The Precious Gollum Browser
In yet another application of the freely downloadable Wikipedia database (see last week’s post about the Ajax-powered LuMriX Wikipedia browser), N?rnberg, Germany resident Harald Hanek has created a stripped-down, stand-alone browser for the Wikipedia.
The browser, called Gollum, is sleek and lightly skinned with a full graphical interface. On his site, Harald comments that the traditional Wikipedia interface was too busy and difficult for his daughter to grasp, so he created the Gollum browser for her. He figured the application might be useful to others, so he released his creation under the GPL.
Gollum uses Ajax and PHP to search the Wikipedia’s free, downloadable database. Unlike other iterations of the same concept that have been popping up lately, Gollum allows the user to search in differnt languages using different languages and character sets in the search field. Just click the little flag in the main search field and drag the cursor to the new language you want to search in.
In another unique twist, Gollum will soon be available for download. This will make the application truly stand-alone, enabling Wikipedia searches from the desktop.
