Beautipedia 4.1 Beta

There are a ton of reasons why you'll love to read with Beautipedia, an extension for Safari, but I think they can be summed up in just one word: soothing. Well, maybe not. If that doesn't do it for you, here are some of the bigger things that make using Beautipedia an awesome experience:<br /><br />Simple. Easy. Elegant.<br />Beautipedia was designed to make Wikipedia simple to understand, easy to use, and elegant enough to enjoy. In my opinion, it achieves just that. It's no longer a chore to search through hundreds of lines of text about Unicode. That might be a stretch, but things that were boring before are somewhat less boring now (until the novelty wears off).<br /><br /><img src="http://www.davidbenjones.com/images/beautipedia/feature-pretty.png" width='100' height='100'alt='' title='' /><br /><br />Clutter-Free<br />Perhaps the greatest thing that Beautipedia can do is remove clutter, the stuff getting in the way of reading. It hides much of the mess that accumulates from Wikipedia's various messages, warnings, and language options. Even the image captions get out of your way until you want them! The complicated stuff is for the truly dedicated, omega-nerds. For normal people who just want to read (and edit), there's Beautipedia.<br /><br />A Useful Menu<br />Finally, a menu that doesn't go overboard. We've all been in the situation where we hover over a menu and hundreds of links pop up (with hundreds of sub-links waiting for the tiniest mouse movement). Beautipedia fixes that by supplying a menu that only shows the options you want. From the Beautipedia menu, you can log in, change your preferences, check your watchlist, edit articles, view discussions, and even see a page's history. When you log out, the personal options disappear. To top it all off, if you don't use any of these pages, the menu can be disabled all together.<br /><br />Classic Search<br /><br /><img src="http://www.davidbenjones.com/images/beautipedia/feature-search.png" width='100' height='100'alt='' title='' /><br /><br />Searching for articles is a big part of using Wikipedia, so I decided to keep the same search that you know and love, merely relocated to the top right corner. The as-you-type suggestions box has stayed, too, making it easy to find things that have long and complicated names (or names that you partially forgot). Beautipedia even keeps key commands such as the up and down arrow keys for switching between suggestions and control-option-f for selecting the search menu.<br /><br />Fast Language Switching<br />Some people often switch between two languages when reading articles. In Beautipedia's eyes, that's just fine. With Fast Language Switching, you can switch between the equivalent articles for two different languages with the touch of a button. Fast Language Switching even supports keyboard commands. Use control-option-s (control-alt-s on Windows) to switch between languages with even more speed. Fast Language Switching is enabled in Beautipedia preferences.<br /><br />Details, Details, Details (and more Details)<br />For Beautipedia, it's not about the bigger picture, although that's pretty, too. It's about the details, the tiny things. Beautipedia is about the little rocks that get stuck in your shoes. They may not seem like much, but they sure are as annoying as hell. Beautipedia aims to removes these little pieces of gravel to make your experience using Wikipedia all the more enjoyable.

Requirements:	No special requirements
Platforms:	Mac, Mac OS X v10.5
Keyword:	Articles,  Beautipedia,  Boring,  Commands,  Complicated,  Hundreds,  Language,  Languages,  Names,  Options,  Reading,  Search,  Switch,  Switching,  Things,  Wikipedia
Users rating:	0/10