The Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) from Digital Lantern is an elaborately layered HyperCard stack that has nearly 3,000 restaurant reviews of San Francisco eateries. The maps are geo-coded - when you type in two street names, the stack goes right to the map of their intersection. Restaurants are denoted on the map as little dots. Touch a dot with the mouse and the restaurant name appears. Another nice feature is a description of when the restaurant opens and closes - in literal, plain English: "Open for another two hours and ten minutes," it might say, or, "Closed thirty-two minutes ago," - a very human touch. Another nice element is that you can unlock cards in the stack and add your own reviews to restaurants you visit. The "Bill Handler" is a custom calculator that will automatically add tax and gratuity to your bill. Other features include a "best picks" selection and food glossary; dress-code, parking, and handicapped access info; and my personal favorite - "Restaurants within two blocks of Moscone Center."
Problem is, as much as I love HyperCard, it actually runs on HyperCard! Which means, due to the enormous size of the stacks, it can be really slow. Recommended: a PowerBook with a 68030 chip (or better) and at least 8 Mbytes of RAM. The company looks forward to a day when restaurant review-location updates can be sent out via radio mail - so that a mobile group of reviewers could upload new reviews and users could download them with ease. Overall, a well thought-out and executed product with strong features and navigational tools. Bon appetit!
San Francisco DRG: $59, Digital Lantern: +1 (415) 337 6410.
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