The Napa Valley iPhone App: A Retrospective
It’s exciting designing for a new medium, like Mobile Applications, while at the same time frustrating, because the learning curve hasn’t been crushed down by lots of previous traffic. While I have designed and created a wide collection of items and products over the years, the mobile Apps have some unique characteristics. They are like books, in that they convey information and they are mobile, but they are interactive, like websites.
They live on a platform that they share with other useful tools, phone, web browser, camera, organizer, etc. In many ways a well designed travel App on a mobile phone is the ideal traveling tool. It has revolutionized travel in the same way that the computer revolutionized the home office. For those of you who have never worked in an office that didn’t have a computer, realize that a cell phone and laptop replaces what was once a large office suite of tools.
The reason why people worked from centralized locations was due to access to the tools; Dictaphone typewriter, carbon paper, drafting tables and tools, phone switch board, postage meters, calculators, and tons of files. A home office was a place where you read files that you brought home with you at night. Without a team of secretaries, bookkeepers, filing clerks and office boys to run errands and deliver packages you couldn’t really ‘work’. When you could have all of this in your home office in the form of an internet connected computer it transformed the working world. Home based businesses sprung up and then went global.
This is what the smart phone travel Apps have the potential to do for the traveler’s relationship with the tour book. Of the 25 or so books that we’ve written seven are tour books, but in truth those tour books contain relatively less information in total compared to our other titles. That’s because they are often a re-packaging and updating of the same information, with some additions. This is common in tour books, creating various sized books based on people’s needs. Just determining what size to make our tour books has been the subject of much discussion.
With an App the issue isn’t whether it should be six inches by nine inches, or five and half by eight, but whether we should include more points of interest, or cover a larger territory. The external format, the phone, is going to stay the same. When you buy a book it is a book, and other than using it as a spacer or doorstop there are not that many other uses for it. An App fits within a multi-purpose tool that makes a Swiss Army knife seem one dimensional in its possibilities. I say this as lover of books and Swiss Army knives.
Our two current Apps are what are called Native Apps, which means that they live on the phone and don’t depend on access to a website to function, other than the initial download and updates. There are numerous tour apps out there that depend on web access. The problem that we find with that method is that wine country is ‘country’, and there are many places where getting web access is a problem. Our apps depend on a connection for the GPS to access to the maps. As we’ve traveled around the area we’ve seen how many times we can’t connect to the GPS, so we have created our own maps, and we’re in the process of putting one in for each destination.
As time goes by and we work with the tool and design for new formats, we keep learning how to make these Apps more helpful and flexible. Eventually we hope to add video so that the tasting tips can be show and tell, and we can offer the winemakers own perspective on their wines. The possibilities abound in a place where the only real topics are food, wine and weather.
Ralph & Lahni de Amicis are the owners of Amicis Tours that takes people on tours of the wineries of Napa and Sonoma. They are authors of the Amicis Winery Guides (Find them on Amazon), and over twenty books on health, design, business and travel. Their iPhone Apps, The Napa Valley Wine Tour, and The Sonoma Winery Tour are a tour guides approach to these beautiful area, complete with 1000’s of photos and insights. Their articles and products can be found on the sites http://www.amicistours.com and http://www.spaceandtime.com
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