If its one thing I’ve always loved about New Orleans, its that you can truly be a tourist in your own city.  The French Quarter Tour app and the Garden District Tour app puts historic locations right in the palm of your hand.  Created by Calliope Digital, the iPhone/iPad development firm, both apps bring real world New Orleans to iPhone users through a slick interface.  We’ll review one app (the French Quarter Tour) because both apps seem to be built alike just with different content.  Although you may see screen shots from both.

Design & Usability

The first thing that struck me when I opened up both apps was the attention to detail on the design and graphics side.  From the home screen you can look up locations by Map View or List View.  Map View gives you a Google map with fleur de lis markers for the places you want to view while List View lists all the key areas in....well a list fashion.  If you walking around the French Quarter, you can easily pick a destination and jump straight into the content, all in one fluid motion.  It was also nice to see that I could jump into Google Maps to get walking directions.

French Quarter App Map View

Garden District App List View

Content

Screenshot of The Old U.S. Mint Content

The content within the app was presented in a very user friendly way.  An audio clip to the left coupled with vivid photos to the right and a transcript of the audio below.  Each place reveled content in the same type of way, giving me a good bit of knowledge about the history of areas like the The Old U.S. Mint on Esplanade or Preservation Hall on Saint Peter St.  I enjoyed the Garden District app more because I was able to see where John Goodman & Sandra Bullock houses were.  (By the way, Sanda Bullock if you happen to be reading this, I loved you in the Net and both Speed movies).  I especially liked scrolling through the pictures to see places I recognized and listening attentively to the audio transcript.  Speaking of the audio, I found it to be very loud and clear (good job with the voiceover) and it should be easy to hear if you're in a busy area.  All totaled up the Garden District app listed twenty-three places while the French Quarter app listed twenty-eight places.

Final Thoughts

All and all I think the app was beautifully built with solid content, but there was a lot of key areas that were missed. One of my pet peeves was not having the ability to pick up where I last left off.  Probably needing an update for the new iOS 4, when I jumped to Google Maps from within the app I had to reload the it to start all over again.  While the content was great, it left me wanting more.  I wanted the ability to pull in 3rd party information say from Wikipedia, blogs or other local media sources.  There also seemed to be no social integration built into the app.  I’d love to see things like Twitter/Foursquare tied in with the ability for locals to leave their own comments.  Who better knows the history of these places then its people right?  These apps are still in version 1.0, so with a few updates here and there who knows whats possible.

Historic French Quarter Tour Travel $4.99

Historic Garden District Tour Travel $4.99