Paris: There is an App for that
I spent the past weekend in Paris and tried to go paperless with the iPhone. At the same time I wanted to keep data roaming deactivated. So before the trip I researched some offline applications to make the best out of this vacation. And was very surprised by the selection of very good apps that do not need permanent Internet access.
I’ll quickly introduce the apps I used.
OffMaps
OffMaps is an iPhone map application using the OpenStreetMap data. That data is now surprisingly complete for many European cities and even includes many POIs such as restaurants, bars, public baths and many more.
OffMaps compiles that POI data into easy to use guides that also allow for offline search. Also you can download the full map of a guide or any area you choose to use it offline.
For the guides you need to pay extra. You can either buy single guides or – as I did – just buy the flat rate so you have great local information wherever you go.
The only information I missed was restaurant recommendations instead of only the locations. And routing does not work offline.
Memonic
Memonic is the online tool to take notes and save web site clippings I co-founded. Before the trip I saved the hotel reservation and some travel tips to Memonic.
The Memonic iPhone application downloads the whole collection for offline use. So in Paris I had access to all my Items without trouble.
Métro
All our traveling in Paris was either on foot or by public transport. Métro is a generic public transport app with data for many cities. Among others of course Paris. Once the data is downloaded you can get routes offline. I didn’t get to like the user interface during my few days of working with it but it always gave me correct answers very quickly.
Lonely Planet Paris City Guide
When the Eyjafjallajökull came upon us, Loney Planet decided to make some of their city guides available for free for some days. So I downloaded their Paris guide and used it in Paris.
In summary I didn’t like it at all. For starts, the information was too short, contained almost no links between different places and many copy-editing errors such as completely duplicated paragraphs made it into the product. But the real killer was lack of access. The app relies too much on search and doesn’t offer a good browsing access to find interesting places.
It does contain some restaurant recommendations and I did try one of those and liked it. But I ended up relying more on OffMaps even for that task.
Stanza
Stanza is an E-Book reader for the iPhone. It provided me with reading material for the train rides.
Built-ins
I also relied heavily on built-in applications. Calendar for storing itinerary information, Contacts for knowing where to send postcards to, Notes for some on-the-road information and the Clock for waking up in the morning.