Kiwi ($0.99) is an iPhone app that offers minimalist Wikipedia searching and viewing of articles. Its biggest advantage over similar Wikipedia apps and webapps is that it can save articles for later offline viewing.
After loading an article, simply hit the Scrapbook button at the bottom of the screen, and the article, complete with graphics, is saved to your scrapbook. To access it later, simply tap the scrapbook icon and then the name of article.
Searching is quick and easy. Launch the app, tap in your query, and hit search. Results show up in a horizontal grid with plenty of white space for easy touchscreen selection. The articles appear in a pleasant, iPhone-friendly format, with chapters hyperlinked for quicker browsing of larger articles.
Besides the scrapbook, there is also a Favorites folder that allows you to quickly navigate to favorite articles.
For the most part, Kiwi is a slick, well-designed app, but I did have some problems. The articles sometimes seem to load very slow, independent of what the connection speed was. This could simply be due to the iPhone’s slower rendering of html you see with MobileSafari as well. Also, the app has crashed on me several times. But for the most part, I’ve found it a decent, useful Wikipedia app with the offline viewing being the killer feature. Check out our video below for a closer look.
- Name: Kiwi
- Version reviewed: 1.0.1
- Developer: Red Rome Logic
- Price: $0.99
- iTunes Download: Click here