Whistlestop for iPhone is now on the App Store. We spent a long time packing it with everything we pictured in a good little road trip companion. Now it is time to take it on the road.
Whistlestop 1.0 is on the App Store.
It watches the road ahead and tells the story of what is coming up. Landmarks, history, nature, local legend. Out loud, on its own, with no route to plan and no screen to tap.
We spent a long time packing it with everything we pictured in a good little road trip companion. Now it is time to take it on the road.
Five years of brainstorming
They say if you want to build something, solve your own problem. For about five years I have had the same one, usually somewhere on a highway with a sign going by too fast to read. How do I make an app that tells me, or better yet alerts me, so I can get the scoop on the places we are driving past?
It is a real thing now.
We are not the only ones who thought it was worth building. There are a handful of GPS tour guide apps out there, and some of what they do looks like what Whistlestop does. In some ways it is the same. In other ways it is not. The difference shows up in what happens while the car is moving.
How it works
Whistlestop scans a few miles ahead of the car and around it. That range is adjustable in settings.
Inside that area it identifies places connected to our sources, weighs which ones are worth announcing, and picks one based on the Focus setting: Everything, History, Nature, or Family. Then a voice speaks up and starts telling the story. There are nine voices.
Each story runs about 30 to 45 seconds. A summary of what is worth knowing, not a lecture.
While a story plays it appears on screen with a marker showing where the place sits in relation to the car. The source is one tap away, and so are driving directions for anyone who decides to stop. Every story narrated goes into a travel log automatically, and any of them can be saved as a favorite.
The rest of the time it stays out of the way. It runs under navigation, ducks the music and hands it back when a story ends. There is no microphone in the app at all. A guide that talks has no reason to listen.
The first version and what's to come
I believe this is the first version of something worth building on. Making a location-based audio guide that works right, that speaks up at the moment the car is passing the thing, takes more than it looks like it should. That was the first hurdle. It works now.
The second hurdle is stories. It takes a lot of them, everywhere, or the app is a demo that works on one famous highway.
That part would have been out of reach not long ago. The tools, the APIs, and the ability to organize this much data are what made a seemingly insurmountable amount of work feasible for a small team.
What is loaded for your first drive
More than 500,000 stories are in there already, ready for the next time you go somewhere.
Wikipedia holds an enormous human-curated repository of articles about places. Historical sites, landmarks, buildings, parks, preserves, close to anything that meets the standards for inclusion. It is written and edited by a large community of dedicated people who have built up a culture of thoroughness and referencing over decades.
That culture is the reason it works as a foundation for this rollout. I plan to write more about sources, and about how we are working to build well-sourced information into Whistlestop.
On top of that we acquired and curated a dataset of nearly 12,000 historical markers from Texas Historical Commission, all loaded in and ready to listen to. We are working to get more historical sites from more states in the near future.
Go find something
The roadmap is long and we will be actively building the audio tour guide you didn't know you needed. For now, Whistlestop is free to download, and your first 15 stories are narrated free. Turn the volume up, press Start, and hit the road!
Filed under
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you these stories automatically as you pass them. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
