Net Results:I'm sure you know the feeling: you are walking through town trying to figure out someplace to go to eat, maybe try something new, but you don't have a clue what might be good, writes Karlin Lillington
Well-known food and travel guide team John and Sally McKenna have just the thing for you: Dublin's 100 best restaurants available on your mobile phone and downloadable to satnav, just in case you want to drive to your dinner.
"Sally's really the techie and was very interested in all this," says John from their home in Kerry - where they cannot always get a mobile signal themselves.
That hasn't prevented them from embracing the challenge of getting a book concept condensed to the reviewing equivalent of haiku. Or, as John says: "It was like boiling a bottle of wine down to a reduction sauce."
Quite. A mobile screen limits John's reviews to two or three sentences, a creative restriction he seems to have embraced with pithy relish.
"I found it incredibly fun to do," he says.
"I found just having three sentences lets you be incredibly cheeky."
Consider this review for the China House on Parnell Street (also one of my personal favourites): "China House is one of the original Parnell Street cheap'n'delicious ethnic eateries, but who is looking at the decor when the food is this good, and this inexpensive? Great chive dumplings, great pig's ears with scallions, great jellyfish skin with vinegar. Aaah, the real queer gear. Yum."
Every review has a tiny picture of the establishment, directions, opening times, web and e-mail contacts, and a phone number that can be dialled directly from the review page.
Restaurants can be viewed in alphabetical order but are also classified according to type, geographical locations, and the McKennas' special categories such as Hot and Hip, Classy Northsider, Near the "Dort", Near the Luas Stops, On the Med, and so forth.
"Everything's at a glance - a blink moment. It's blink thinking," says John.
The freely available mobile and satnav guide is the online-only rebirth of a guide they did years ago and which is now out of print, but with new restaurants and adapted to new technologies with the help of web designers Fluidedge.ie.
"The hardest thing was that we wanted it to feel like a book. We didn't want it to feel at all like a web page," says Sally. John says that having a clear voice behind the content was key - they didn't want it to sound like it was assembled by a mix of people, as with many guides.
Fluidedge says designing the map of the city was the biggest coding challenge.
The tiny screen meant all 100 places couldn't be represented at once, so the map divides the city into a numbered 3x3 grid that is matched with an ordered list of links to nine regions of the city. The links are coded to work with phones that support access key navigation, says Fluidedge.
For the satnav locations, Sally says the whole family drove up to Dublin, stayed overnight, then started at 7am going from restaurant to restaurant and entering the co-ordinates while also snapping the picture for the guide (meaning some were still shuttered in the early hours).
The locations were all crosschecked with online mapping systems like Google Earth and Multimap. Because there is no standard file format for satnav devices, several versions of the guide are available, which can be downloaded from the Bridgestoneguides.com website and loaded into a satnav device.
Sally says she loves maps and doing the guide for satnav made obvious sense, "and the power of the web is phenomenal". There was also, she says, a gap in the market for this type of guide.
"We'll never leave the books behind, we love the books. But this is so exciting, and all the fun we've been having in tech doesn't seem to have affected print sales," she says.
"And you can't sit back and just do what you know."
Mobile guide:www.bridgestoneguides.com/mobile
Satnav files:www. bridgestoneguides.com/dublin
weblog:www.techno-culture.com
