine. For instance, "Shakespeare" does not bring up the great bard. For that, you have to search for "William Shakespeare." As another review noted, they couldn't find Cleopatra. That is because you need to search for "Cleopatra VII." I mean, really?
Also, there is no way currently to update the database. They say they are working on it...
I hope the app is seriously updated, because I can see it causing me more frustration than not.
Good idea, way overpriced
If you want to have a complete copy of Wikipedia on your iPhone, this is your only option. It's really an indispensible product for those times when you want to look something up but don't have access to the Internet.
That being said, this is an incredibly bare-bones product that just barely manages to do what it advertises. No saved searches, no history, etc. When you leave the program and come back to it, you are presented once again with a blank search screen, not with the article you had previously been reading.
The articles are presented with no graphics, which is fine - I'm sure that would take up way too much space on the iPhone. But the program doesn't parse the graphic text away, so you still get little snippets of this text scattered throughout whatever you're reading.
Further, the program cannot handle links in the article that are redirects - you can only jump to articles that are redeferenced directly, so you get a lot of "this article doesn't appear in this wikipedia dump."
To sum, this program does what it advertises, but it is just barely usable. It is effectively beta software in a major way. Accordingly, it should be priced at more like 0.99 instead if an exorbitant 7.99; for that price I expect something polished and professional. This is, after all, just a reader, not something incredibly complicated.
- Category: Reference
- Released: Oct 19, 2008
- Version: 1.0
- 0.1 MB
- Languages: English
- Seller: Patrick COLLISON
- © Steam Heavy Industries
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 2.0 or later.
