TripIt

Posted 01/10/2012 at 1:29pm | by Cory Bohon Planning trips can quickly become a disaster. Whether you're traveling alone or with a group, you still have to keep track of plane tickets, hotel reservations, and your basic day-to-day itinerary. The trade off might be worth it, but getting there can sometimes cause a little stress. Fortunately, iOS apps like TripIt can help you manage all of the nitty gritty details and let you focus on what's actually important: the trip itself. >> TripIt Account (Free or Paid)>> TripIt iOS application [iTunes link] You can either log in to TripIt with an individual account, or hook it up to your existing Google account. The latter is more convenient if you have Gmail, because then TripIt will grab your itinerary from your email without you having to worry about doing so. If you opted to input the trip manually, here's how: Once you log in, create a new  trip by selecting "Add Trip" from the left-hand sidebar. On the new page, enter in your trip details, such as the destination, start and end dates, travelers, and the purpose. When you are finished, click the "Create Trip" button. Most online travel sites send you an email confirmation when you book a hotel, flight, or rental car reservation. With TripIt, you can forward these emails to plans@tripit.com, and the service will automatically add the information to your TripIt account. TripIt can also automatically detect things like airlines, flight times, confirmation numbers, hotel names, and more. If you will be traveling with multiple people, it may be beneficial to add travelers to your trip. This will enable the other people in your party to log in to their account and see the details that you have added to your trip. To add travelers to your TripIt trip, click the trip title in your account, and then find the "People and Sharing" sidebar. Click on the Update button. On the new page, click the "Invite more people" link. From here, you will be able to enter an email address of the person you wish to share the trip with, and type a short message to them. You will also be able to choose whether or not they can edit the trip details, or select that they are travelers on your trip; you can also add them as a TripIt connection so that they can see your future Read More

It's January 6th, 2012, and today marks the end of the TUAW Best of 2011 awards. This was a massive undertaking, with 25 separate categories all requiring their own nominations and voting from our readers. We've learned some lessons for next year's event -- start earlier, watch for astroturfing in the nominations, drop some unpopular categories -- and the Best of 2012 will be even better. The editorial staff here at TUAW agreed with many of the reader picks, but we had our own opinions on some others. We want to thank all of the thousands of TUAW readers who took time to consider their favorite accessories and apps, nominate them for an award, and then vote in the competition. Without further ado, here's the full list of winners as well as our picks for the TUAW Best of 2011: Editor picks: 13" and 11" MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro Peripheral or Accessory: OWC Data Doubler and OWC Mercury 6G SSD Editor picks: Magic Trackpad, OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Editor picks: Mophie Juice Pack Air, Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation, iChair Editor picks: Apple Smart Cover, AViiQ Smart Case,Twelve South BookBook, ModulR System, OtterBox Defender Editor picks: Apple TV, iCade, Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Read More

Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too lazy busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction. This app list includes both new releases and old favorites. It’s entirely subjective! Note that some of this year’s best apps are free, so they aren’t on here. (Waving to Instagram, Path, Spotify, Flipboard, Pinterest, HBO GO, etc.) Also, everyone already has Angry Birds (the original). It’s not on here, either. 1. iMovie ($4.99) Everyone should have this app from Apple, the fun moviemaking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Designed for multi-touch, iMovie puts everything you need to tell your story at your fingertips. Make a movie in minutes by adding video, photos, music and sound effects. Then give it the Hollywood treatment by adding a theme, titles and transitions. 2. Camera+ ($0.99 sale) Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will make you love taking photos. Offers exposure, lighting controls, stabilizer, high quality zoom, scene modes, digital flash, cropping tools, effects, borders, sharing features and more. 3. Snapseed ($4.99) iPad App of the Year Snapseed makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips. Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease. 4. SkyView – Explore the Universe ($1.99) Simply point the camera to the sky, tap on what you see and discover neat things about these sky objects. SkyView is unique as it blends the camera view with incredible 3D graphics of the sky objects to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) view of your sky. 5. Fahrenheit ($1.99) This super clever app is a weather application that shows you the current temperature of any location right on your iPhone/iPad homescreen using iOS’s push notifications (the red badges). Beyond the real-time temperature display, it also gives you detailed weather information from unlimited cities worldwide. 6. Numbers, Pages, Keynote ($9.99 each) From Apple’s iWork Suite, its own versions of Excel, Word and Powerpoint designed for iOS. All three work with iCloud, so your files stay up Read More

Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too lazy busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction. This app list includes both new releases and old favorites. It’s entirely subjective! Note that some of this year’s best apps are free, so they aren’t on here. (Waving to Instagram, Path, Spotify, Flipboard, Pinterest, HBO GO, etc.) Also, everyone already has Angry Birds (the original). It’s not on here, either. 1. iMovie ($4.99) Everyone should have this app from Apple, the fun moviemaking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Designed for multi-touch, iMovie puts everything you need to tell your story at your fingertips. Make a movie in minutes by adding video, photos, music and sound effects. Then give it the Hollywood treatment by adding a theme, titles and transitions. 2. Camera+ ($0.99 sale) Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will make you love taking photos. Offers exposure, lighting controls, stabilizer, high quality zoom, scene modes, digital flash, cropping tools, effects, borders, sharing features and more. 3. Snapseed ($4.99) iPad App of the Year Snapseed makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips. Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease. 4. SkyView – Explore the Universe ($1.99) Simply point the camera to the sky, tap on what you see and discover neat things about these sky objects. SkyView is unique as it blends the camera view with incredible 3D graphics of the sky objects to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) view of your sky. 5. Fahrenheit ($1.99) This super clever app is a weather application that shows you the current temperature of any location right on your iPhone/iPad homescreen using iOS’s push notifications (the red badges). Beyond the real-time temperature display, it also gives you detailed weather information from unlimited cities worldwide. 6. Numbers, Pages, Keynote ($9.99 each) From Apple’s iWork Suite, its own versions of Excel, Word and Powerpoint designed for iOS. All three work with iCloud, so your files stay up Read More

From one-person shops to giant enterprises, if businesses agree on anything right now it's "iPad Yay." The Apple tablet hasn't even reached the terrible twos yet, but it's clearly making its presence felt across countless verticals and different industries. For at least a couple of mobile professional writers (who might have been termed "ink-stained wretches" in times gone by), the iPad's capability as a writing tool has led it to largely replace their laptops for day-to-day work. While consumers may be the drivers behind most iPad sales, chances are that the iPad-toting professional on your gift list is using his or her iPad for a combination of personal enjoyment and work tasks, so why not find a gift that supports and extends the biz savvy of everyone's favorite quasi-computer? Here's our brief list of gift ideas that you could conceivably write off on your taxes. Cloudy Days If your business iPad user is a sole proprietor or running a small business, they don't have to compromise about getting big-biz-level enterprise tools anymore. The same Google Apps or Box.com infrastructure that supports huge corporations can be theirs for a modest investment. Consider gifting a pro Dropbox account (50 GB is quite a bit of room to maneuver), or going with Box or Egnyte for more sophisticated file services & sharing. (Dropbox's Teams product is great, too, but requires more coordination with other colleagues.) Maybe a Pogoplug account, or a subscription to one of 37 Signals' highly-regarded services? If your businessperson is already a user of 37 Signals' Backpack business collaboration tool, the $9.99 Pouch app makes their iPad a fully-featured Backpack client. Another collaboration platform, Pagico, just released its official iPad app last week. Then again, what we want from the cloud, often as not, is access to the files we have sitting right there on our computer at the office or at home. With the free Polkast service and iPad app, business users can quickly get to their PC or Mac storage over local networks or remotely as long as the computer is on. It's not the sort of thing that BigCorp IT departments find particularly appealing, but for a lean and mean solo operation or small team it might just do the trick. Speaking of big IT, the pricey ($29.99) but indispensable LogMeIn Ignition client makes it easy to remotely control one or hundreds of remote computers from the iPad's Read More

When it comes to travel and local apps, Android is a step ahead of other mobile operating systems. The integration of Google Maps plus free navigation is a bonus for Android users, while often-updated popular apps like Kayak, TripIt, GasBuddy and FlightTrack continue to grow in popularity. But we’ve seen a number of new kids on the block this year, so without further ado, here are five of the best Android travel apps we came across in 2011. Skyscanner is an app that’s great for booking flights from your Android device. While other travel offerings let you select hotels, rental cars, vacation packages and so on (and that’s certainly valuable for many consumers), Skyscanner keeps things straightforward by focusing solely on flights. Once you do a simple search, Skyscanner lets you get more picky, narrowing down all possible airlines, departure times and airport connections so you can choose wisely. Well-received by the press and public alike, Skyscanner is worth adding to your Android app collection if you’re a frequent flyer. Another flight search app? Sure, but Hipmunk is a little different to Skyscanner and its ilk. What makes it unique is its ability to single-out the potential ‘agony index’ of your chosen flight. Once you’ve selected your destination, airline, time/date and all that good stuff, Hipmunk takes into account things like how long you’ll be traveling, how many stops you’ll make and various other algorithms to return results ranked on how ‘enjoyable’ a potential flight may be. You still could be delayed of course, or face a crazy surcharge for carrying-on a bag. But in the initial stages of booking a flight, Hipmunk proves a worthy companion. You finally made it to the airport and now you’re facing a six-hour layover due to delays, errant birds or a massive snowstorm. Here is where GateGuru can help. The app covers a bunch of world airports already (though not all of them) and offers full maps of the terminals and in-depth details of shopping, restaurants and amenities plus reviews and photos from fellow travelers. If you’re a user of KAYAK and TripIt too, it syncs-up nicely with either of those apps. Some security wait-times have not been updated for a while, and some big airports are missing, but GateGuru seems to be on the right track with plenty to offer travelers everywhere. In these lean financial times, traveling to distant locales is not Read More

If you travel frequently, keeping track of all your flights, hotels and car trips can be made easier using a few different iPhone apps that consolidate all that information in one easy to access location. These iPhone apps are great because not only do they give you a dashboard for your flight information, but they also help you keep track of changes to your trips and easily input your information into the apps. Price: $3.99 TripIt is hands down the best trip and itinerary app for the iPhone. This is not only because TripIt offers a great application but also due to the unique service that TripIt provides which helps you automatically create trips using your confirmation emails. Once you’ve setup your account at tripit.com, all you have to do is forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and they will instantly add the information and create trips for you with all the flights, lodging and car detail information. The professional version of TripIt costs $4 which removes the ads, which I highly recommend. The app shows your upcoming trips in a list where you can tap to get details. There are color coded icons for flights, lodging and cars. Plus TripIt adds convenience items to your trip like directions from the airport to your hotel, and a map of your destination city. Flight details include links to seat details, terminal and gate info, flight check in websites, and more. You also have passenger info, confirmation numbers and contact numbers in case you need to call the airline. The design of the app is very easy to read. There is no push notification feature for flight changes built into the TripIt app. You can view maps of addresses, but for some odd reason you have to tap the view in Google Maps link to get there. If you pay for a TripIt account ($49/year) you should download the free app, and you are also able to track your rewards points in the app. Finally in the Network section you can find out when your TripIt Connections are traveling. The app also lets you add new trips or add new plans to existing trips, although the interface for adding changes uses a tediously slow web based interface. Another missing feature in this app is the ability to view past trips. The TripIt app purchase comes with an iPad optimized version as an added Read More

What happens when an iPhone/Android app startup wants to get out of its Silicon Valley offices and into local communities to meet users, support local businesses, and see the country? A killer road trip transpires, of course. My Bizzy colleagues and I packed our bags and hit the road in a rented minivan this past July to drive cross-country from San Francisco to Boston. We hosted dinners and meet-ups in 16 cities along the way. In fact, we had such a great response that some of the team hit the road again in mid-September to travel from Portland, OR, to Seattle, WA. If you hit the road, be sure to have these apps on hand. Of course I'm going to include this. After all, we created Bizzy to allow you to easily share your experiences out and about with a simple "Check Out". Others can follow your journey and add any places they may like to their "Try List" with only one touch. Twitter proved essential when we wanted to quickly spread the word we were in town. Having the app in the palm of our hands made tweeting, searching, and DM'ing super easy on the go. Throughout the trip we talked with prospective users and current users about our app. Evernote proved useful for quickly jotting down user feedback. Thanks to quick synching, we could then pick up the note on the Evernote site or Mac desktop app later. One cannot survive with in-car GPS alone. A must have. Logistically, a road trip can be a major stress. Stay sane and keep all your hotels, flights, and rentals in one spot. Get points, possible specials, and check in to announce where you are. Bonus: Bizzy integrates with Foursquare. Connect it through Bizzy and, when you check-in, we ask, "How was it?" with a check-out push notification. Bizzy user, Eric Leist, shared this app with me when we met on the road trip in Boston. Glympse lets you privately share your location with the people you select to know. There are multiple control features for privacy. I'm still deciding if it's cool that someone can know how fast we're driving (if I give them that permission, of course). Read More

When it comes to the matter of smartphone apps, nothing can beat the iPhone App store. But the Android Market also has more than enough apps to overwhelm you. You might have your own favorite Android smartphone apps. But if you are a bit confused with all the different apps available this year, you can check out our list of 15 of the most useful ones. Considered by some as one of the top benefits of Android, the Google Voice app gives you a phone number that you can use to ring to multiple places or devices. It also lets you access all of your voicemail and text messages from the Web. Most of the smartphones available on the market comes with great multitasking capabilities. But this makes it important for all users to manage their apps so that they don’t hurt the performance of the device or its battery life. That is why it really helps to have an app like the Advanced Task Killer (ATK). This app provides you with a widget that you can tap once to kill all open apps. The killing can also be done at periodic intervals. You just have to set up ATK to do so. Dropbox is a cloud service that automatically syncs a folder of files between multiple computers. The Dropbox app extends this service to Android and interacts with other apps to open files such as PDFs, image files, and business documents. Evernote is a great note-taking app. This app will be very useful to you, provided you are used to typing on a virtual keyboard. Although there are many to-do apps available on the Android Market, many prefer this app because of the clean, easy, Android-friendly user experience. One of the biggest advantages of using Taskos is that it comes with voice recognition. You just have to speak a task and the app turns it into a to-do item. We are not sure why Google hasn’t created an official app for Google Analytics, either for Android or iPhone. One of the best Android ones available is DroidAnalytics. There is a free version of this app available which offers a great little reader for Microsoft Word and Excel files. But for $15 you can upgrade to the full version which will allow you to create and edit files and also add PowerPoint files to the mix. If you are a fan Read More

The Android Market may not have as many apps as the iPhone App Store yet, but there are still more than enough to be overwhelmed, and it continues to grow at a breakneck pace. To help you sort through them all, here is my latest list of the 20 most useful Android apps (this is an update of my 2010 Android list). I’ve also recently updated my list of the most useful iPhone apps and you’ll notice several of the same apps on both lists. Remember that I primarily had business professionals in mind when making this list and also keep in mind that this is a snapshot in time. The Android platform is developing so quickly that I guarantee my home screen will look different a month from now. Still, here’s my list of tried-and-true Android apps that I can highly recommend. Google Voice is a service that is so useful I consider it one of the top benefits of Android itself. The service gives you a phone number that can ring to multiple places or devices and it allows you to access all of your voicemail and text messages from the Web. The Android app integrates even deeper. It can make outgoing calls look like they’re coming from your Google Voice number so that you can keep your real mobile number private. One of the realities of having a multitasking mobile OS is that you have to manage your apps so that they don’t hurt performance or battery life. Advanced Task Killer (ATK) is my favorite on Android. It even comes with a widget that you can tap once to kill all open apps and you can also set up ATK to kill all apps at periodic intervals. Some people will argue that task managers are irrelevant and unneeded in Android, but I still prefer to use ATK. Dropbox is a great cloud service that automatically syncs a folder of files between multiple computers (Windows, Mac, or Linux). This app extends Dropbox to Android and interacts with other apps (such as Documents To Go) to open the files. It allows you to access PDFs, image files, and business documents by simply dragging them to a folder on your computer and then you immediately have access to them from your mobile phone, once you have this app installed. Once you get used to typing on a virtual keyboard (and it honestly Read More