QWikipedia

Since the Internet is easily accessible worldwide, and provides quick access from the comfort of your desktop, or even walking down the street, it’s no surprise an abundance of info providers evolved, and flourished throughout the years. Wikipedia is a fine example, and in this regard, QWikipedia wants to provide the comfort of exploring it directly from the desktop.

Note that the application requires Java Runtime Environment to function, so you need to make sure it’s installed. Although packed in an installer, the application can also be deployed on a thumb drive, and system registry entries remain intact during use, making it pretty flexible, and easy to carry around.

Needless to say that Internet access is required to fully benefit from what the application has to offer. This makes the program a custom web browser, and it is, but strictly limited to Wikipedia navigation. The main window is pretty intuitive by nature, mostly because of its simplicity. Most of the space is the interactive preview area, with an upper field to write down search text strings.

Sadly, you need to use the mouse to initiate search, because hitting “Enter” on your keyboard doesn’t put the process in motion. Moreover, connection speed leaves more to be desired, but this isn’t the most disturbing issue. What does bother is the poor page compatibility, which gives you a hard time navigation, and especially using anchors.

With no navigation controls, or any supported hotkeys, you can only move forward through pages. There’s no address history tracker to help you return to a specific page, so you’re always stuck in the last accessed section.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that QWikipedia manages to provide a quick method to access, and explore Wikipedia. However, little attention was invested in development, and you can easily tell by poor content support, lack of navigation controls, and the general look and feel.