Review : Wikipedia
FREE APPLICATION.
The Official Wikipedia is here! And let’s see if it can stand up against a whole bunch of third party Wikipedia apps out there.
Design:
The Wikipedia app is a typical grid-style windows RT app. All articles are depicted as tiles. Pages extend horizontally as expected. Overall, the design user interface is very simple and little effort has been put by the developers to make it more intuitive and we were quite disappointed about that. However the design is user-friendly and gets the job done.
Use and Features:
The first page of the application displays all the featured pictures, featured articles, ‘on this day’ feature posts and a column of recently updated articles. This is particularly interesting as it works better than its website main page. Each article opens out as a huge horizontally panoramic page. This is an important decision taken by the developer. A horizontally panoramic page is easy to navigate on a touch enabled device and is feels odd to scroll to the right to read more. This needs some getting used to especially on laptops and desktops without touch.
Searching on this app works like a charm (yes!). Just use the search charm and you are good to go. The article page does not display the infobox until you trigger it with a click/tap.
The app lets you change the language to display in the options menu. You can also pin an article to the start screen. There is also an option to open up the page in the browser which by default starts the IE. Finally, you can search the page for words using the ‘Find on Page’ option.
The app is live tile supported and posts the latest featured posts.
The also has a snapped view. Its works okay. The title of the article gets clipped after a particular limit, the images on the featured posts wont load completely leaving the grid-square awkwardly incomplete. The infobox is definitely clipped off its right portion in this snapped view.
Performance:
The app opens fast but takes quite some time to load the main page articles. Weirdly, the page keeps refreshing quite a number of times in a matter of seconds while loading the articles and this is very disturbing. After all the articles have loaded, it works smooth. But it is clearly visible that the stutters quite a few times while using. There is no way to pinch-zoom any page and also the app doesn’t provide a way to increase font size. This is the biggest gripe about the application, lack of Readability settings. Wikipedia app is used mainly for reading purposes and lacking such important features is definite deal breaker for some.
Wrap-Up:
This Wikipedia application is a typical Modern UI style grid-like application and is available for free. It is very easy to use and decent looking. One can use this application and never visit Wikipedia as it serves well. But the biggest problem is in not being able to change the font size added to the fire of no pinch-zoom. Missing these features might not mean anything to casual users but would definitely test the patience of power users. Overall, the application does what it says and almost all are happy users. It would take huge leaps from other developers to better the offerings here.
The Breakdown
