My wife and I are unabashed Disneyphiles, so the last two months have been a lot of fun. After my wife taught a tutorial in L.A. last month, we spent a few days at the West Coast properties -- Disneyland and California Adventure. This month, we had some Disney Vacation Club points left over, so we spent five days at our "home" resort near Disney's Animal Kingdom, Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, and Disney's Hollywood Studios.

I thought these trips would be a perfect opportunity to try out some of the many travel apps that have sprung up for the iPhone, all of which purport to be the solution to all of your Disney dining, lodging, and theme park information needs. As with any genre of app, there are a mixture of good and bad apps available. Since the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is generally a big time to visit the parks, here's a quick tour of a few of the apps that my wife and I used on our trips so you can load up your iPhone if you're going to visit The Mouse over the holidays.

To start with: I am a Disney fan -- to be precise, it's a lot like the way Jack Nicholson is a Laker fan -- so on my very nearly annual expeditions to a Disney park, I don't really need the map. I have memorized shortcuts and low-traffic restrooms, how to get all the good stuff done in one day, and loads more random bits (look closely in the Hall Of Presidents; molds for their faces are used on other animatronics around the park), mostly because carrying them around in my head was the easiest way to carry them.

Then I got my iPhone (my first smartphone) and was able to put data on my phone (which I always carry with me). Enter the Walt Disney World Notescast. This $0.99 app is a handy planning/informational tool that can guide your entire Walt Disney World trip, from vacation packages to tips on annual events and park history. I tested the iPhone version of this app, but TimeStream Software also sells a $1.99 version for notes-capable classic iPods and nanos. It doesn't rely on a data connection and you can carry all this info with you easily.

When you first launch the application, you get a list of options to choose from. I liked the variety of options, but I wish I could customize or at least re-order it so I could get at a few of the options more quickly. There is a bookmark system available, but I ended up bookmarking a lot of things so that list went non-functional pretty quickly. And while I understand not having a ton of information on one page, I had a hard time figuring out why there were breaks between, for example, "Tours of EPCOT I" and "Tours of EPCOT II". I love the list of phone numbers, especially since I can tap the number to make the call. In the now cutthroat world of Disney Dining, having that number handy -- as well as the ticket line and even the camping and Magical Express numbers, not usually easy to find on the WDW site -- is a huge convenience.