Ever since I first saw heads-up-displays in science fiction movies like The Terminator, I knew that I had to get my hands on one. How neat it would be to get instant information on anything about anything in my field of vision?

Well, just as the iTablet won't be the Knowledge Navigator, the new buzz-phrase of the year, augmented reality, won't give me Terminator eyes. Such is life.

I tested out a pretty decent augmented reality app called Robotvision [iTunes Link], and for US $0.99 what you get, if you have an iPhone 3GS running OS 3.1 or better, is quite cool. Will it solve your problems, cure the common cold, or tell you anything that more established apps won't? Not really. But tossing a buck on a neat novelty is not unheard of in the iPhone 3GS world.

This one does more than most. First you tell it how widely to search and then, if you're in a highly populated area, you can set up a category ranging from ATMs to Travel Destinations. For the most part, I didn't fool with this since being in the suburbs, I can't be too picky.

Run it and the camera shutter opens. Moving the iPhone around, I found Cousin's Pizza, only 8432.1 miles away. Hmmm. The setting was for 5 miles. Wait, I guess it needed to be calibrated by doing the calibration figure eight wave of the phone. It seems that a lot of GPS apps require this.

OK, much better. It found a bunch of places but they were all stacked on top of one another. No big deal, since when you touch one, you get a screen like the one in the picture. The closest place is displayed first and the right and left arrows take you back and forth through the stack. While an item is in the front pane, you can call them, see them on a map (by cleverly pointing the iPhone to the floor, which invokes Google Maps, but all the stick pins aren't really any clearer than the AR view... maybe less so). You can also hit the Bing button where there might be a review or more information.

The problem is that the direction it puts you in is not quite accurate. It might get you to a nearby corner, but not to the butcher shop itself. I don't think we can slight Robotvision on this, since the not quite pin-point accuracy of the iPhone 3GS GPS has already been talked to death.

What else can this bad-boy do? You can see who is sending tweets in the area you specified, read the tweets and see how far the tweeter is from you. Not enough? Wait, there's more. You can find people in your area who use Flickr, and view their gallery. This doesn't work too well. I set the default for 50 miles and found no one. Then I set it for 25 miles and found one person with a gallery of 10 pictures. I live 30 miles from NYC, so I can't blame it on the boonies. You still want Ginsu knives? Okay, hit the Wikipedia button and see if anything in your range is listed. If so you'll get a bit of text and the option to go to Wikipedia to read more.

I don't know if AR will change the world, or be as successful as either New Coke or the iPod. But I'd suggest tossing a buck at this one. You are guaranteed 20 minutes of awe and then maybe some time to reflect on what you have, once the novelty wears off.

Check out this video for a tour and let us know what you think about this or the idea of augmented reality in general.

The Wikimedia Foundation has just released a free app for accessing the web based encyclopedia right on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Wikipedia Mobile [iTunes link] brings the full boatload of Wikipedia knowledge to a nicely formatted iPhone screen. In my tests, it responded quickly, and without any glitches over Wi-Fi and the 3G network.

The only issues really are that there are already dozens of similar apps available for the iPhone. In fact, if you go to the Wikipedia site in Safari things are nicely optimized for the iPhone screen. Of course the app has a built in history button, but Safari does too.

Some of the other Wikipedia apps I've tried are Wikipanion [iTunes link], which has more features, including changing the font size, and Wikiamo [iTunes link] that allows landscape view, reading of saved material offline, and links to other languages.

I'd like to see the ability to email entries to myself or others, and the Wikipedia Mobile support page just goes to the home page of Wikipedia. That's not too helpful.

One other odd thing. When trying to install the software on a first generation iPod touch, users are reporting it fails with an error message saying a microphone is needed. Huh?

However you access it, Wikipedia is a great resource, and the Wikimedia Foundation says it will be updating the app frequently based on user requests. The current version is 0.1, so I think this app is just getting started.

I'll admit it -- I'm a Wikipedia junkie.

Sometimes I just pull up Wikipedia, type in the first word that comes to my head, and then start following links. It's amazing how much information is available out there, and the connections that you can find are remarkable.

Until now, most of my Wikipedia surfing was limited to one of my Macs, since I wasn't fond of the way that the information was formatted in the iPhone Web app. As you can see in the screenshots below, it was scaled down and hard to read even in landscape mode.

With the new native iPhone Wikipedia Mobile app from Comoki Software, all that has changed. The information is neatly formatted for the iPhone, using disclosure triangles to hide or show information in sections of each article. There's a summary section on most pages that can be expanded to fill the iPhone screen by tapping an arrow in the upper left corner.


Other features include the ability to look at your search history, save and view saved searches, or change the language of an article.

The Wikipedia app is available now in the App Store for US$2.99 (click opens iTunes).

When Apple made the move from Tiger to Leopard, they decided to throw in more than a few features. One of those new features was the ability to search Wikipedia right from Dictionary.

To start searching Wikipedia, just open Dictionary (located in /Applications). Next, click on the Wikipedia button and enter a search term. Leopard will then browse Wikipedia for the answer.

You can access the dictionary from most applications by highlighting a word, right-clicking and selecting "Look Up in Dictionary."

Want more tips like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

iPhone web application developer, Comoki, has unveiled a new, iPhone-compatible Wikipedia interface. It's not alone, of course, but joins the ranks of web applications like iPodia with some nice interface improvements. It has a more reliable "Save" feature and makes some nice formatting decisions on the page, including making bulleted lists collapsible. It also makes use of a little Ajax for zooming images without reloading the page, which you may or may not prefer to the more traditional approach. I did like the search-as-you-type feature on iPodia, which is currently lacking in Comoki's version.

Of course, you may prefer to go offline with something like wikipedia-iphone (Google Code). Or perhaps make use of an older iPod for such pursuits. Welcome to a wondrous era of unlimited access to questionable information of possibly-dubious origin. Good stuff.

As excited as I am for the iPhone, I'm just as excited for Mac OS X Leopard - that's why I have to thank TUAW reader Uros for sending us a link to a big ol' batch of Leopard demo videos posted at Brightcove, a video sharing service. Demoed in the videos are features like Screen Sharing, Cover Flow, Parental Controls, new screensavers and even some interesting new stuff in Preview. Most of this stuff isn't too groundbreaking on the scale of, say, Spaces, but the devil is in the details for me and it's really interesting to see some of the handy new features that unfortunately couldn't make it into Steve's keynotes. For example: Leopard's new Dictionary app can also search Wikipedia, right from within Dictionary itself. If you're interested in seeing more of Leopard in action, these videos might satisfy your appetite - at least until Apple orders them to be taken down, of course.

Ironcoder is a Mac software developer competition inspired by the cult Japanese television cooking show Iron Chef in which Mac developers have about a weekend to produce a cool piece of software based on a particular API and theme. The latest contest was Ironcoder V and featured the ScreenSaver.framework API with the theme "Life." The results are in, and the winner this time around is Ben Gottlieb, whose winning entry, WikiPath, displays a series of Wikipedia pages by following a random path (though the links) beginning from the Wikipedia entry on Life. The results page offers the winning entry plus several runners up for free download.

[Via GusMueller Blog]

There's something deeply fascinating about article debates at Wikipedia; reading the intricate threads is like eavesdropping on a librarian's convention where the punch has been spiked with PCP. The tumult du jour is the involved discussion on the appropriate naming and disposition of the iPhone article.

It seems that the rational question of "What do we put at the wikipedia.org/wiki/iPhone page: the Apple product, the Cisco/Linksys product, or a disambiguation of the two products?" has led to fear, thence to anger and naturally to suffering. The commotion and disagreement apparently attracted the attention of some Cisco employees, who attempted to right the perceived injustice and were promptly chastised. The whole affair has resulted in the virtual lockdown of the iPhone page while tempers and keyboards cool off.

If you want a taste of the secret sauce that helps Wikipedia manage as a self-regulating community, check out the conventions on the naming of articles. Highly gripping; couldn't put it down.

Thanks Adam!

If you're like me, Wikipedia is your go-to site for all things research and definition. Read something in an article you don't understand? Wikipedia! Friend use an obscure TLA? Wikipedia! There is almost no end to the community edited encyclopedia's usefulness.

Most visits I make to Wikipedia are just quick fact checking and the like, but every now and then I am pressed to do some good old fashioned actual research; the kind grandpa used to do in the library. For those situations, Pathway is my new best friend. Pathway is a desktop interface for Wikipedia that not only lets you view wiki pages, but keeps a history of the pages you view, and displays your history in a sexy-sexy data map. I've only just started playing with Pathway, but its sleek look, original features, and light usage footprint have already earned it a cozy new home in my Applications folder.

You all know what I'm talking about: the moment you tear open your new Mac and are greeted by that complex combination of a "little bit of plastic bag with a hint of lindenberry followed by a rush of Styrofoam." We all love it. Just like every other Apple product I've purchased new, my MacBook features that same unique scent.

I'd forgotten how much I missed it. I purchased my last Mac (a 15" Titanium PowerBook) second hand, from a smoker. Then I spilt a glass of wine on the keyboard which made it pong of cheap rosé. Needless to say, my MacBook smells significantly better than my old Mac. Its scent is amongst my most favorite smells and in my opinion it is second only to the smell of napalm in the morning.

Knowing this, you'll understand my disappointment after I Googled "that new Mac smell" and found that research suggests that the smell emanating from new gadgets is very unhealthy. Wikipedia's entry on a similar feature found in cars, "that new car smell", links to research that likens the odor to sniffing glue. There's also an article from 2004 on Geek.com that recounts evidence that toxic fire retardant chemicals found in computers can be transferred to dust. Although the article says that "two of the chemicals in question (penta and octa-brominated diphenyl) have already been banned and will no longer be used in production by the end of this year," I'm forced to reconsider my love of the smell of new Macs.

Does anyone have any information that would restore my confidence in my new Mac's smell?

This is officially cool, mostly because I say so. Wikipedia has a graphic that charts the timeline of Macintosh computers which shows the time length that particular models were (currently are) in production. The coolest part is that you can click on a model name, and it takes you to that Mac's Wikipedia entry.

Way back in 1993, I can remember purchasing the entire works of Shakespeare on a CD-ROM to help me in a college course I was taking. I also had the printed works, but the CD-ROM allowed me to do keyword or character searches in a way the printed text didn't. For me, it was a breakthrough in how I was using computers to access content in a different way. The CD-ROM was accessible with hyper-links to other content on the disc which is notable because before the World Wide Web, hyper-links were really only being used in content like this Shakespeare CD-ROM (and in HyperStudio and HyperCard projects). It was my experience with this CD-ROM and gophering into the University of Minnesota's system to study 1990 Census data that opened my eyes to the coming World Wide Web explosion.

My point is that while content doesn't actually change much over the years, the way in which we access it does. And today, I've learned of yet another interesting way we access content. You can now get the Wikipedia on your iPod. [Note: this requires you to install Linux on your iPod].

The Wikipedia is the free, online, open-source encyclopedia. I've been consulting it for years, particularly for entries that likely wouldn't appear in a traditional encyclopedia. Since Wikipedia content is all user-contributed, it tends to be significantly more up-to-date than traditional sources. Some people worry about the accuracy of the Wikipedia's content, but I've never found it to be a problem.