Hey
I love new applications, especially good and innovative applications that are different. Anyway today was the release of a very cool application called Knapsack from TinyPlanet. Knapsack is a personal travel organizer for any of your world wide trips. It gives users the tools to plan, organize, and relive their travel adventures. Version 1 is the first major release and offers many user-friendly features including map pins with location postcards, a flexible itinerary planner, trip checklists, and professional-looking printed itineraries.
You may stick a pin on a world map, you must have definitely seen them do it on TV, why don’t you stick a pin in a map on your computer. It is designed so you can review and plan any of your trips. You can go back in time to visit previous trips from around the world. A single click in the postcard opens a Google map of that place in the world, enabling you to revisit distant memories.
The whole idea behind this software is to make it easy for you to organise your trip. There are todo lists so you don’t forget anything. There is an activities pane which you can use to plan activities before you leave. As a trip is planned, users can keep track of all unfinished business by creating checklists for packing, shopping, or lists of things to do. When it’s time to depart, users can print professional-looking itineraries to take with them or share with anyone around the world via email. You can also add notes and tips to trips you have just been on, as well as giving it a rating out of 5 stars. For example to summarize it has:
- A Flexible Itinerary Planner
- World Map with Pins and Postcards
- Professional-Looking Printed Itineraries
- Sharing via Import/Export or PDF
- Trip Groups
- Smart Groups
- Sample Trips (very fun to learn the ropes)
- Built-in Help
This piece of software is really good, its feature rich and very simple to use. All the menus are intuitive and obvious in what they do. Adding information to a trip, itinerary event is simple any only requires one click. It starts to remind me of the Delicious Generation of apps that seem to have developed so well in the past couple of years. Since it is built on Apple’s core technology it doesn’t need a powerful computer to run it, although Leopard is required.
Minimum Requirements:
- Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard or higher
- G4, G5 or Intel Processor
- 1 GHz or faster
- 64 MB VRAM minimum
- 512 MB RAM minimum
- 20 MB Hard Drive space
For a first release it is a very good application. Of course there could be a couple of improvements. For instance the main map in the middle could update to a high resolution as you zoom in. Although it does have links to Google Maps, it could be better integrated within the system, sticking a pin in a precise spot on a blur is kind of hard. As well as this since it is about trips it could include working out road routes or routes taken by yourself. GPS integration would be awesome. As well as this integration for photos in iPhoto or Aperture would be kind of cool. Image linking would enable you to quickly flick through photos.
All in all its a recommended application. Don’t let my list of improvements get you down. Every single application has them. If you want you can download a free 30 day demo to test the waters before purchase. The prices are at $39.95 for a single user and $59.95 for a 5 user family pack. For travelers and the amount of quality it is definitely worth it.
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