There is also a map button which will take you to a map showing your choice and putting a star on it. Since it has GPS capability built in, it will locate you, but in my experience, you have to find your way to the starred attraction which again is a problem since a park can’t be displayed on one screen. The design of the app is pretty arcane to my taste. You can set it to show you rest rooms, ATM’s etc., and they show up as appropriate icons, but attractions are just denoted by useless numbers. When you tap on a number, you get to see what it is, but this is far less useful than the paper maps available all over the parks. Tapping on a displayed name of an attraction goes to the detail screen, but in some cases the little arrow to tap is partially off the screen. The detail screens are useful if a bit barren. It took me a few days to find that hidden behind some screens is a wealth of information like park hours and detailed restaurant listings.

This is good stuff, but the way the app is laid out makes it quite difficult to get to the good stuff since I always seemed to be dropped into one settings screen or another. What I want from an informative app is to be able to get to information quickly and not have to fiddle with many concatenated screens. After a few days I gave up on this app favoring the paper maps which were much easier to understand. The Wow factor of the app is apparent though. More than once, on a bus going between parks, someone looked over my shoulder and asked if the colorful map I was looking at was on an iPhone and wistfully telling me that they wish they could get something like that on their phone. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I really wasn’t too impressed with the app, no matter how neat it looked. The app requires OS 3.1.2 or better.

Here are some screen shots of The Walt Disney World Maps Boxed Set:

If you are new to the Florida mouse, you can’t do better than buying the Walt Disney World Notecast $US2.99 [iTunes Link]. This is a complete guidebook in an app and a very complete one at that. Using a tried and true interface that’s probably been around before the iPhone, this app organizes every piece of information you could possibly want to know about the resort. It can be used to plan your trip, suggests tips for taking toddlers, provides history, ticket information, relevant phone numbers, resort information and so much more that if I included it all, this would be the worst run-on sentence I’ve ever written.

I’ve been to WDW at least twenty-five times, and with two, now grown, kids, can tell you where all the bathrooms are by heart and give a pretty good tour of all the parks, but this app isn’t meant for me. Understanding all four parks, the plethora of accommodations and all of the complexity of the resort can be somewhere between baffling and challenging. The Walt Disney World Notecast is the go-to app to tell you everything about everything. It does so in a static, no Internet or Wi-Fi connection needed, manner. This prevents it from giving you up to the minute information, but there are other apps for that. It works with any device running OS 2.1 or better.

Explanations of Disney’s Magical Express a wonderful Disney service where they handle your bags and deliver them to your room, is only one of the details that are fully explained. Hidden Mickeys, which Steve Sande referred to in November, are a game that the Disney imagineers built into all the parks. Hundreds of Mickey Mouse heads are hidden in plain sight throughout all the parks, and the trick is to find as many as you can. This app explains the concept and then gives you seven Hidden Mickey tours. It’s that sort of attention to detail and constantly exceeding expectations of what the app can do, that makes the Walt Disney World Notecast really special. If I couldn’t walk into Epcot and get to the Norway Maelstrom ride with my eyes closed, this is the app I would buy first.

Take a look at some of the seemingly hundreds of screens to give you an idea of what you get:

The last three apps I used all come from a company called VersaEdge and have a clear in-your-face design which makes them even more valuable than they would be if you had to tap a ton of buttons to get your information. The first and simplest of these apps is Disney World Park Hours Free [iTunes Link]. This is a two-trick-pony that I found quite useful. If you stay at one of the Disney resorts, one benefit you get are Extra Magic hours. Many days one park stays open an extra hour in the morning or up to three hours at night only for resort guests. One tap of the app gives you all the parks hours along with Extra Magic hours in a scrolling list that includes six months of data. If you then tap on a park, you are presented with all the times of parades, shows and special events taking place that day. Of course you can get this information online, but it’s really nice to have it in your pocket just one tap away. This app needs OS 3.0 to run and an add free version is available for US$.99, but I see no reason for it since the ads aren’t very intrusive.

Here are a few screen shots:

The Disney World Dining app US$1.99 [iTunes Link] was the one that really came through for me. It requires OS 3.0 or better and houses information that, as the week progressed, became really important. We were on the Disney Dining Plan which wound up saving us a bunch of money since the price of food in WDW is quite expensive. For US$40 per day you get a snack, a counter breakfast or lunch (which is something like a burger fries and a drink) and a sit down dinner where you get an entr

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