Tripnotes Review

When taking a trip, it is always wise to plan ahead and organize what places to visit and when to visit them. Tripnotes is an app that helps people do just that. It offers a beautiful interface and makes adding venues to an organized list a breeze. Unfortunately, there are a few limitations that prevent it from being a must-download.

The first step is to add a trip. Tapping the plus button brings up a new screen to enter the details of the trip, including the method of transportation, starting city, ending city, departure date, and return date. Once a trip is created, specific venues to visit may be added in the planner section. When adding a venue, users may select a category, such as a museum, a start time, and an end time. A map is displayed so that users may search locally for places to visit.

Once all of the venues have been added, a simple and attractive layout on the planner screen displays each place and organizes them by date and time. A map is also available, displaying pins of each location on the trip's itinerary. A link to the Maps app allows user to get directions to each location.

Even though Tripnotes is absolutely a useable app in its 1.0 launch, there are a few limitations and missing features we hope to see in a future update. For example, when adding a venue to visit, the time is automatically set to the same 12:00PM until it's changed by the user. If the time is not changed, all the venues in the list will take place at 12:00PM. It would be beneficial if the app could automatically change an event's time to happen after a previous event ends. Also, after a complete list of places is developed, the only way to edit the list is to go into each event and change the time or date. It would be nice if users could tap, hold, and drag an event to a different day in the planner view. Or, at the very least, add an edit button to allow the up or down movement of events. Lastly, there doesn't seem to be any way to share an entire itinerary with other people. Usually, there are multiple people traveling together, so it would be very helpful to have the option to email or text an entire itinerary to other people in the party.

Tripnotes does some really great things, including providing a beautiful interface. However, the limitations do keep me from making it my go-to app for planning trips. Hopefully some updates will make it a real competitor in the future.