The Good
- Fairly comprehensive rest area listing
- Good detail on rest area amenities
- Free
The Bad
- Rest areas are color coded, but there's no explanation of what each color means
- No way to filter by rest area type
- Occasional GPS errors
The Price
Free
As its name suggests, Rest Area Finder uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to help you find all kinds of rest areas in the U.S. and Canada near whatever highway you're currently traveling on. But with its bare-bones interface and features, can it direct you to the nearest bathroom as quickly as you may need it to?
Basic Functionality
When you launch the app, Rest Area Finder fires up the iPhone's built-in GPS to determine your current location (this works well on the iPhone, since it has a true A-GPS; for the non-3G iPad and iPod touch, the location awareness features rely on Wi-Fi, so unless you have a nearby Wi-Fi network, you'll only be able to pinpoint your location to the last place you were connected). With that information, it then drops hot air balloons representing nearby rest areas onto the map. Tap on a balloon to see what highway it's on, whether it's on the northbound or southbound side, and what amenities it offers (bathroom, food, gas, pet walk, etc.). Tap the label and you can get a fuller description of the rest area, your distance from it, and any comments on it from GuidebookGalactic, a travel site where users can comment on rest areas (but whose web version seems to have something of a spam problem).
For this basic functionality, Rest Area Finder is basically a solid app. While I was testing it, it gave me an occasional error saying it has lost the GPS signal even though I wasn't moving, but it locked back on quickly enough. If all you need is this functionality, the app might work for you, but I'd have liked to see a number of additions.
Needed Tweaks
First off, the hot air balloons that represent the rest areas are color coded--gray, red, and purple--but there's no explanation as to what the colors represent. It turns out that gray is a rest stop with gas, red a rest stop without gas, and purple an official state welcome center. If you're going to go to the trouble of color-coding the locations, though, it ought to be more clear to the user what each one is.
Secondly, there's no way to filter what kind of rest areas you see. For instance, if you only want a place to get gas or only want to find an official welcome center, you're out of luck. You can only see every nearby facility. This can make the map view that shows the facility locations pretty cluttered in high-density areas.
Lastly, the default setting of the app is to show facilities within 100 miles of your current location. That's also the minimum, though you can view facilities up to 500 miles away. I'm not sure how useful casting such a large net is. It's unlikely that if I need a rest area or gas I'm going to choose one 350 miles away. Knowing what's within a maximum of 100 miles could be useful, but allowing users to just see what's within 35 or 50 miles (or any other distance under 100 miles) could help reduce the onscreen clutter.
The Bottom Line
Rest Area Finder isn't a bad app if you want a bare bones way to find nearby facilities (plus it's free, so it's not like you're taking much of a risk if you download it). If you want a more refined experience, though, I'd check out some of the other similar apps.
What You'll Need
An iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, running iOS 3.0 or higher
