This App Lets You Browse Wikipedia From Your Mac’s Menu Bar
There’s more to your Mac than pre-installed apps and utilities. With a little digging, you’ll find that the Mac has some incredibly useful menu bar apps created by talented indie developers. One of my favorites is Menupedia , which puts Wikipedia in your Mac’s menu bar. This makes it the fastest way to launch and use Wikipedia on an Apple device.
How to Use Wikipedia from the Menu Bar
After installing Menupedia, you will see a small W icon in your Mac’s menu bar. Just click this icon to instantly access everything Wikipedia has to offer. You’ll have access to the entire Wikipedia website, all contained in a convenient pop-up window.
While the default options should be good enough for most, there are a few tweaks you can make to make them even more useful. Open Menupedia and click the gear icon to open Settings.
I recommend the following changes:
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Disable window always on top
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Enable startup at login
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Enable larger icon in menu bar
With its default settings, Menupedia remains open until you click the icon in the menu bar to close the pop-up window. If you turn off the Always on Top option , you can click anywhere outside the app window to hide it. The other two settings launch Menupedia when you turn on your Mac and make the menu bar icon larger to make it easier to spot.
You can also make a couple of small changes to Wikipedia itself. Open Menupedia, click the three-line icon in the top left corner and select Settings . On this page, I changed the text size to Medium , the page color to Dark, and turned on Expand All Sections . These are my preferred Wikipedia readability settings, although yours may vary.
Menupedia has several other useful features. The bottom panel allows you to change the language of Wikipedia. The application supports English, French, German and Spanish. There is also a cube icon that opens a random article. This way you can read several articles and then hide the Menupedia. When you restart it, the app will restore the last article you read.