Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecomsA little bit of everything

Patrick Collison Irish genius and one of the founders of Auctomatic has pushed out a little personal project which I love.

Wikipedia offline on iPhone 3G and iPod touch.

I can now browse Wikipedia on long journeys, do some work, reference work without having an internet connection.

I had a chat yesterday with Patrick who is now at Live Current

What are the main features of the application?

Allows you to browse Wikipedia on iPod Touch and iPhone 3G without an internet connection.

Stores every article in the English Wikipedia (non-article pages, like user profiles, are excluded, and some things that aren’t very useful on a phone — like references — are stripped).

iTunes-style live search of the millions of article titles.

Fully functional links between articles, and a navigation trail so you can engage in the usual back-and-forth browsing style.

Why the iPhone/Ipod touch?

The iPhone/iPod Touch devices really are ideal for this — with the app installed, they basically turn into real-life versions of the Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a comprehensive collaboratively-written encyclopedia on a small hand-held computer.
Personally, I find that I do a huge fraction of my Wikipedia browsing on it. It’s like having an unending magazine or something — always interesting bits and pieces to browse around.

How are the numbers looking?

It’s been hectic since it went live — each user downloads a 2GB copy
of Wikipedia from our servers — and so most of Saturday night (well, ’till about 10am Sunday morning) was spent frantically setting up enough servers to keep up with the demand.