City to City is one of the best arguments for a laptop Mac to date. For people traveling the United Slates, Activision's new HyperWare offering gives a pretty thorough traveler's guide to 31 major cities, ranging from Honolulu to Boston and Seattle to Miami. In addition to making a wide range of resources available, City to City features a personal-profile card and customized itinerary planning. It also integrates with Activision's international travel stack, Business Sense.
Making the best of the HyperCard interface, City to City begins with a map of the U.S. Clicking on a city brings up a card related to that metropolis. The 12 information categories include Business, Dining, Late- Night, Lodging, Market Data, Media, Shopping, Sports, Theaters, Tourism, Transport, and VisitorInfo. Buttons representing each of the categories are lined up along the bottom of each city card, so you can jump quickly from one category to another. You can also pick a different city from a pop-up list box. It's possible to preselect any category and go directly from the map to a specific topic for a certain city.
Within each of the 12 categories is a wealth of information gleaned from the efforts of more than 30 researchers. The Lodging category, for instance, contains information about hotels, organized into three classes — First Class, Business Class, and Coach. The hotel's telephone number is listed (a toll-free number in many cases), and simply clicking on the Telephone button next to the number initiates a call to the selected hotel. You can also checkmark a hotel to indicate that you have a reservation and fill in the check-in and check-out dates, confirmation number (if any), and the daily rate you were quoted. With a click of the mouse, you can then transfer the necessary information to a current itinerary card. Should you discover a hidden gem of a hotel that isn't currently included in City to City, you can add it easily.
In addition to the hotel information, each Lodging card contains a button that, when clicked, displays a map of the urban area with its major roads, airports, and the location of each hotel in the list. The hotels are represented by numbered buttons on the map and are also listed, by number, along the side of the map card. Clicking a button on the map takes you back to the main card containing that hotel’s information.
The other categories contain equally useful features. Restaurants are listed by the kind of food they serve and are rated both by cost and by quality. Phone numbers are also listed, and you can copy restaurant data directly to itineraries. Emergency numbers, freight companies, convention centers, and much more can be found within the City to City stacks.
I had an urge, on occasion, to see more information about specific items restaurants or hotels, for instance, or airline schedules — but that’s just the magic of HyperCard. You somehow begin to expect to see everything hyper-linked to more information. Obviously, City to City couldn't include a review of each restaurant and each hotel. With more than 10,000 entries and 7,500 phone numbers, the product is already impressive. Speaking as an inveterate telecommunicalor, I would have liked to see Telenet and Tymnet local-access numbers, at least, and even some good local BBS numbers. And the maps should display other special locations such as convention centers.
The most versatile feature of City to City is the itinerary that you can easily develop as you browse through a city's cards. The itinerary is actually a stack. You tell the program the dates for your trip, and it creates a card for each day of your journey. The daily card has information about flights, lodgings, and car rentals as well as an appointment calendar. Other buttons open additional information about airlines, rental ears, and hotels (including appropriate toll-free numbers) as well as handle HyperCard functions related to itinerary cards and stacks. Finally, you cun add a special note card for any particular dale.
My only complaint stems from the initial sentence of this review. City to City would be a great product to take along while traveling. Unfortunately, there is no affordable traveling Mac, so this wealth of useful material will have to stay home the next time I travel. I hope to get everything I need from it before I leave.
DeMaria, Rusel. (September 1988). City to City. MacUser. (pgs. 57, 64).
MediaWorks
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
5 / 
2021-12-03 / 
b10bbad67583cb99170b10533b51da8ca4cdbc38 / 
/ 
CityToCity_v11_dsk.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
