The Complete National Geographic

Note: This review is only for the 1998 CDROM edition

What can one say about the National Geographic magazine? A truly fantastic magazine, with breathtaking pictures, and enriching articles on varied and diverse topics about our world, even the ones beyond that have been probed. That being said, imagine 110 YEARS of the magazine spread over 32 CDs!!Before getting into details-here is what this CD collection is NOT-It is not a substitute for a multimedia encyclopedia like Microsoft Encarta, or the World Book, or any other. So don't expect pretty videos and flashy animations. This is essentially scanned images of each issue of the magazine for the last 110 years. It's not specifically aimed at kids-at the same time, kids WILL love the spread of articles and photographs that it encompasses.Now lets get down to the basics. When I looked at the system requirements-one thing made my heart sink: 'Supports Windows 95,98 ...and Windows 3.1.

For those who've used Windows long enough to remember,Win 3.1 is the terminally ugly, botched 16 bit version that preceded Win 95 (on whose user interface most of todays windows distributions are based). So if an application is meant to run on it-it probably is a 16 bit Windows app-without many of the things that we take for granted-support for scroll mice, long filenames, context menus....A trip to the website shows that Nat Geo acknowledge this problem-but they don't offer any updates, and you would have to buy the newer edition, the 2000 or later ones, for a better interface. Sigh.

List of features and evaluation parameters

Pricing The box price says Rs. 6000, but you can get it for much less on Indiatimes.com. My parents got me mine for a jaw dropping Rs 1600 on an Air Sahara auction!!!The DVD version costs US$ 120 as per the website.PackagingInside the carton, there was a sealed cardboard box with 10 CD cases (9x3 CDs +1x4 CDs) for 31 CDs, and a bonus 1997-98 CD free in an envelope.The cardboard box is sturdy enough to store the whole collection safely

Installation This was a no brainer, the installer asks you where to install and whether to install the full index. This requires about 100 MB, peanuts by todays 40 GB + hard disk sizes, so go for it.-The installer tries to detect Apple Quicktime, and insists on installing it when it can't find it. This even though I have the latest version of Quicktime (6.5, as of writing) installed. It then goes on to install a primitive 16 bit version of quicktime, version 2.11!! This won't interfere with your newer quicktime installation, so don't worry. I thought there would be some nice quicktime videos for which the software is required, but was disappointed: It is only used to load a couple of introductory movies(which you can skip after the first run).

The viewer software This was the sole disappointment with the CD-this software is clunky, outdated and difficult to use -You cannot maximize the window beyond a point One of the quirks of Win 3.1,-You cannot zoom into a page beyond a point. Since the entire magazine collection is simply a bunch of scanned images of its pages, you ought to be able to zoom in clearly to read text-which you can't. You can however rotate the page sideways, and adjust the contrast for the display text.-You cannot select text for copying and pasting Again, because all the pages are scanned images, not rendered as PDF or HTML or something. If you have an optical scanner software or something...perhaps you could try it out.-

Full text search engine A good feature, essential for any such reference software. It provides searching for articles as well as advertisements, and supports boolean queries (For the non geek, that means you can search using AND, OR, NOT and such regular expressions). After locating the results, you are prompted to insert the appropriate CD on clicking any result. So, for example, you could search for Coca Cola ads, and you find the very first one was in 1933, and the latest was in 1994!Along with the search results, you are provided cross references to similar topics, as well as other articles by the same author.

-Bookmarks Browsing such a huge collection can be exhausting, so it has a bookmarks feature. You can create usernames (no passwords) for different people, so that all can have their own sets of bookmarks.Workarounds for problemsDespite the few hiccups listed above-this collection is worth its weight in gold. Infact, the best thing to do is, use your own image viewer software to view the images, and use the built in software just to search. I recommend IrfanView ( http://www.irfanview.com), a completely free image browser thats powerful and easy to use. You can zoom and pan, adjust contrast to your hearts content. On each CD, each issue is organized by folder, for eg, 1986 issues would be in folders labeled 86A to 86L, under a base folder called IMAGES and within each folder are all the images representing a particular issue. So locating the images to browse is not a problem.-A sampler of whatever I've seen on the CD so far, with issue edition:

-The first landing of man on the moon (Dec 1969)

-Pre World War 1 Turkey (June 1914)

-Sunken World War 2 ships and planes in the pacific (April 1988)

-Opening of Tutankhamens tomb for the first time (1922)

-The JFK assassination.................................................!!!!!!!!!!!

To sum up-I'd give it 100 out of 10 on content, but a low score on usability. Then again, I got the first edition. If anyone else has the later ones, especially the DVD version, please write a review!!

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