Whether you’ve recently moved to a new place or are simply visiting, after finding places to eat, unpacking, and figuring out transportation, the next most likely thing on your list is getting a feel for your surroundings, understanding this new vibe and atmosphere. It’s easy to understand why most people invest in a good travel book. Exploration without a guide – while adventuresome and fun – can often be too time-consuming and uneventful if you keep missing out on the main hubs of activity. Travel book writers are gadabouts by trade, after all, and make a living out of researching and exploring, finding you the best places to grub, to gestate, to group, and to gather, to gesticulate and be garrulous, to gallivant and gape. But, travel books, while great for longevity, for institutions and restaurants and parks and sights in place for years, don’t have any guidance for current and local events; for any lover of poetry readings, bar music, comedy workshops, art groups, and neighborhood fairs and festivals, you know this is a huge and vital part of regional culture. There’s only so much window shopping and coffee shop lounging you can do in a foreign neighborhood before you think, “what are the locals doing, that I’m not?”

It’s true, many locals may simply be lounging in their neighborhood park and sticking to the same coffee shop they’ve faithfully sipped their favorite brew over the years, wondering if they should paint their walls and feeling familiar tidings of boredom on the weekends. But, locals and non-locals alike can surely benefit from knowing a little more about what is going on in their neighborhoods, right under their nose. If you’re fortunate enough to own an iPhone, the app Events Finder by Sputr LLC keeps you up to date and notified on music events, concerts, street fairs, festivals, wine tastings, sporting events, outdoor recreation, book releases, movie events, and more, connecting you through event finder sites like Upcoming, Eventbrite, and TicketStumbler. Upcoming, powered by Yahoo!, is particularly great as it covers varying genres of activity, from comedy and performing arts to public educational and political events. Eventbrite is actually used by various oligopolistic, prestigious, and national institutions – MasterCard, Harvard, US Postal Service – and anything sponsored by these giants is sure to be advertised through this site, and by proxy, through Events Finder.

On the home page, you may narrow your search by Who’s Playing, Fairs & Festivals, Sports & Outdoors, or Movies & Book Releases, or you can simply opt to search for everything by tapping Show Me Everything. The app will automatically try to use your current location, but you can opt out of this feature to search for a specific city, town, or other location; at any time you may tap the GPS icon in the upper left to use your current location. By default, Events Finder locates events within a 25 mile radius within the course of a week. Tap on the funny martini-glass-like icon in the upper right to change these filter options. 25 miles is a bit too local for my taste, especially since my current location of Petaluma is more than 25 miles from San Francisco, the closest city, and my best bet for fun activities. 50 miles is a good average choice – not too far, like 200 miles, but far enough to include more avenues – and I like to see up to 3 weeks  in advance. I never book tickets 3 months in advance, but I’m sure my boyfriend – foamy-mouthed and rabid Ryan Adams fan that he is – would relish this option.

As it turns out, Emmylou Harris is playing tonight at 8:00pm, October 6, at the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa. Tapping on this link brings me to a page with the address, a picture of the silver fox herself, and a short descriptive blurb on the event. As with any good source app, the address will link me to a google map so I may map out directions, and a link to the event finder site, Upcoming, is given as well. Too bad this opens up a separate window in Safari, rather than keeping me in the app (this is always frustrating). Since I like Emmylou Harris, with her stately debonair, and warbling mockingbird of a voice, I’ll tap “Add to Favorites” and neatly tuck it away in my Favorites tab for later inspection. If I feel like sharing, I can email the page to myself or to someone else (most likely my boyfriend, since he’s also a rabid fan of Emmylou Harris, though more of the drooling, sedated fugue kind).

Other notable upcoming events in my search radius are the Mill Valley Film Festival at the Smith Rafael Film Center in downtown San Rafael, and, my pick of the litter, Litquake, the annual SF literary festival that spans a week and showcases local and national authors in various events, that grows by the thousand with each coming year. I, despite being a budding writer, have never heard of this event – *Jackie starts buzzing that typical literary geek trend of religious reference and metonymical uses of “blasphemous” and “baptizing”*. Thanks to Events Finder, I’m tempted to attend the Black, White and Read Book Ball this October 9, in particular for the “fabulous and mysterious” dress code (if I were to describe myself as anything, I’d like it to be fabulous and mysterious). Hopefully, the ball (don’t you just love that word? Ball? Gala is too regal, and party just pedestrian) won’t be rife with the excessively and hyper-articulate, those young, starry-eyed 20-somethings prone to literal interpretations of the figurative “rubbing elbows” with highly-publicized authors, and Dave Eggers rolling his eyes in the corner, sipping on his own moonshine concoction. Of course, I won’t know unless I go, right? And that’s what Event Finder is all about.

I would prefer if the app didn’t constantly revert to its original filter options of one week, 25 mile radius search, and I would appreciate better descriptions for some of the events – I realize the app receives its information from those three aforementioned sites, but how hard is it to do a bit of research and fill in a short summary? As someone looking for a good time, I’m more apt to attend the event I can actually read about, skipping over those with only a title and not even a picture to further elucidate. People and institutions hosting such events should also take note, since prompting people to attend requires a week bit of descriptive marketing.

Overall, though, a good app in a pinch, and free to boot, and knowing what’s happening in a week, or just tonight, is far easier when on your iPhone.