The Alaska App
17 Aug
Fresh from Alaska.org is a shiny new Alaska iPhone app for your next visit to the 49th State! This is without a doubt the most featured rich iPhone app dedicated to the Alaska experience! There are loads of features packed into this app, but the most striking of all is the price…it’s FREE!
Download the Alaska App via iTunes.
So, what can this app do?
GPS Location Aware Guide & Map
My vote for the coolest feature has to be the built-in map that recognizes your location via GPS then displays cool sightseeing opportunities, places to eat and things to do nearby. It’s claimed to include more than 30,000 hand-picked locations to choose from all around Alaska. Pretty cool! My personal experience showed hundreds of options all around the Anchorage to Eklutna areas. For a local, this feature is actually pretty slick…I bet you’ll find a park nearby that you never knew about!
Audio Tours
If you’re looking for some historical background or just curious about places, buildings and wildlife in the area – the audio tours are a neat addition for the tourists. (Some locals could learn a thing or two also!)
Great Videos
Alaska Channel (Alaska.org) is already well known for their travel videos. Basically you get high quality previews of Alaskan scenery in the palm of your hand. Great eye candy.
The Alaska Postcard
For travelers and locals alike, the Alaska postcard feature built into this app is pretty cool. Basically you can take a photo with your iPhone and attach it to a cool looking template that resembles an old school postcard. Type in a message and send it to friends, family and jealous coworkers. If the recipient has a somewhat modern email application, they’ll get a really gorgeous email with your photo (theoretically taken in Alaska). Nicely integrated and great feature targeted primarily at Alaska visitors.
The Library and Ask Bob
These features are really aimed at people simply trying find out more things to do as a tourist or looking for the inside scoop on traveling around Alaska. There’s a solid list of categories to choose from in the Library. If you’re looking for a personal travel guide just Ask Bob!
Conclusion (at least for now)
I’ve only had the app installed for a few hours, but I can tell you that this is definitely an impressive effort – not just for Alaska, but for ANY free iPhone app. Kudos to the developers and to Alaska.org for putting together such a great application! It was definitely a hefty download at more than 260MB, but for what it can do I am not surprised at the file size. Go check it out! Download the Alaska App via iTunes.
The Alaska App was originally developed by Catapult Consulting.
Thank you so much for the nice review of our app. Since you were kind enough to write about it, I thought I would share where we’re headed.
The goal was to get an initial version out, so we could get feedback and release an improved version still yet this summer. Over the past week, we’ve identified and fixed some performance and bug issues that were causing crashes on certain devices. I expect to get a new release out within the next two weeks with much faster and cleaner performance.
We have over 1000 photos in the app. For this next release we are adding several hundred more. (In fact, we hired a photographer to drive 6000 miles of Alaska’s highways in the past two weeks gathering these additional photos! I’ve also been flying in my airplane taking aerial photos of some of the glaciers around Prince William Sound.) We will be adding a slide show feature similar to the camera roll feature of the iPhone so you will be able to see all images full-size.
We are working on bringing down the large size of the app, but not for this next release. The challenge is that most of Alaska is out of cell phone service areas, so alot of our content needs to live on the device, rather than be served by the network. We think we have a nice way to solve this problem that will bring down the size of the initial load.
We are also going to be improving the postcards for the subsequent release.
Beyond that, we will be adding some really neat stuff that I will come back and tell you about in a month or so!
Thanks so much for your interest in the app. I welcome feedback and suggestions on how to improve what we have, or things we could add to it in order to make it more fun and useful for people.
Bob
bob (at) alaska.org
Where is the android version?