Encyclopedia
By Steam Heavy Industries
View More By This DeveloperOpen iTunes to buy and download apps.
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 (you need a wifi connection for this download), which will occupy about 2.6GB of space on your device. Regular updates to the Wikipedia database are provided at a nominal cost to cover the 2GB of bandwidth.
** NOTE: **
To people who have experienced issues finishing the download of the database using Encyclopedia 2.0: We've submitted a new version of the app to Apple that should address your problems. In the interim, you can fix your problems by just making sure the dump download completes by not quitting until the search view appears.
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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.
What's New In Version 2.0.1
• Improved dump download robustness
• Stability and performance improvements
Customer Reviews
I use it every day BUT....
I think this program survives because it's the only off-line Wikipedia reader, and NOT because it's very well written. It indeed does do a passable job of displaying the Wikipedia text, and I use it many many times a day. But in 18 months of development, it's barely been updated (2.0 adds a new dump of the Wikipedia file, but that's about it.). The Wiki parser is lousy: tables don't show up at all, fonts are messed up, many links disappear and render as funny characters, etc, etc. The search engine is slow and inflexible (don't know how to spell a word? Good luck, since it won't help you!). The layout is black & white and can't be changed -- not even the font size!. In fact, there are no settings whatsoever in the entire program. There's no way to search for text within the current article. (Much less search the entire Wiki file for a word or phrase!) The developer's cornered the market here, but hopefully will get a bit of stimulus from other competitors so the app will evolve and improve.
Excellent all around
This is my favorite application on my iPod Touch- I'm a teacher and I use it all the time. The one weakness was that it couldn't be updated, but now that that has been fixed it does everything I could want. The customer support was great too, as when I had a problem they contacted me quickly and were great the entire way. I can't recommend this highly enough.
Alright
I really like the concept, but the actual system is lacking in some places. It is very difficult to look up what you want. Cleopatra does not yield the correct result; you need to type Cleopatra VII. Annoying! The hyperlinks on pages also don't always work. For example, a hyperlink for "Ancient Olympics" will guide you to a page that says this app doesn't have an entry for this. On normal Wikipedia, it would redirect you to "Ancient Olympic GAMES". However, since there are no other encyclopedia apps, this is the only option for someone who frequently wishes to use their iPod to look things up.
Barack Obama is currently running for president. UPDATE PLEASE!!!
- $8.99
- Category: Reference
- Updated:Apr 07, 2010
- Current Version:2.0.1
- 2.0.1
- 0.2 MB
- Language:English
- Seller:Patrick COLLISON
- © Steam Heavy Industries
Requirements:Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
Top In App Purchases
- 1Dump Upgrade.$0.99
