I created an A-list app for ‘B-tier’ acts at Disney. It’s hard to dig down deep into the official Disneyland app to find times for the smaller acts, especially when someone might be spurring you on to the next Lightning Lane. I jest by the way….The Dapper Dans are nobody’s B-tier, and the Main Street Piano Player has one of the best left hand strides to pound the ivories since John Michael of Asleep at the Wheel. They’re not usually top of mind though, and finding their performance times can be a pain.
That’s why I created Admiral Boom’s Master’s Log (Admiral Boom is the character in Mary Poppins that keeps time with rooftop artillery). It aggregates show times from an open api and leans on a json file to fill in performer descriptions and custom location data. Not only does it tell me the next time The Bootstrappers are playing in Frontierland, it tells me they’re in New Orleans Square and will be there for 20min.
Once I got to testing it it out, I realized I wanted to be able to navigate the app as much as possible with my right hand. Because my left hand is usually being held by my wife as she’s ‘encouraging’ me to pick up my pace, I dropped the nav to the bottom of the app. There’s also swipe control for forward and back navigation.
Since it’s a personal app that I wanted to use for this trip, I might have used some official Disney images. As such, I don’t think I can release it for others.
The last thing I did was to leverage localStorage. The app pulls data every 30min and caches it. If I lose the network connection in the park, the data is totally usable and not that stale. You know what’s not stale? Mary Poppins at 10:40 AM near the Small World Promenade in Fantasyland. Now that’s right as a mornin in May.
