Pacific Coast Highway 1 Guide

Vary good for kids

I recently took this app on a road trip from LA to SF. The commentary from the tour guide is insightful and useful, but I encountered multiple issues with the design and implementation that caused me to abandon using it part way through. 1. It’s difficult to use this app for navigation because A) it doesn’t provide enough instruction prior to ALL turns B) the route it uses is not straightforward to plot into a background map app as a supplement. 2. App had trouble detecting when I reached locations, and did not begin audio about 5-10% of the time. 3. App does not handle audio switching between a background music app properly. It pauses the music to play tour commentary, but it does not resume music after. This means you have to either manually resume after each comment (dangerous) or listen only to the tour for your whole trip. 4. Because the audio commentary causes a full screen takeover, the driver loses the ability to see the map without manual intervention. This can cause some wrong turns. 5. It’s unnecessary to read “Look at the map when it pops back up…” after every comment. 6. The “Learn more” option on some of tours doesn’t make sense since the driver shouldn’t be messing with the app. I think it would be better to hear append that commentary to its predecessor. I really wanted to like this app because there isn’t really another app (that I know of) on the market that offers a great audio tour package for the entirety LA to SF, but overall, it feels very much like this app hasn’t been sufficiently user tested by the developers.

A nice counter to the epic beauty of PCH is the Action Tour Guide narrator. Nearly every point of interest between Ventura and Carmel is marked by something horrible. Fires, floods, death, extinction! We would wait in anticipation for the tragic turn to every story and laugh out loud when it came without fail. It became a game for us to predict and embellish the dark side of every mark on the map.