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Last November, I reviewed the Encyclopedia Britannica 2002 DVD Edition for the legacy Mac OS. For some peculiar reason, the DVD Edition does not support 0S X, while there is a Standard Edition on CD-ROM that does support OS X, but not the legacy OS. Go figure. The standard edition of Britannica 2002 comes in a 2-CD set with cross-platform 0S X and Windows support. There is an installation CD and a data CD in the package. The installer gives you the option to do a partial install, which requires you to insert the CD each time you want to use the encyclopedia, or a complete install, which copies of all of the data files form the Data CD to your hard drive. I chose to do a complete install. The Complete setup option installs the Britannica 2002 program and all data files on your hard drive. You can run Britannica 2002 without a disc in your CD-ROM drive. This setup requires at least 700 MB of free hard-disk space. At the end of the complete install you will be prompted to insert the Data Disc into your Macintosh. Once the disc is mounted, launch the Data Installer application by double-clicking its icon. The Data Installer has two options: Data Install which will install all of the data to your Britannica 2002 Standard Edition, and Uninstall which can remove all of the data if you should find a need to save space on your hard drive. Each disk edition of Britannica 2002 includes the full text of the 32-volume print Encyclopaedia Britannica, plus additional encyclopedia articles, a world atlas, a Merriam-Webster dictionary, and recent editions of the Britannica yearbook. Britannica has over 80,000 articles, but the Standard Edition CD-ROM lacks the Deluxe Edition DVD version's multimedia enhancements, such as historical timelines, "visual tours" of selected topics, and rich video, audio, and animations. The installer took about a minute to transfer some 2000 items in the basic install package onto my hard drive, and then prompted me to insert the data CD to complete the installation. When the data CD window opened, there were several folders containing files, and a VISE installer icon, which I double-clicked to initiate the completion of the installation -- about 14,000 items taking up about 570 MB worth of hard drive real estate with mostly GIF and JPEG and library files. I had installed the main Britannica 2000 SE folder on the lowermost of four partitions on my Pismo PowerBook's hard drive, but the data installer insisted on dumping the ton of data files onto my main (Mac OS X) partition, which I would have preferred not to do, but the installer offered no alternative. The data files installation took about 12 minutes. The Britannica 2002 installer installs Britannica in a folder named "Britannica 2002 SE" at the location you specify. You start Britannica 2002 by double-clicking the "thumbprint" program icon within the Britannica folder. Once the installation was complete, I double-clicked the "thumbprint" Britannica application icon in the Britannica window to open the encyclopedia program. I wasn't very impressed last fall with the speed of the DVD version of Britannica 2002 running on the legacy Mac OS, so I was eager interested to see if the 0S X Version would be the same or faster or even more sluggish. Both versions were tested on the same computer, but last fall I only had 256 MB of RAM, while now I have 640 MB. The minimum hardware requirements specified for the Britannica 2002 encyclopedia application are a 266 MHz G3 and 128 MB of RAM, but even with 500 MHz and 640 MB of RAM, you find yourself waiting for things to happen. Indeed, my initial impression was that the OS X version was substantially slower than the legacy OS version. I found that there was an incredibly long lag between when you clicked on one button selection before there was a response, and then another long lag before you could get another button to work. 
The Britannica and 2002 home screen displays seven buttons: search, an A-Z Index, Knowledge Navigator, a world atlas, the Merriam Webster dictionary, Research Organizer, and the Update Center, but the first three as well as the dictionary send you in the same tabbed find window. 
I tried clicking on the first item in the index the Great Schism of 1054, and began to wonder if the program had frozen before the screen with the article finally appeared. When it did, the quality of the content was excellent as expected, but this program was one slow puppy. To be fair, articles in the "Related Information" sidebar appeared with reasonably satisfactory dispatch when clicked. The Atlas works nicely. 
Here is the Search page for Nova Scotia: 
And the map and reference page it turned up. 
Here's Knowledge Navigator topic results for Apple Computer: 
And a sidebar of Apple-related topics: p 
The Knowledge Navigator topic animation was cool, but it was moving in slow motion as well. Having written what turned out to be a very popular article about industrial designer Raymond Loewy recently, I decided to check out what the Britannica had to say about him, and about the general topic of industrial design. Bingo! The anchor article on industrial design, citing various trends in the field as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries noted:
"The third trend is streamlining, a design principle pioneered by Raymond Loewy and others in the 1930s and still widely employed, although the term itself has fallen out of fashion. As the name suggests, streamlining is characterized by contours designed to minimize resistance to motion through a fluid (as air). Originally associated with trains, automobiles, and other vehicles, the bullet shapes and sleek lines of streamlining were seized by industrial designers and applied to objects (e.g., toasters) intrinsically unassociated with speed." Several more mouse clicks interspersed by long intervals awaiting turned up a short but informative biographical article on Loewy, but the lag between one selection and the rest was abominable, and then the program seemed to freeze up altogether and refuse to do anything for a while when I tried to drag over text to copy it, making me wonder if I would have to Force Quit. It did finally respond again, but everything I tried to do was like trying to run through knee deep mud. And remember, I was running off the hard drive, not the CD, which would presumably have been even slower, but perhaps not as we shall see. A final Raymond Loewy note; Britannica says "Perhaps his best-known design was that of the Coca-Cola bottle." I have been informed that Loewy was a teenager when the classic Coke bottle first made its appearance, although he apparently did a facelift on the design at some point. I digress. As noted above, I found the legacy OS version of Britannica 2002 pretty slow, but still reasonably usable. This 0S X version was turning out to be essentially unusable by anyone without lots of time and the patience of Job. Being a lot less patient than Job, I was contemplating cutting my review research short and for the first time in four years of writing software reviews for Mac publications, posting a "not recommended" evaluation. I decided that I really didn't want that 570 MB of files on my 0S X partition, so I ran the uninstall utility, which insisted on closing the 20 or so applications I had open before doing its thing. The uninstall process took an even longer than the installation had. However, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to check about how the program would run from the data CD-ROM without any other applications open. I still had the basic Britannica installation on the hard drive, so I double clicked the thumbprint icon again, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the program now, while not exactly speedy, was at least reasonably responsive, and certainly usable. It was now roughly about the same in performance as the DVD version had been running in Mac OS X 9.1. It still took more than 30 seconds to start up, and there was still about a 10 to 15 second lag between the time that you clicked a button until something actually happened, but it had gone from being completely unsatisfactory to merely disappointingly sluggish. I would be interested to know why closing all those programs I had had open made such a dramatic difference in speed. With 640 MB of RAM I am certain that there must have been still about 400 MB or more of free RAM overhead. Nevertheless, despite the lazy response, this is a wonderful resource, and easily the best digital encyclopedia I've tried, with much more "meat" to its articles than either Grolier's or InfoPedia 2. Internet access is not required to use the encyclopedia. However, to take full advantage of searching with Britannica.com and related Internet sites as you work, Internet access is recommended. The Britannica CD-ROMs and DVDs cater to individual research styles by giving users a flexible range of searching and browsing options for getting information. In addition to a powerful search engine that scans the full text of the Britannica database of more than 56 million words, more than 613,000 hypertext cross-references, and takes users directly to related information on their topics. Their exceptional searching performance is thanks in part to a unique system of topical, semantic, and hierarchical linkages between articles and index entries in the Britannica information database. This system of linkages, perfected by the company's editorial indexers over many years, produces smart, relevant results that are hard for conventional search engines to match. Key Britannica 2002 Features "Find" Utility (new for 2002)
KnowledgeNavigator (new for 2002)
More that 613,000 direct links between articles and index entries make it easy for users to find related information on their topics with a click of the mouse. Timelines
World Atlas Users can take a tour of the world through more than 1,300 "clickable" maps linked to articles about countries and up-to-date national statistics. Research Organizer
Update Britannica
The Standard Edition CD-ROM includes the complete text from the Britannica 32-volume print set, plus additional articles not available in print (more than 55 million words); content of the 2001 Britannica Book of the Year; more than 5.400 photos, illustrations and maps; more than 23 interactive animations; and over 30 minutes of high-quality video and audio Standard Edition System requirements:
Suggested retail price for the Standard Edition is $39.95 - currently $29.95 after mail-in rebate. Rebate offer expires 9/30/02. I'm giving The Britannica 2002 Standard Edition CD a split Applelinks rating, with separate scores for content, which is excellent, and technical execution, which leaves a bit to be desired. I'm assuming that it is a port of the Windows version, and there are still some rough edges that need attention and more optimization for speed on the Mac would be nice. I'm giving The Britannica 2002 Expanded Edition DVD (MAC) a split Applelinks rating, with separate scores for content, which is excellent, and technical execution, which leaves much to be desired. Like most OSX software, I'm finding, there are still a lot of rough edges that need attention and more optimization for speed on the Mac would be nice.   For more information, visit:
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