Some Observations on the Forest Lawn Mobile App once I actually used it
By Chris Mills
I just discovered how to download and install the Forest Lawn mobile app last week and put it on my Android cellphone, and today I got a chance to use it at two of the Forest Lawn memorial parks, Hollywood Hills and Glendale.
This is definitely a case of praising with faint damns or damning with faint praise, it's a useful app but all I can think of is how much more useful it could have been.
First of all, on the good side, the app lets you do some things you can't do any more on the main Forest Lawn site, such as search for names only within a certain cemetery (presumably the one you're visiting at a particular moment in time). It also shows you full death dates, which you can no longer view on the main website (although it doesn't include the birth year, which you CAN view on the main site).
Another useful ability is viewing some of the lot locations in some of the older sections in Glendale, they had odd formatting and when Forest Lawn rolled out their new website three years ago they broke the listings for some of the older sections, the lot numbers no longer displayed correctly, they were truncated. Viewing these lot locations through the mobile app restores the full lot name, which is going to enable me to go through and clean up some gaps in some of the lot numbers I recorded.
OK, so I've proved I'm not a complete curmudgeon by saying something nice. Now let's get to the not so nice ...
When you search for a person, when you want directions, you are given a choice of two modes, driving and walking (If you are more than 1.75 miles away from the person's burial location, it will force you to use the driving directions until you are close enough to use the walking directions).
The driving directions, as one would expect, are dynamic. As you drive and get closer to the burial location, you will be prompted to turn when necessary and you will be informed when you are at (theoretically) the closest point where you can park your car and walk to the grave.
It would be nice if the walking directions worked the same way. They don't, not at all. The walking directions display a snapshot for you, and the only movement you will see on them is your position wiggling around because of whatever imprecision is built into your phone's GPS. The walking directions will display the position of the marker relative to you with a distance, such as 240 feet. You can then move in that direction and walk, say, 200 feet, but your display doesn't change. So you have no idea if you are getting closer to the grave or farther away from it.
I also bring this up because my cell phone (a Samsung Galaxy Avant) has a relatively dim screen, it's fine indoors but when I'm outside with it I really struggle to see what's going on with the screen. Today while I was trying to use the Forest Lawn App I kept ducking under trees just because the only way I could really read the screen was in the shade.
In any event, because the walking directions screen does not appear to be dynamic, I kept having to resort to hitting the back button on my phone, relaunching the directions screen (having to click Agree every time I did that) and then starting the directions over again to see if I was actually getting closer to the grave or farther away from it.
OK, so that's a pain in the ass, and really detracts from the utility of the app, at least as far as I'm concerned. In some cases it is pretty clear which direction you have to walk to get to the marker, in other cases it doesn't seem clear, maybe I'm just being stupid but it was not always obvious to me which way I should be going.
That brings me to my next gripe about the walking directions. Some of my test cases today were in a section in Glendale called Whispering Pines, which is known as being a nightmare even to experienced gravers because of the bizarre way some of the plots are numbered.
For those of you who don't know, the main feature of Whispering Pines is a long hill, with a gentle ridgeline going more or less from east to west (or west to east, if you want it that way). It's always easiest if you can find anything you are looking for on the hilltop, then work your way down to any graves that are below that, if you've planned properly you can minimize as much as possible walking up and down the hill which can be quite tiring.
Once I had found the first grave I was looking for in Whispering Pines, I punched in the name of someone else I was looking for. Imagine my disgust when I looked at the walking directions and saw it telling me to go back down to the road I had parked my car on, walk a hellacious distance AROUND Whispering Pines the longest way possible as far as I could see, and then walk back UP the hill to get to another grave. I zoomed out of the view and looked at the actual distance I would need to walk if I just continued over the top of the hill. It was probably about 15 or 20 percent of the distance of the other route, with very little of the up and down.
So my point about that is, walking directions should be WALKING DIRECTIONS, not GO BACK TO MY CAR AND WASTE GAS DRIVING AROUND THE CEMETERY AND WALKING BACK UP A HILL I JUST WALKED DOWN directions.
As far as the interface goes, those are my observations. I had a couple of other things happen which I'll discuss next, but these are probably data errors, they don't have anything to do with the interface.
After I hit Whispering Pines (and I actually was pretty happy with the results, I found some markers I had been meaning to visit for the last couple of years and put off just because WP is such a pain in the ass) I went down to Vale of Memory. I know Vale of Memory pretty well, I've personally photographed probably at least a third of it. That doesn't mean I remember off the top of my head where every grave is, I think there are something like 11,000 people buried in just that section.
The person I was looking for in Vale of Memory looked to be not very far off the curb of the adjoining road, which would normally be a slamdunk. And very quickly I get to the point where I relaunch the search to see how close I am, and it says 1 foot. But the marker is nowhere to be found. I go ahead and go up and down a few rows and back and forth probably fifty feet in each direction. Nothing, nada. At that point the thought occurs to me that the reason we don't already have a photo for this person is that there may not be a marker at all. A bunch of us worked the heck out of Vale of Memory last summer and photographed most of the markers, although a good number of the photos didn't get posted because of something Find A Grave did (long story, not going into it here).
Anyway, I went up and down and back and forth and couldn't find the person, who was in Lot 1771. I relaunched the search and once again it said I was 1 foot away from the marker. I don't know how accurate the GPS is on my phone, I'm sure it's not accurate to one foot, but I had looked at every marker around this spot for quite some distance without seeing the one I was looking for. Just for yucks, I looked at the name on the marker in front of me and punched in a search for that person. It said that marker was in Lot 2006 or something like that.
2006 doesn't sound that close to 1771. I say fuck it and give up on that person for now. Like I said earlier, there is a distinct possibility this person has no marker, but I'm not going to bother calling the records office and asking, still got plenty of other stuff to do.
My next test is not far away, in the Graceland section. I have it launch the driving directions because it's at least several hundred yards from where I am now and I don't want to walk that far. The only problem with that is that as far as I can tell the driving directions now want to take me to the far side of the cemetery, not to Graceland. I ignore the driving directions and take the most direct route from Vale of Memory to Graceland, much shorter than what they were trying to have me do.
My next problem is that just from what I know of Graceland (another section I have photographed a lot of) is that I appear to be driving right past where I should be parking and the driving directions want me to continue going around the bend (I won't even make the obvious joke about how it's already way past that point with me). I go ahead and stop the car and switch to the walking instructions. Sure enough, the place I parked is as close as you can get to the marker which I find out once I actually see it. So I have no idea why the driving directions wanted me to continue on and park FARTHER away from the marker..
I have someone else in Graceland I want to find, so I search for that person and launch the walking directions since I shouldn't be too far away by my reckoning. Imagine my surprise when the walking instructions have me leaving Forest Lawn entirely and driving away from the cemetery, oddly enough, it showed me a street address although I don't recall now what it was. Let me see what happens if I pull up that search again ... Pulling it up now from the driving directions it looks ok, but god only knows what it would do if I switched back to the walking directions, which I can't do now because I'm 25 miles from the cemetery. OK, well I'll revisit this one again the next time I'm at the cemetery.
Actually, I might see the problem here. It shows the marker positioned correctly within the cemetery but it thinks I should be walking to it from a street just outside and to the southeast of the cemetery, not a street inside the cemetery. Not sure what that's all about, but it seems kind of glitchy. Anyway, that must have been the problem with both of those graves in Graceland, the part of Graceland their coordinates were in somehow got mapped to a driving waypoint outside the cemetery, which is why all that crazy stuff was happening when I was trying to find them.
At that point I gave up on that person and went looking for someone else in Eventide. The directions to the one in Eventide worked more or less perfectly, so I got no beef with that one.
Thinking about the problems I had in Graceland, it did dawn on me that this whole system is only as good as the GPS coordinates they have put into their database. If any of the coordinates are screwed up for these markers, their directions are going to exhibit all kinds of crazy behavior. And as I described above, even if the coordinates are within the cemetery, if their system thinks the closest point you can drive to is outside the cemetery, you have problems there.
At that point I gave up on playing with the Mobile App and went back to doing the kinds of things I usually do, finding an area within a particular section and photographing everything within that area. That's something I don't need an app or a GPS device to do, just me and my camera and maybe a map or two to point me towards the markers I'm photographing.
My take on the whole thing is that if you have an idea where you're going this app is handy to have and could be helpful. But if Forest Lawn is expecting people to walk or drive in off the street and find someone in a cemetery where they've never been before, they are going to have some confused and possibly pissed off relatives, because from what I'm seeing I'm not sure this system is really out of the beta test mode, although it looks like it's been around for two or three years.
So that's why I said praise with faint damns and damn with faint praise. I will use it if it's helpful, but I'm not throwing away my maps or my lists of names with plot numbers. At least with those I can find someone with no marker and know there's no marker, unlike with this system. And the weirdness it has with finding an appropriate place for you to park in some sections (particularly Graceland) is just completely off the wall.
VERDICT: Better than nothing, but plenty of room for improvement.
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© 2016 by Chris Mills