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(More customer reviews)Unlike the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, which is a collection of articles from the encyclopedia in a different format, the National Geographic Society wisely elected to scan every page of every issue of their flagship magazine, spanning the period from from 1888 to 2008. To be clear, that's every single page from cover 1 to cover 4 of every published issue, some 121 years' worth of The National Geographic. You can opt to install just the essentials and then swap DVDs as required, or install all six of them to your hard drive. I chose the latter option.
Everything begins with the installation of Adobe's AIR run-time engine. According to the vendor, "The Adobe® AIR® 2.5 runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® Professional software, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser." Essentially, that means that NationalGeo on your PC has the visual punch of a graphically stunning Website. The installation hiccuped just after I installed AIR from the first DVD. Knowing that Adobe products are a bit finicky, I simply uninstalled AIR, and then downloaded and installed the latest version directly from Adobe's site -- after which I rebooted my PC, always an important step with Adobe products. Then I just re-started the NationalGeo install. Everything worked perfectly after that. Installation took just short of ten hours on a fast PC, and occupies just under 50 GB of hard drive real estate. Whew!
Imagine a bookcase with 10 shelves, each 12 feet wide, packed with the dead-tree version of the National Geographic: that's the amount of information this product stores on your PC. The presentation recreates the feel of holding a printed National Geographic in your hands, so you'll definitely need a 22- or 23-inch monitor to read the smaller type without squinting -- or resort to the built-in magnifier. The UI is clean and modern, but don't expect a conventional WinApp sporting CUA dating from the 1980s. Put to torch are the familiar title bar, menu bar and tool bar. What you get is akin to a sleek Website whose design isn't wholly intuitive: some menu items are hidden and only reveal themselves on mouse-over, so expect a learning curve unless you were born digital. Don't give this one to grandpa; he won't like it.
Searches are fast and may be confined to sections such as feature articles, departments, years, even advertisements. As with all other applications I've seen for the mass market, search does not support Unixlike regular expressions but in other respects is normally adequate to locate what you're after. Content may be searched by feature articles, departments, map supplements, contributors, illustrations and advertisements. Specification of start and end dates is optional. Search may be expanded to include article text, a feature not usually found in similar products. Search results can be saved to a reference list for later access.
Search works well with words contained in titles of articles, headlines of advertisements and captions of graphics, but is spotty at best in full-text mode. Searching for articles about Silicon Valley worked flawlessly -- there were two, it turns out -- but a full-text search for five randomly chosen phrases within one of them worked with only two of the five phrases -- Palo Alto High School and flow cytometer -- but failed to find the other three (digital divide, regional planning, conservative institution), suggesting that the search algorithm depends on an index of some kind, a basis falling short of the standards we subconsciously expect from Web-based search. Google has spoiled us.
Text retrieval is hobbled by National Geographic's otherwise justifiable decision to make every page on your screen an exact replica of the original source material: the product is simply a huge collection of page scans from the magazine, so getting text in ASCII format for inclusion in a document is impossible without resorting the kind of trickery that must be used with PDF documents: capture the section of interest with a utility such as Screen Grabber or FastStone Capture, and then use an OCR utility to convert the resulting image to text. The need for such manipulation is irritating.
Another annoyance is the product's incessant querying of my floppy drive at two-minute intervals. Clack, grunt ... clack, grunt ... clack, grunt. Why does it want to communicate with an electronic dinosaur? The reason is inexplicable; floppy disks aren't part of the installation and have no conceivable use by the application. An artifact of Adobe's Air, perhaps? Who can say?
To sum up: aside from these infirmities, without which I would unhesitatingly award the product five stars, NationalGeo on DVD is a treasure well worth having and a bargain to boot. Buy it by all means!
[Afterword of interest only to those who presently have more than 300,000 files on a single hard drive.] You may well discover that your hard drive needs tweaking to support the staggering amount of data this product stores on it. My C drive held perhaps 350,000 files before the installation. Six months later it ballooned to 500,000+. Some of the increase came from NationalGeo, but the lion's share came from the gradual addition of thousands of high-res JPEGs and FLACs. Performance crept along miserably, so I used one of my favorite utilities, Diskeeper Pro, to increase the size of the MFT to the point where no more than 10 percent of available MFT records were used. This resolved performance issues. Being a software engineer, I was able to analyze and resolve the issue: others may not be as fortunate. You might consider installing this software on a dedicated hard drive to minimize I/O latency unless you are comfortable using high-end disk utilities such as the one I selected. These comments in no way constitute criticism of the product, but simply reflect the reality of processing massive amounts of data through relatively slow I/O channels. At the very least, get yourself a reliable SATA drive for the installation -- I have a preference for Hitachi -- and all should go well, unless you subsequently load the drive with a huge collection of photos and music, which will doubtless have a troubling outcome for you as it did for me.
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