Unwrapped travel

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As we moved our first app into beta testing last week, we thought now would be a good time to let you know about some of the features of the app and show you a few more screenshots — just so you are completely tantalised!

First, a special thanks to those who volunteered to help with the testing. We had more than 100 people volunteer — thank you to you all. Unfortunately it wasn’t practical to get everyone involved in the testing, so we whittled the list down to a dozen or so to put the app through its paces.

I can’t really discuss anything in more detail without letting the cat out of the bag: Our first app covers Cambodia’s Siem Reap and Angkor Wat.

The app is called “Angkor”.

Keeping it simple
One of the tempations with the iPhone/iPod Touch is that few limitations stop you cramming whatever you can into the device, so our immediate approach was to put everything bar the kitchen sink in. The problem with this is that you quickly develop a massive dump of information that is both intimidating and unwieldy for the poor guy on the street that just wants to find a cheap noodle joint.

There’s nothing worse than opening an app packed to the lintels with information, only to get a list that goes and goes and goes and goes some more. So we tossed the list out the window and went with eight simple top level categories:

Background | Sleep | Eat & meet | See & do
Transport | Walking tours | Photos | Maps

Each section contains sub-categories and sections, but at a glance, you should know exactly which section of the app you want to head to. Here is a screenshot:

Makes sense?

Delve a little deeper
Each section then has sub-sections. In the Background section, for example, you’ll find information under the headings of History, About Cambodia, and Planning. Each of these may contain smaller sections themselves. History for instance is broken up into more than a dozen chapters, each talking of a specific period and where appropriate matched with a picture. About Cambodia has chapters on Food, Language and Safety (among others), with these often broken into sub-sections — food has Eating Khmer Food, Snacks, Insects and so on. So it’s four levels of fun.

Before you recoil from what sounds like a hellish conflagration of lists, listen to this: No lists are involved. Well, there is a list if you want to use it, but the important thing is you don’t need to. Instead we make use of the great iPhone swiping feature to allow the reader to flick through the sections looking for one that catches their eye — sort of like how you’d leaf through a book. Here is a partial screenshot showing a couple of history snaps.

What this means is that you can dig deeper and deeper into various subjects, learn a bit (we hope!) and be helped along with the photos.

If you’re scratching your head and thinking “Hey I didn’t read any of this on the Travelfish website!” you’d be right. The app contains around 40,000 words of extra content that we have written purposefully for the app.

Save time and money
As you probably know, many guesthouses and hotels can be booked online. Within the accommodation section, all the contact details are clearly displayed, but if a place works through property resellers (like Agoda or HostelWorld) then we also give the reader the option to click through to that site to make a reservation.

The problem is, resellers often have different rates, meaning that if you’re looking for the cheapest option you have to go check each provider and compare rates. We save you the trouble and show you the cheapest rate in our records that is available at each reseller. See the screenshot below for an example.

Decide where to go before you get there
Most of the sights, especially the Angkor ruins, have been matched with a photo. There’s nothing worse than reading about a site that sounds at least half interesting, only to get there and find four laterite blocks and a sleeping pooch. By matching the sights with pics, and with our straightshooting write-ups, you’ll be able to decide quickly what you do and don’t want to spend your time doing.

This is further buttressed by a handful of walking tours that give you a range of different options and routes — helpfully marked on the maps — to help you get the most out of the app.

Stay on the straight and narrow
It’s just not an app without a map right? We’ve packed up some neat bundled maps with the app. You’ll get down to the ground detail for Siem Reap and Angkor Wat along with a bird’s eye view of the rest of Cambodia — including the capital and border crossings. This means you’ll have all you need to plan without needing to get online once, so no need to fret about totally insane roaming bills.

The maps are annotated with markers that lead you straight to listings (so click on Angkor What? bar and you’ll be taken to their review in the Eat section). It also works in reverse, so if you’re reading about Two Dragons Guesthouse, you can click on the map icon and have the map pop up to show you just where you need to go to pick Gordon’s brain.

And there’s more
The app also contains a photo gallery with hundreds of photos along with the standard stuff like bookmarking, help, glossary and FAQs. Results also can also be reordered and sorted to make it even easier to find what you’re after.

On the subject of search
There isn’t one.

We don’t mean to brag, but we reckon the information is so well organised and so easy to find that there is no need for a search facility in this app.

We thought it was better to eschew one totally rather than go for what would have been nothing more than a glorified filter — a solution that has been much derided in other travel apps. If you can’t find something in this app, we’re willing to bet that is because it isn’t there.

That said, if you’re reading this and just happen to be able to write a natural language search algorithm for the iPhone, please do get in touch

So when is it going to be available
We’re planning the final beta-build tomorrow (Tuesday) and as long as no last-minute problems flare the app should go to Apple shortly afterwards. Once they have it, we need to bide our time while it runs through the approval process.

Once it is available, we’ll be celebrating and will be giving away coupons for the app at the iTunes store. If you’re a blogger interested in receiving the app for review purposes, contact me at stuartmcdonald@travelfish.org.

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Yesterday I caught up with a couple of Travelfishers who happened to be in Bali and took them off for an afternoon of beach sitting and BBQ seafood eating — yes, you should always get in touch if you happen to be in Bali!

As an added bonus I had the first functional build of our first Travelfish app on my iPod Touch and so, after I’d clouded their judgement with enough Bintang, I said hey take a look at this — and they were suitably impressed.

So, given the cat is starting to sneak out of the bag, I thought I’d sit down and go through in a bit more detail what we’re trying to do with the new Travelfish app.

SOME HISTORY
A few months ago I knew nothing about apps. I knew iTunes was great for downloading free Sesame Street podcasts for the kids and, ahhhh, Village People albums for Samantha, but that was about it.

Then in July my parents visited and Dad had an iPhone 3Gs with him. Within ten minutes I was a convert. Over the next ten days we took the phone through its paces. We used Google maps to trace a drive up to Bedugal. We checked email and browsed Travelfish on White Sand beach north of Candidasa. We browsed hotels in Sanur while sitting on the beach. As a travel research device and planning tool, it was absolutely awesome.

Not long after this we partnered with a developer and started building our first app.

When I finally got around to getting my own gadget, I went for the considerably cheaper iPod Touch that came in at a third of the price of an iPhone 3G (the 3Gs is as yet unavailable in Indonesia). First I went and downloaded Flight Control — a totally addictive game that you should get too, but once I’d given up on bettering my amateurish score of 64, I started looking at it as a work and research device.

Now, as long as I’m within range of a WiFi signal, I can use the Touch for email and web browsing, Twitter, Facebook, chat and basic note-taking. On my next trip all I will be taking is the Touch — no laptop.

Then I went in search of travel apps, purchasing and downloading all the other Asia-focused travel apps I could find. The majority were poor, in quality, execution or both. There were some gems, HostelHero for example, but the bulk were quite disappointing.

But out of this disappoinment came the opportunity of doing some things better:

CONTENT REMAINS KING
In some apps the content is primarily derived from free sources on the net, for example Wikipedia or WikiTravel. I’ll be the first to say some Wiki content is great, but when the only listings offered in the food section of one city is a single Indian restaurant that we’d banned for spamming Travelfish I’m not sure how many times, the need for curation is highlighted. Uncurated Wiki content is problematic. As is reams of totally unformatted text dumped straight out of a Wiki.

So comes the first goal of the Travelfish app: The content must be as good, if not better, than what is available on the Travelfish site and it must be tailored for use on the iPhone.

THE IRONY OF NOT WANTING AN INTERNET CONNECTION
A lot of the cheaper (under $3) or free travel apps are really just a gateway to an actual website. There’s nothing wrong with this if:

a) you’re in an area where internet connectivity is ubiquitous;

b) you’re on a local sim card so roaming charges are not an issue.

If you’re tramping through rural Cambodia on a five-day break, chances are you’ll have zero connectivity and you won’t have a local sim card.

My father’s roaming bill after the aforementioned 11 days in Bali was A$4,400.

So came the second goal of the Travelfish app: It must not require internet connectivity to be useful.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Other apps, notably Lonely Planet’s, are absolutely packed to the rafters with information, but when it comes to simple tasks such as finding a guesthouse or a place to eat, the process is very complex and not at all intuitive.

In a very clever move, Lonely Planet has set up an excellent resource courtesy of GetSatisfaction that allows people to lodge praise and complaints for their apps. This proved to be an ideal resource for seeing what issues customers were having and how Lonely Planet was dealing with them.

So comes the third goal of the Travelfish app: The app must be intuitive to use and the information must be easy to find.

MAPHEM
One of the challenges faced by the other real travel apps is maps. It is a frustrating business to be browsing offline and in a situation where you really need a map only to get a “You gotta be online” message when you click on a map link.

So comes the fourth goal of the Travelfish app: The maps must be totally cached and be able to be used offline at all times.

THE FAMILIAR VS THE FUNKY
Lastly, once you’ve looked at and used a few apps, the design, look and feel all gets pretty similar — a dollop of lists, a smidgen of pics, a dash of icons and a pinch of dropdowns. We decided we wanted something that looked. really. good. So we’ve largely dispensed with lists and drop downs. While it isn’t quite as fancy as the big screens Tom Cruise played with in Minority Report, the app interface really turns traditional travel appdom on its head, yet it is so simple, you’ll have it down in seconds.

So comes the fifth goal of the Travelfish app: It must be funky but not at the expense of functionality.

I’m happy to say that, with the first working build in my hand, all five of the above have been satisfied.

Q AND A
The response to our newsletter list has certainly surpassed our expectations, and we’ve been getting a lot of questions — so here’s answers to the 10 most frequently asked questions regarding the Travelfish app:

Q) Where will the app cover?
A) The first Travelfish app is destination rather than country focused. The launch destination is somewhere in Cambodia.

Q) Will the app be free?
A) No, but assumming all goes to plan there will be free apps on the way.

Q) How much will it cost?
A) We expect it to be priced at a similar or slightly higher level than the Travelfish Guides. Please bear in mind that Apple takes 30% of the final selling price.

Q) Will the app contain extra information compared to the Travelfish site?
A) Yes. It comes with a far more detailed background section — history, culture, guidence on health and safety, money matters and so on. Sort of similar to the introductory section you’d see in a legacy guidebook. That said, while we’re putting a lot of new material into the app, nothing is more than four “clicks” from the splash page.

Q) When will the app be out?
A) We’re currently working towards having it to Apple by early December.

Q) Will the app have ads in it?
A) No.

Q) Will I be able to update the information in the app?
A) At this stage no, but this feature is on our longer development timeline.

Q) Will the app have Google maps in it?
A) No. We’ve used Google Maps for the interactive maps on Travelfish, but due to licensing issues, we can’t bundle these maps how we wanted to. The app does have fully interactive maps, but they are not supplied by Google.

Q) Will I be able to book places online through the app?
A) You’ll be able to contact places directly via web, email, phone and fax and where we have a link to an online reservation supplier you’ll be able to make reservations through those other sites (in which case you will obviously require internet connectivity).

Q) Will I need an iPhone for it to work or will an iPod Touch be enough?
A) The app will work on either an iPod Touch or an iPhone.

SCREENSHOTS
We really don’t want to give too much away in this regard, but here are a couple of screenshots of sections of the app. Note these are not final and the finished product may look a bit different to this.

Some of the details on the accommodation profile above have been blanked out.

Yes, Sam does like her crab — especially with a liberal dose of Kampot pepper.

Thanks for signing up for the list and we hope to have something ready for you to use in the very near future.

Cheers

Stuart and Sam