This should definitely help with our planning! Free wait times and FP returns!

[pfalcioni]

I don't care how he does it, I love the fact that it works on my Kindle Fire and my wifi enabled gps. We don't own smartphones yet, so those are the only technology I have with me in the parks.

 

[dvc one day]

I think I know how he does it. He is a wizard and uses his magic. I would stop talking about how he does so he doesn't turn you into a toad.

 

[stink]

For what its worth:

This past Sunday April 21st starting about 6 PM I compared at varying points in time Easywdw and Undercover tourist wait times for MK. I found sometimes the times agreed exactly and other times there was a 10 minute variance in wait times between the sites.

Undercover Tourist doesn't have FP return times available to compare.

I did this not so much to audit the difference but to decide if I wanted to go to MK EMH on Sunday May 5th, my arrival day. Hoping that the 21st of April mirrors Sunday May 5th EMH (I know they will not always mirror each other).

Easywdw & Undercover Tourist are the only apps/sites that work on my blackberry.

 

[ghtx]

I am guessing that the easywdw app scrapes the wait times posted on MDE and on the official WDW website.

Its advantage over MDE is that it is much quicker to load since there aren't images.

Its advantage over touringplans.com's Lines app is that it's free.

Its disadvantage relative to touringplans.com's Lines app is that it only has the official posted wait times, and not Lines's wait time estimates (which often differ considerably from the official posted times)

 

[jillyb]

I am guessing that the easywdw app scrapes the wait times posted on MDE and on the official WDW website.

Its advantage over MDE is that it is much quicker to load since there aren't images.

Its advantage over touringplans.com's Lines app is that it's free.

Its disadvantage relative to touringplans.com's Lines app is that it only has the official posted wait times, and not Lines's wait time estimates (which often differ considerably from the official posted times)

Call me crazy but I'd rather go with the official posted wait times instead of someone's estimated wait times (no decimals!).

 

[chartle]

Call me crazy but I'd rather go with the official posted wait times instead of someone's estimated wait times (no decimals!).

The issue is are the "Official" wait times correct. There has been a lot of posts where people get on a ride and it says 60 minutes and its really 30 minutes or less. Was the posted time wrong or did Disney inflate the time to discourage you to ride.

Many say that at the end of the night, right before closing, when people are starting to leave the park, the wait times don't get adjusted down to keep you out of the line and then therefor leaving the park.

Also Disney sometimes includes the preshow as "on the ride" so the timer stops when you get in the room watching Aerosmith get in the limo.

 

[catiesmom]

Love this!! At WDW now and the MDE app is cr*p. It takes forever. I can NOT pull up wait times for anything. Hate it. I've used both wifi & 3G. It's slightly better on 3G but that's assuming I can get coverage where I am. I'll use the website.

 

[rwdavis2]

Love this!! At WDW now and the MDE app is cr*p. It takes forever. I can NOT pull up wait times for anything. Hate it. I've used both wifi & 3G. It's slightly better on 3G but that's assuming I can get coverage where I am. I'll use the website.

Agreed. I tried th app in January and it was just too slow, too many "button" pushes, and too many screens. Josh's looks promising. I too wondered where he got the data so I'm guessing he's grabbing from Disney, one way or the other.

 

[Cyrano]

The issue is are the "Official" wait times correct. There has been a lot of posts where people get on a ride and it says 60 minutes and its really 30 minutes or less. Was the posted time wrong or did Disney inflate the time to discourage you to ride.

Many say that at the end of the night, right before closing, when people are starting to leave the park, the wait times don't get adjusted down to keep you out of the line and then therefor leaving the park.

Also Disney sometimes includes the preshow as "on the ride" so the timer stops when you get in the room watching Aerosmith get in the limo.

Interesting on a recent DISUnplugged podcast they talked about how wait times were exceeding the official times. Which of course leads to further guest dis-satisfaction.
The norm has always been that the official times exceed the actual.

 

[chartle]

Interesting on a recent DISUnplugged podcast they talked about how wait times were exceeding the official times. Which of course leads to further guest dis-satisfaction.
The norm has always been that the official times exceed the actual.

Its all because of the Dark Sith Lord Fast Pass+.

I have read some posts here that say Disney is manipulating the times now to test some aspect of the new system.

 

[AThrillingChase]

I don't think anyone here is trying to go against the MDE "official" times or anything like that. But MDE is not available for a lot of phones, disney has left us blackberry users high and dry! So a lot of us are just excited for ANY app with FP return times listed!!

I just tried it, I leave in 2 weeks and I am so relieved! It looks great.

 

[doconeill]

"Official" times can be off since they measure how long it took someone who is now at the front of the line to get there...and the situation behind them could have changed significantly. They _may_ be doing adjustments based on historical data, but I've not heard that is the case.

As for how he gets the data...he could have licensed it

But I've thought about this in the past, and if I had to do my own hackery, I'd run an Android phone simulator that allowed me to run MDE, and scrape the data from it. Or, depending on the protocols, sniff and decode the packets between a real phone and the servers...

 

[andyman8]

These are indeed the official wait times from MDE. While Josh won't say how he (or the person who gave him the programing) is directing the times to his site, he has posted that it's from a "complex algorithm", so I can assume that whatever he's using isn't something Disney would necessarily endorse.

None the less, I would definitely use this over MDE, which is slow and hard to use. Something odd about MDE is that on days (like the holidays and spring break) when there are extremely, extremely, extremely high levels of crowds, the app tends to freeze up and fail to update due to the high levels of traffic it's experiencing.

 

[doconeill]

I'd normally say that if Disney found out and decided they didn't want him to be able to do it, they'd change the protocols/mechanics/etc and break it (necessitating re-engineering, if possible). But then again, I think Disney's lucky if they can get it to work at all with their own systems

 

[andyman8]

I'd normally say that if Disney found out and decided they didn't want him to be able to do it, they'd change the protocols/mechanics/etc and break it (necessitating re-engineering, if possible). But then again, I think Disney's lucky if they can get it to work at all with their own systems

Believe it or not, most of those Disney podcasts don't obtain the necessary copyrights to play Disney's music. You'll notice that the major, major podcasts (like the DIS Unplugged and WDW Today), don't play any attraction music. There's your reason. The only two that seemed to have obtained the necessary licensing I'm aware of are Inside the Magic and WDW Radio and we don't seem to hear that much criticism towards Disney from those sources.

Anyways, this could easily slip under Disney's nose. Not to mention, with all their systems, just tweaking the app's code w/ attractions might further throw off the entire MyMagic+ thing.

 

[doconeill]

Believe it or not, most of those Disney podcasts don't obtain the necessary copyrights to play Disney's music. You'll notice that the major, major podcasts (like the DIS Unplugged and WDW Today), don't play any attraction music. There's your reason. The only two that seemed to have obtained the necessary licensing I'm aware of are Inside the Magic and WDW Radio and we don't seem to hear that much criticism towards Disney from those sources.

Agreed, although I'm not sure how that relates...

Anyways, this could easily slip under Disney's nose. Not to mention, with all their systems, just tweaking the app's code w/ attractions might further throw off the entire MyMagic+ thing.

Which was my point...I doubt they could do it without breaking their own stuff and it would take months to fix...

 

[andyman8]

Agreed, although I'm not sure how that relates...

Which was my point...I doubt they could do it without breaking their own stuff and it would take months to fix...

Yeah, my point was just that a lot of behavior that Disney wouldn't commend occurs on the internet but they rarely do anything to stop it. Sorry for the confusion; I understand that wasn't well communicated.

 

[andyman8]

By the way, just wanted to say that I don't feel Josh is doing anything "bad" at all, just giving you the probable reasoning behind his tight-lipness regarding how these wait times are being collected. Quite frankly, Disney doesn't want anyone else distributing attraction wait times AND decreasing traffic from their horrendous excuse for an app.

I am definitely grateful to him (and the guy he said created it), as this means no more waiting for the stupid MDE app to load. Good guy and great site!

 

[PrincessArlena'sDad]

I don't care how he does it, I love the fact that it works on my Kindle Fire and my wifi enabled gps. We don't own smartphones yet, so those are the only technology I have with me in the parks.

MDE runs on Kindle Fire. You can download it from amazon for free. In fact, it just got an update this week.

Though, the update made it run slower and, in general, a worse experience (though, it does have my ADRs now on it)

 

[Cloudless Nights]

This is fabulous! I fully plan on using this in a couple weeks.