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As I've reported before, I've recently gotten my first iPhone (actually a
hand-me-down of the Gen1, while my wife got the new 3GS). I've been using it
to play in the parks. On my weekend visits, I'm starting to snap photos of
Disney details, trivia, and obscure spots, and I'm starting to play the
ever-popular "where in Walt Disney World am I?" game. You can see those
posts on
Twitter or you can simply find me on
Facebook, where
the Twitter posts are also forwarded. You are all hereby invited to "friend"
me on Facebook and we can explore the parks together… so to speak.
But beyond social media, the iPhone offers me the chance to do much more
in the parks. Until now, I've only had "dumb" phones in my pocket, but now
I've got a smart phone with Internet access. That means a world of research
now sits at my fingertips. There are a ton of unofficial Disney fan sites
out there which are quite useful for looking at when you're standing in the
parks and wondering what to do next, when the next show starts, or how much
that hamburger all the way on the other side of the park costs.
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That much would be true of any smart phone. But the iPhone goes a few
steps further by making application (apps) available for download written by
third parties. These little programs are like pocket websites unto
themselves, with their own interface and their own content. Some function
even without Internet access once you've downloaded it, but others make use
of the GPS features of the iPhone and require not only a cell connection,
but that you are physically standing in the park to use the app.
It takes months for Apple to approve an
app,
so my guess is that more are on the way.
Some apps are free, supported by ads. Others cost money for the download
(anywhere from $.99 upward, though $.99-$1.99 seem the most common prices),
and the purchase price is a one-time cost. I resisted paying for apps all of
perhaps two days, and once I caved, it became hard to imagine returning to
my stingy ways.
Many apps promise they will be updated over time, when content changes.
That will be especially helpful for ones that offer, say, prices of exact
menu items. Others draw the content and information "on the fly" (requiring
a cell phone connection) when you request it, so it's by definition going to
be current. I'm thinking here of one that makes use of the published,
official Disney operating hours and show times.
In the spirit of helping my fellow iPhone users, I thought I'd take one
for the team and buy a bunch of these apps, and review them so you wouldn't
have to spend the money unnecessarily. What follows is clearly a personal
and subjective recounting of the relative worth (or worthlessness) of the
apps, and as always, your mileage may vary. I've placed them here in ranked
order, with the best and most useful ones listed first.
WDW Dining Disney ($.99) – Listed as "WDW Dining" in the
icon, this indispensable tool gives you exactly what it sounds like:
complete menu items, prices, and sometimes ingredients for all the
restaurants at the parks and hotels. It's got a clean design, an easy
interface, and it seems extremely up to date to me. You click on a park
(or hotel name), then it lists all the eateries alphabetically in this
park. Click on a restaurant name, and you get a description.
My one quibble is on this screen; I'd like to see the menus right here
just by scrolling down, but I have to click LUNCH or DINNER to see that
menu. There's a search function that looks for restaurant name; it
dynamically suggests choices as you type. I'd like a search and index
function by menu item, too, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess, and
this app is very difficult to beat for usefulness. I found myself
checking it multiple times each day, and let me remind you that not only
do I live in Orlando and should know the menus, but I've quite literally
written a book that does everything this app does, so for *me* to find
it irresistibly useful is saying quite a lot. I hope they update often,
but even if it's only once a year, this is one app you cannot live
without.
Simple, easy, effective. Let's all use
this one!
Walt Disney World Resort Times Guide ($1.99) – Listed as "WDW
Times" in the icon, this tool makes use of official data from Disney's
website to bring you park opening and closing times, as well as the
major parades, fireworks, and shows. Since it's automated and doesn't
depend on human agency to update it daily, I have high confidence that
it will be current on whichever day I switch it on.
It's particularly useful for the purposes of selecting which park to
visit that day (try locating all four paper Times Guides in your hotel
in the morning, especially if you're staying off the Disney property),
and it's just as useful when thinking about parkhopping. You can check
parade times, fireworks, and so on from anywhere in the park, without
having to find the paper Times Guide. A real winner, and an easy
purchase for me to recommend to you.
WDW Wait Times Disney (free) – Listed as "Wait Times" in the
icon, this free tool has one of the cleanest designs and easiest
navigations of all the apps. Clicking a park name gives you different
lands of the park, and under each land is prominently listed the
attractions in that land. The approximate wait time for the attraction
is given in large characters next to each attraction name; it's
impossible to mix this up. This app doesn't provide a guess based on
historical data and an algorithm, it needs live users to input data on a
day to day basis. The more users inputting data as the day goes on, the
more accurate the result. On one visit, we only saw a few reported
times, implying perhaps two users. On another visit, it looked like four
people were doing it that day.
This app is presently not perfect, and there are gaps. But it has
enormous potential. If ten, twenty, or two hundred people (let alone two
thousand or twenty thousand) used the app, the wait times info would be
pretty accurate. Since it's free, it's an easy sell. I hope the rest of
you will join me in using this particular wait times app. Even the
interface for inputting a recent wait time is intuitive and actually
kind of fun. It's oddly satisfying to stand at the info board and update
all the times at once. This kind of outsourcing of labor is called "crowdsourcing",
and it's the last of the "must get" apps for Walt Disney World.
Quibbles: it's missing Mickey's Philharmagic for some reason, and it is
completely silent about FastPass. It would be nice to add functionality
about "last reported Return Time" for issuing of new FastPasses, so I
would know whether it's worthwhile trotting out to Splash Mountain
before leaving the air conditioned comfort of the Exhibition Hall.
Centralized FastPass, a test at DAK that
has been extended. Hint: the rides are "unlinked"!
Wait Watchers Magic Kingdom Edition (free) – This app is
specific to the Magic Kingdom, and there are others for the other parks.
The same idea as the earlier app governs this one: it depends on users
inputting data so others can benefit. But this time around, the user
input interface is somewhat difficult to use. You see the same master
interface for inputting times no matter which ride you were looking at a
moment ago, and you have to scroll through the long list to find your
desired ride. Frankly, it's annoying, and since this app is only for one
park at a time (rather than the all-parks app mentioned earlier), this
one ends up lower on the list.
Hidden Mickeys ($1.99) – Listed simply as "Disney World" on
the app (a somewhat presumptuous title), this one offers a clean
interface and easy navigation. As you might expect, it's all about
finding those elusive Hidden Mickeys. It's not written by Steven
Barrett, the author of the paperback version of the same topic, and it's
a lot cheaper than his book. In terms of content, it's probably about
comparable. There are five locations listed for Adventureland, which
compares favorably with the print book. It's somewhat fun, and
reasonably useful. I wish it had pictures, though.
Walt Disney World Trivia ($2.99) - This one is less about
utility and more about killing time in line. It's got great fun icons
and whimsical castles, and an overall fun design. It's basically a
trivia quiz (something I know a little bit about!), and you appear to
lose the game as soon as you miss one of the questions. It's got a
leader board, which I like since it will encourage repeat play. The
questions are multiple choice and ask such things as the tallest object
on property or the name of the leader of the Bear Country Jamboree."
Some of the questions came up twice in the same 20-question game on me,
implying a bit of an error in the programming. Still, it's a good killer
of time when in the lines, and I'll bet it will be popular on airplanes.
Assuming you remember to put your iPhone in "airplane mode" and just use
the apps!
Magic Kingdom Mini Guide ($.99) – Listed as Magic Map on the
icon, this app looked almost completely useless to me at first. It
appeared to be just an unofficial redrawing of the park map, with a
simple way to see restrooms, rides, and shops. All this is on the
official paper park maps you can pick up for free, so I didn't see the
point at first. Eventually, though, I realized that you can click DINNER
on the restaurant page and be linked via the iPhone's Safari browser to
the menu items as seen on the allearsnet website. (I wonder if
allearsnet even knows if they are doing that.) This saves me the trouble
of a bookmark in the regular Safari browser, which is standard on an
iPhone, but it probably takes just as many clicks. I suppose this might
be a useful and fun thing to check while riding the Disney bus on the
way to the park, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
Walt Disney World Secrets Notescast ($.99) – With only one or
two "tours" per park, and each tour really pretty slender, this app
leaves a lot to be desired but if your definition of "secrets" includes
knowing that Cast Members sometimes show off animals to small kids or
that you can hear artificially-piped in kitchen noises in Tusker House,
then this is the right app for you. Pretty much 100% of this info is
available elsewhere online, though, so it wasn't really the right app
for me. At least it was about lesser-known things, though.
Walt Disney World Guide Notescast ($1.99) – This one goes in
a million directions: annual events at Walt Disney World (pirate and
princess party, food and wine festival) but with zero specifics,
descriptions and photos of Walt Disney World attractions, a historical
narrative of WDW, generic character finding hints, disability info, and
a few token links about planning, merchandise, parades, phone numbers,
hotels, and tickets. It reads like a not-very-informative unofficial
website, reproducing much of what's already there on the official
website.
WDWPal ($1.99) – This app is all about drinking and dining!
The top link concerns lounges, then comes dining discounts, a dining
plan tracker (which might be useful if I actually used the Disney Dining
Plan), and there are some details about exactly *which* restaurants
gives me discounts using the annual pass or the Tables in Wonderland
card (this is a problem because the list is ever-evolving). Moderately
useful.
ProGuides: Disney World ($.99) – Extremely overview-oriented.
The top menu has "districts" (um, I think you mean "parks" guys), and
such links as UNDERSTAND, TALK, GET IN, TICKETS, GET AROUND, SEE AND DO.
It's meant for the rank first timer who did no homework, has no context,
and yet would like something to read when they are at the park. Or
perhaps they are thinking folks would use this rather than the regular
Web when planning? It may be cheaper than Frommer's, but the value is
quite suspect.
SwanDolphin (free) – This app is official. What a concept! I
wish Disney would release official apps, but like always, Disney is
behind the technology curve. (I'm still annoyed they thought go.com
would be a portal of sorts, and still find ways to worm it into URLs)
The Swan and Dolphin hotels are not owned by Disney, and this app
provides video, pictures, restaurant info, activities, and a map of the
area. It's mostly generic and unspecific, like a glossy official
website, but it's free. And if you're staying here, it wouldn't hurt to
read about the amenities while you're waiting in line for Splash
Mountain.
Disney World Wait Times and More ($.99) – Listed as D2 on the
icon, this one tries to be comprehensive but just plain misses the boat.
It purports to cover wait times, photo sharing, map location,
restaurants, restrooms, and shopping, but in reality, most of the app is
just a gigantic listing under "Places" that puts "AFI Showcase Shop"
right next to "Agrabah Bazaar". In case you're wondering, the
standby/wait time for Agrabah Bazaar is "nothing submitted" as I write
this, and the FP return time is "Nothing submitted today." As you can
surmise, they have quite lazily used a common interface for every ride,
shop, and restaurant in the park. Um, no. Not useful. Have these people
even been to Walt Disney World? Avoid.
Disney Checklist: Walt Disney World Day Organizer ($.99) –
This is one giant "to do" list, meant as an interactive way for you to
create a list of stuff to do as you plan your trip. It's not very guided
– it could be used for anything! It lets you create a description,
assign a status like "in progress," and assign three levels of priority.
This might be useful for OCD people, but for the rest of us, a piece of
paper works just as well (personally, I do my vacation planning in
MS-Word, where I can paste reservations info from the web, or remind
myself of URL links). Your mileage may vary, but I found this app
completely worthless.
WDWTrip.com: WDW Today ($2.99) – Not only is this one
overpriced, compared to the others, it commits the unforgivable sin of
being incorrect. It's a simple and useful tool on the one hand; it shows
you at a glance what the park hours are around WDW, and even suggests
which ones to avoid (on the basis of which has Extra Magic Hours and
will likely be more crowded). So far, so good. It even gives parades and
fireworks times, but not the smaller entertainment.
I originally had this app ranked much higher, but then last Saturday it
listed the MK as closing at 10 pm, and stuck with that info after
multiple refreshes. Yet the other park info app (see #2 above) said the
park closed at 11pm. Finally, we opened Safari and checked the official
website: 11pm was right. Since we were in-park that day, we also grabbed
the paper Times Guide and saw that 11pm was correct. This app is either
hand-coded by a human (who might make a mistake), or it relies on older
data. Either way, unreliability is the kiss of death, for me at least.
Whew! That's a big list. Now, a reminder: you have to actually *USE* your
apps. On the first weekend I had them, I checked only sporadically and thus
lodged a false closing time into my memory. It could be argued that we
relied a bit *too much* on technology. In a world without an iPhone, I would
have grabbed the paper Times Guides and known for sure what time the park
was closing. Arguably, having the technology lulled me into a false sense of
security, and it ended up with me checking the closing time less often than
otherwise would be the case.
If you bury your nose in an iPhone all
day, will you fail to "discover"
little side attractions like this one at the China pavilion?
As noted media theorist Neil Postman famously said, when you adopt a new
technology, you are invariably (and often unconsciously) giving something
else up in return. Are we losing our active planning and relying on the
technology instead? Are we thinking too little? On the one hand, that's the
goal of a vacation. On the other hand, that's also just a tiny step forward
on the road to a Keanu Reeves "Matrix" type future, which is chilling enough
in itself.
The apps are so darned useful, though, that they may well be inevitable.
Long before the iPhone landed in my lap, I had planned to discontinue my own
Menu Book (which gives menu items, prices, and indexes by park of everything
in Orlando) because sales have never matched the level I'd need to make the
constant updating and printing worthwhile. I had expected people to use my
book in the parks themselves, but most of them who replied told me they used
it for planning instead (and there are free websites for that).
Like any businessman, I see the writing on the wall and will discontinue
the book. That became especially true when I saw the dining app (#1 on my
list above). It's better than my book. You carry it around with you anyway,
and updates are digital--thus, they are "free" to the author (no additional
printing of books) and might even happen more often.
Reader's Note: This is the first of two columns from me this week, I'll
be back Thursday with a pair of photo essays.
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