World Explorer for Mac

World Explorer is an app that lets you enter any of the 350,000 locations in the app's database and see images and descriptions of that location. Working with the Mac's geolocation capabilities, you can also see what's near you. The app installs quickly.

The World Explorer interface presents you with a dialog box to enter a location, then three panes underneath show images, an illustrated description, and ratings of the feature or nearby features. Lookups are fast, and we ended up discovering lots of things around us that we hadn't seen before, as well as learning enough to sound like a know-it-all when we got there! Most of the information is retrieved through an Internet connection from other sources, not self-contained in the app (the database would have to be huge to do so!). The images used are attractive and the text is well written, but looks like it comes from Wikipedia.

The biggest complaint we had about the software was that it could take a while to look up and display information about a location, and sometimes the app had trouble looking up a search entry until we found an acceptable way to phrase it. Still, World Explorer is a nice app and we'll keep it on our MacBook Pro, using it when we travel.