Pick A Park Walt Disney World WP7

Pick a Park is an application I wrote for my kids on a different phone platform.  We used it to help us decide what park we wanted to visit while driving to Walt Disney World.  We originally had a Disney pin that we could spin to decide, but it would always be forgotten at home.  Since we lived about an hour away from the parks it was pretty easy for us to go, but there was always the debate about which park to visit.

The application is a very simple way to choose from two or more of the Walt Disney World theme parks and get a random choice of which one you should visit.

Pick A Park is in the Windows Phone Marketplace

Windows Phone 7

This version is for Windows Phone 7.  Since I work at Microsoft I got a free phone right when they first launched.  This app was my initial way to help learn the programming model.  I wrote this over Thanksgiving weekend 2010,  but I was so embarrassed by the app that I never released it until summer 2011.

The reason I finally released it was a XapFest event I attended where another internal Microsoft employee said that he felt you should always release the app while you are still a little embarrassed, it will keep you humble and motivate you to improve it.

To date there have been hundreds of downloads for what I was pretty embarrassed about at the time.  I get a few hate mail, but I get a lot of people just asking for advice on what park they should visit when they only have 1 days in Orlando after a conference.  Overall it has been a great experience.

Mango Update is interesting

I have been toying with the app more and more as Windows Phone Mango has progressed through beta.  I wanted to initially include two modes, one for picking the park, but another for just exploring which park you might want to visit.  But I couldn’t figure out how to do the data filtration because there was no database on the phone.  Now with Mango there is an embedded database (SQL CE), so I wanted to revisit the problem.  First a little about the current version.

New in Version 1.4

Ad SDK

At another XapFest meeting there was a discussion about the Microsoft Ad SDK for Windows Phone 7.  I thought it looked interesting so I added it to the app as a test.  It literally took me less than an evening to sign up, add the control, and test it.  If you are just beginning development with Phone 7.1 or later I think the ad sdk is now included with the developer tools (no need for the link above).

Deeper Linking to Disney

After a park is selected there are some facts about the park.  In you press one of the facts you are sent to the Disney mobile website for that fact.  See an example of the mobile website for the Animal Kingdom Kilimanjaro Safaris. Notice this is the Disney mobile website (optimized for low bandwidth and small screens, it may look strange on a desktop).

There are also two new pieces of information at the bottom of each list of facts.

Extra Magic Hours Site

Sends you to the park specific Extra Magic Hours site.  See the Animal Kingdom Extra Magic Hours Mobile Site.  Now I could just screen scrap this information as some other apps are doing, but it actually feels better to me to view the information directly from Disney.  It carries more weight with me.  Now I did get feedback that perhaps just hosting that page in a web browser control in the app (perhaps on a pivot) would be even nicer.  I may try to do that to see how it looks.

Disney Wait Times Site

Sends you to the park specific Disney mobile wait time site.  See the Magic Kingdom Mobile Wait Times Site.

Despite what some may tell you, there is NO way to get the actual wait times other than through this mobile site. There is a Disney specific app that does wait times, but that is only for feature phones from a specific mobile operator (and costs money).  The mobile wait times page is the only official way to get the current wait times.  It only states sites you can see now, moderate wait, or a long wait.  I have actually contacted Disney about an official way to get the queue time, and they sent me these links.

What about other apps that claim to give you wait times?  They are estimates, or averages from other users who reported them.  Think of them as crowdsourced wait times.  They are not official, and each app comes up with their own way to figure that information out.

The pages look like this one on the right.  The times are shown pretty clear, and there are lists of what rides will be open for those dates.

Future Updates?

So what do I have planned for future updates?  I want to split the initial entry into the app for two modes.  One is to quickly pick a random park for you from your choices (like today), but the other would be to help you discover a park through filtering datasets.    There are so many great new features in Mango that I could take advantage, like letting you deep link to a ride you want to do to your home screen.

Discovery Mode

The app will ask you to filter based on your preferences, small children, handicapped guest access, do you like rollercoasters, etc.  And then suggest a park based upon how you feel that day.

Explore Mode

Another mode could just be to explore the parks through the data and photos.  Perhaps you just want to look something up about a ride, or want to know the minimum height requirement, etc.

Park Facts as a Data Service

But what I think I would ultimately like to do is create these types of park facts as a data service.  I have a huge collection of photos, insights about rides and attractions that I could share with others.

If that data were made available from something like Windows Azure then any phone app could pull from that list and display them in their own applications.  Then I could accept input from the community about their experiences on rides, what their kids thought of things, and display feedback from people who have similar likes to yours.  I think if I can get to that stage then the app becomes much more useful to a wide range of users.

If such park facts were to be available as a data service you could even add park facts to your website or blog as a sidebar type of item (Did you know…).  There are a lot of possibilities, but this is just a hobby.  And maybe an excuse to need to go back to Disney World now that I live in Seattle.  You know (cough) for research!

I have 1000’s of photos out at Disney.  Some with my family (and maybe yours too), but a lot of just the amazing structures and out of the way places to sit with a two year old and cool her down.  I want to find more ways to get both my, and other peoples photos into an part of the data service.