Michal Ždanský Wikipedia is an amazing source of information that years ago we had to look up in paper encyclopedias and scholarly literature. But the information in printed form also had another added value - beautiful typography, which is based on decades of perfected typesetting process. Although we have information readily available, Wikipedia is not a Mecca of design and typography, and the same is true of its mobile client available on iOS.
Even the current offering of clients that have at least been updated for iOS does not bring anything groundbreaking in terms of design. The work of the German design studio Raureif (authors Partly Cloudy), which decided to release a quite unique client for an Internet encyclopedia with an emphasis on typography. Welcome das Referenz.
The application goes back to the roots of letterpress and typesetting, after all, when you first look at an open article, it resembles a page from a book. This is no coincidence, Raureif was inspired by the twelve-volume Meyer encyclopedia from 1895. Elements of the actual book can be seen throughout the application. The background of the articles has a light beige color just like the parchment, the images have a black and white touch and the typographical elements are elaborated to the smallest detail. The designers chose two fonts for the application, Marat for the text itself and a sans-serif version of Marat for all other UI elements and tables. The font is both very easy to read and looks great.
The developers paid a lot of attention to the search results screen. Instead of displaying the keywords themselves, each line displays a short summary with the search term prominently highlighted, and the main image from the article. You can simply quickly read the topics you are looking for without opening the article. You won't find anything similar on Wikipedia itself.
The layout of individual articles is another great example of how well Wikipedia can look with a little care. Instead of opening to the full page, the article appears in a pop-up panel that sits above the search list. While in most clients for Wikipedia the text part is often rendered in the same way as on the pages themselves, das Referenz arranges the individual elements accordingly.
The text itself occupies two-thirds of the screen, while the left third is reserved for images and chapter titles. The result is a layout that looks more like a textbook or a book encyclopedia than a web page. The images are converted to black-and-white to match the color, but when you click on them, they will be displayed in full-screen mode in full color.
Similarly, the authors won with the otherwise ugly tables, which it displays in a modified form with only horizontal lines and modified typography. The result is not always optimal, especially for long complex tables, but in most cases the tables also look beautiful, which is a lot to say for Wikipedia. To make matters worse, das Referenz also integrates information from Wikidata, for example we can see the timeline of when they lived and when they died for personalities.
Das Referenz allows you to switch between languages for searching, but much more interesting is changing the language directly in the article. Tapping the globe icon at the top of the app will list all language mutations of the same article. It is not the first client that can do this, but you may not find it in the official application.
A large number of applications offer to save articles offline, save bookmarks or work with multiple windows. At das Referenz, the pinning system works instead. Simply press the pin icon or drag the article panel to the left. Pinned articles will then appear on the bottom left edge as a protruding leaf. Tapping to the edge of the screen darkens and the names of the articles appear on the tabs, which you can then call up again. Pinned articles are then saved offline, so they do not require internet access to open them.
The application does not have its own menu with the history of searched articles, at least as it might seem at first glance. Instead, it displays the most recently searched terms directly on the background of the main page (with no active search results), which can be simply tapped to bring up the search, and dragging from the right edge will bring up the most recently opened article, which can be done multiple times. However, a classic list of visited articles might be better from a user point of view.
I have a single complaint about the application, which is the absence of the option to display articles in full screen. Especially in the case of long articles, the visible dark background on the left and upper side is unpleasantly distracting, moreover, expanding it would also enlarge the column of text, which is unnecessarily narrow for my taste. Another possible complaint is the absence of an application for the phone, das Referenz is only intended for the iPad.
Despite minor flaws, however, das Referenz is still probably the most beautiful Wikipedia client you can find in the App Store. If you read articles on Wikipedia often and you like good typography and sophisticated design, das Referenz is definitely worth the four and a half euro investment.
[app url=https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/das-referenz-wikipedia/id835944149?mt=8]
Thanks a lot Michal, nice app and I like it a lot. It already has pride of place on my Air 2.