Tommy Collison

Wikipedia is known almost worldwide, known not only as a research tool but also as something you can happily waste 3 hours clicking away, jumping from article to article just reading through. XKCD had it perfect, in fact

So, why limit your researching and time-wasting activities to when you have wifi?

Good question. Well, thanks to Steam Heavy Industries, a lack of wifi no longer stands between you, and researching/time wasting.

What Steam Heavy Industries (AKA my brother Patrick) have done, is created a ‘dump’ of en.wikipedia.org. They’ve taken it, stripped away images, external links, userpages, Wikipedia:pages, discussion pages and the kitchen sink. Basically, taking everything out, leaving you with the text. Best of all it fits snugly on your iphone at, um, 2GB.

Still! 2GB is a small price to pay when what you’re getting in return is basically the sum of all human knowledge on your iPod Touch/iPhone (herein called the iPone)

Also, while 8€ may seem like a lot for an app, think about this:

If you had a 5€ note, a 2€ coin and two 50c coins in your pocket, would you consider it to be a lot of money? It wouldn’t be a vast amount. OK, you’d get 8 things from McDonald’s €saver but if you went into HMV with that amount what could you really buy? You could get Home Alone 2 after you spent 50€ but that’d involve spending 50€, wouldn’t it?

On top of that, a percentage of the profits gets donated to the wikimedia foundation, so by helping yourself to some offline-browsing goodness, you’re also directly supporting Wikipedia itself.

So what about the actual download itself?

Well, if you go into the app store, Steam Heavy Industries’ version of offline wikipedia is the first result when you search for ‘encyclopedia’. This is what it looks like:

Click ‘buy app’ and it’ll download to your apps folder. Sync your device and get all apps on your iPone. On your iPone’s screen, you’ll notice a brand new logo:

Open that, and this will be the screen:

Click ‘start download’ and just leave your iPone switched on, auto-lock off and connected to a network and a power source. When it’s done, go surfing!:

–**–

Overall, it’s a fantastic app. Yes, it’s crummy that you can’t copy it over and open it immediately to play with ala all the other iPone apps, and the fact that you now have 2 GB less music space, (you could fit 50 versions of Super Monkey Ball Lite in a GB :P), but at the end of it all, the next time you’re in a remote area with no coverage, you still can check what the capital of Nicaragua is*, or who was president between Taft and McKinley**.

Thanks, Steam Heavy Industries! A genuinely useful app!

* it’s Managua

** Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt