Yesterday was Twelfth Night,* the last of the “12 Days of Christmas,” which means that today is the official start of the Mardi Gras season. Arthur Hardy, the foremost authority on Mardi Gras in New Orleans, has published Arthur Hardy’s Mardi Gras Guide for over three decades. Every year it is the Bible for all things Mardi Gras, a magazine with over 150 pages containing everything from Mardi Gras history, facts and figures to specific information on individual carnival krewes, including parade details, schedules and maps. You can purchase a copy of the Mardi Gras Guide for $4.99 at virtually every bookstore, grocery store and convenience store in the Greater New Orleans area, and every year I’m sure that there are copies in a significant percentage of the homes down here.
The smart folks at Calliope Digital have worked with Hardy to bring the Mardi Gras Guide to the iPhone. (Calliope Digital is also responsible for the WhoDatApp, a very popular app for Saints fans.) The result is a useful app that both New Orleans natives and visitors will want to have on their iPhone to help guide them through the Mardi Gras season.
The most useful part of the magazine Mardi Gras Guide is the parade information and schedules, so it seems natural that this information is prominent in the app. The schedule appears when the app launches and can also be reached from the first button at the bottom of the app. For each of the 52 parades, you get all of the critical information including date, time, this year’s theme, the krewe history, this year’s royalty, information on the floats, a map with the parade route, and Arthur Hardy’s unique commentary on that particular parade. So when you are standing on the parade route and you want to know what time the parade starts, how many floats it will have and whether there are any new and unique throws this year, that information is at your fingertips in the app.
The app also includes a large amount of general Mardi Gras information from Arthur Hardy that will be especially helpful to visitors to New Orleans including the history of Mardi Gras, frequently asked questions, and information on what is new in 2010.
Unfortunately, even though the app costs the same as the magazine version of the guide, it doesn’t include all of the information from the magazine. For example, the feature articles are missing. But the app has a few advantages over the magazine version. First, as long as your iPhone is with you, the guide is always with you, even when you are at the parade route and don’t have the magazine at hand. Second, unlike the magazine, the app can be updated. I would imagine that the app will update as parade information or schedules change, and the developers have told me about some great additional features that are coming soon. (They asked me not to spill the beans.) By the time that parades start rolling, I see myself using this app quite a bit.
If you live in New Orleans, or if you plan to visit for Mardi Gras this year (the focus of which is Friday, February 12 through Tuesday, February 16, 2010), you will enjoy having this app on your iPhone. And by the way, since most readers of iPhone J.D. are not here in New Orleans, I encourage all of you to make plans soon to visit the Big Easy. Whether it be for Mardi Gras, for Jazz Fest from April 23 to May 2, 2010 (which I love even more than Mardi Gras) or any other time of the year, it is easy to fall in love with the food, music, architecture, history and culture that makes the Crescent City so unique.
Click here to get Mardi Gras Guide by Arthur Hardy ($4.99): 
* Note: Different traditions count the 12 Days of Christmas differently. Some count the 25th as the first day, some count the 26th as the first day. But everyone agrees that January 6th is King’s Day / the start of Epiphany / the start of Carnival season.