I like traveling and I have grown accustomed to planning my travel through online services and/or smartphone applications like TripIt and WorldMate.
One key feature of these online services, which I really like, is the ability to synchronise the smartphone cached information with the online stored itinerary. This is a cool feature which allows users to plan, modify, and view their trip in their preferred platform. It is usually more preferable to plan itineraries using a computer, where you have more features easily accessible to you. Some of these services provide an easy way to create your itinerary by just forwarding your email flight/hotel reservations to their provided email address; however, usually after forwarding, it is usually necessary to massage the information uploaded to the itinerary. This process is more conveniently done on a full computer. While travelling, though, it may be more convenient to use a more portable device to view and/or alter information on the itinerary as needed. Thus, the ability to work across different platform over the same itinerary becomes convenient.
However, one problem arises: accessing these data while travelling. Yes, one can cache these information on the mobile device application. However, there are information from these applications which normally dynamically loaded from a mashed up service. For instance, directions or maps which were sourced from Google Maps or Bing. The application usually just stores the essential information and let the mashup application do the rest (calculating the suggested routes, rendering the map, etc.). Doing this allows the application to save space and to render more quickly. The drawback though is that the user will have to re-render these information when bringing up the travel application. There would be some form of caching which can still be done on the application, but this will be discarded when the application exits or closes (during a device shutdown for instance).
This problem is further complicated when you factor in the data roaming rates or even 3G or LTE signals on remote places. These precious maps stored in the services' remote servers would be virtually useless when you're lost in one part of the planet and you cannot bring up the map.
There must be a way to persist this information more “permanently” on the device. And I was glad I discovered one way of doing this.
I never really understood why there is a proliferation of Notepad-like applications for the iPad when there's the Notepad application. Until, I was able to use it across platforms (just like the travel itinerary online services). One particular Notepad service/smartphone application which I really liked is Evernote. It has a very intuitive interface; and it essentially does what its name says: it stores the note for-EVER. Ok, probably not forever but close to that. Like the travel itinerary services discussed previously, these notes are stored remotely. But unlike most the travel itinerary platforms, it persist the notes more permanently on the device. And it does this pretty well by trying to save as much space as possible.
So I had the idea of merging the best aspects of these two applications. What I did was to screen capture the views from these travel itinerary applications with my preferred viewing platform and attaching it to an Evernote note. Yup, that's another cool thing with Evernote… it handles images as well. Essentially, what I did was create a snapshot of the information (converting the dynamic rendering of the information from the travel itinerary service/application into a static one). This now solves much of the problems associated with trying to load information while on the go.
Of course, it has this approach would have its own share of problems. One particular problem is that you lose the ability to use the devices' orientation capabilities to move the map around to the correct layout (where the map's north points to the geographic north). But that's ok for now, at some point, travellers need to put in their travelers hat and have to orient themselves around.
One question though that may pop up is that, if that were the case then why haven't these smart phone travel applications thought about providing a static view of the itinerary and map (one where rendering is not done via external mashed up services). Well, there may be practical and sometimes marketing reasons. But that's something worth thinking about by the developers of these products.
