Author: Memory Maker Diva
The Daily Disney Did You Know – Walt Disney World Tips and Trivia application for the iPhone aims to provide users with, as the name suggests, daily tips about the most magical place on Earth. The app is available for download from the iTunes store for $.99.
When you download the application, the first thing it asks you (as new downloads often do) is to allow push notifications. This is so you will get a tip sent directly to you each day without you having to go onto the application itself. I usually do not allow this, as I find it annoying to get so many messages on my phone, but this time I said yes. I now receive a notification of the new tip each day, but that is the only message I receive, so it is not too bad. Plus it is easy enough to turn off the notifications in preferences if they get to be too much. If you choose not to allow push notifications the application still works the same way, you just won’t get notification that the new tip is available.Once you are into the application itself, the options include: Today’s Tip, Past Tips, Photos, and Submit Your Tip. Clicking “Today’s Tip” brings you to a new page where a single tip appears. It also gives you the option of sharing that tip via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr. This is the same tip that would have appeared on your push notification.
“Photos” brings you to a page with pictures. However, there are only two pictures there – one of a row of Mickey Mouse plush dolls and one of Epcot’s Spaceship Earth. While they are both good pictures, with so few available, I am not sure why they are even there. There is no way to add your own pictures, and you can’t do anything with the two pictures that are there other than look at them.
“Submit Your Tip” brings you to the www.whereindisneyworld.comcontact form, which requires you to enter your name, email, subject and message – which is where you supply your tip. There is also a check box that allows a copy of your email submission to be sent to you. I submitted a tip regarding buying dollar store rain ponchos at home and carrying them with you on your trip, and I did receive an email immediately upon submitting. The next morning I received a personal email from the company complimenting me on my tip, and thanking me for submitting it. I thought that was very nice of them.
The “Past Tips” section is the meat and potatoes of the application. When it is clicked it takes you to a secondary list of tip options. These include: General, Attractions, Restaurants, Shows, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood, Animal Kingdom, Downtown Disney, and Water Parks. Then there are three more categories: Trivia Questions, Did You Know, and Tips. Most of these options make sense, but I was a little confused on a secondary Tips option, how trivia questions were considered tips, and what the “did you know” option meant. Wouldn’t that be the same as trivia?
Within each of these categories are the actual tips that have been submitted. I assume that these are user submitted tips, however it isn’t clear as to who is making the recommendations. The tips themselves range from being helpful, to not really being tips at all but more like pieces of trivia, to being outright questions that seemed to be looking for an answer rather than providing one. And although there are several different categories, as outlined above, the tips themselves are often duplicated. If items marked tips were actually tips, and not listed more than once, and perhaps screened or reworded to be tips, the app would be more useful. On the bright side, there were no technical issues with most of the posts.
The Trivia Question section was a different story. They do have questions, but getting the answers is confusing. If you just click on the question itself, you get taken to a secondary page that just says, “test”. Below each question is a blank area. If you click on that you also get taken to the “test” page. However, if you just hold the blank area you can see the answer. That was fine for the threequestions that were there, but then there were several blank areas in a row that if you touch them the app closes all together. This section definitely needs to be fixed.
While I was on iTunes downloading the application, and on their website, I noticed that this company has several other stand alone Disney-related applications. And while I did not download them or test them, some of them sounded promising. They have several applications that features Walt Disney World wallpapers for your phone, one that gives transportation options between different locations at the resort, a ticket price calculator, Fireworks Photography Field Guide, and even a game where you have to guess where the Disney photos were taken. It makes me wonder why all of these different app’s were not combined into one, it would be much more useful to the user, and more worth the money that this application costs. It also makes me wonder again why there are only two pictures in the Photo section when they have so many other photography applications available for sale.
Overall, I cannot recommend this application at this time. There seem to be a lot of kinks in the programming and the content is not where it needs to be. If these issues were worked out, and more features were added, this could be a useful tool for Walt Disney World guests.
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