Great apps to plan your trips & share your travel exploits

People who likes to travel and discover new places, listen up,  I have two great apps that will help you manage your excursions as well as let you share your travel exploits with family and friends. The TripDeck app, available for free from iTunes, is really useful for planning and managing every little aspects of your holidays.

Even though this app is free to download, to enjoy greater functionality such as Live Flight Status checking and Push Notification, you will need to make in-app purchases. 

This app allows you to create several new entries at the same time, you can plan ahead if you have more than one outings planned in the future. You can plan for hotel reservations, restaurants, meetings, flights and so on to ensure you don't forget any of them when the time comes for your to leave for the trip. it's so easy to use, and the interface is very nice too.

You can keep track of departure and arrival times, as well as make phone calls directly to hotels/restaurants where you have made reservations. 

In addition to these great features, the app also allows you to share your trip itinerary with others and geo-tag your destined locations through maps. How cool is that? Very.

Now,  there's another app called TripJournal that will let you share your travels waypoint-by-waypoint, and you can download it for USD 2.99. Let me assure you that this app is worth every dollar spent as it's been awarded as the number one travel application by Google, and has been featured in some major presses like NY Times, Businessweek and Mashables.

The first thing you'll notice about this app is how gorgeous it looks. It has the design and feel of an old journal, and it has tons of nice features packed inside too.

You can start a 'New Trip', where you can geo-tag your current locations, start GPS-route tracking, take and post photos, write notes, add videos and even set your own waypoints.

This is a great way to showcase your travel exploits with others, no doubt!

On top of that, you can also share your entries via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and Youtube via the app. This app is designed for iPhone specifically due to its mapping functionality. For iPad users, they can still use this app, but will need to rely on wi-fi access if they want to geo-tag their locations.

With these two great apps, you trips will be really well-organized and made more memorable!

GETGLUE is for sharing, y'all!!

If you are a media-savvy person, and you like to share the things you love with the rest of the world, then this app is definitely for you. GETGLUE is a whole new way to social-network with other people through sharing stuff.

GETGLUE is available for iPhone and iPad users, and if that's not enough for you, there's also a website at http://getglue.com/home. To use their service, you have to sign up and register an account. Once you did that, you can start sharing stuff. Be it video games, music, movies, books, celebrities and TV shows, you can share practically almost anything that caught your fancy. You're a die-hard fan of Lady Gaga? Type Lady Gaga under the music section and click  the 'Like' button. Click 'Like' for any or all of her albums, leave your comments about them and see what other Lady Gaga fans are saying about her. Simple as that.

As for me, I've recently watched the movie Inception, which I really like. And through the app, I can leave my personal comments about the movie, as well as see what other users thought about the movie. I can personally reply to any of these user too. Links to Twitter and Facebook accounts are also supported.

  

A unique feature of this app is that everytime you share something, you can earn points. By collecting a certain amount of points, you will earn bonuses like stickers, which serves as encouragement and acknowledgement to motivate you to share even more stuff.

The app will tell you that, in order to earn certain stickers, you need to 'Like' 20 artists or post 5 comments, and so on. And you can keep tracks all the stickers you have earned at the 'Stickers' section. As you go along, you will unlock even more stickers to brag about. You can download these stickers and use them as wallpaper for your iPhone too. Trust me, earning stickers this way can be very addicting!

You can also subscribe to other GetGlue users and keep track of the stuff they like via the Stream section. 

Meanwhile, to see what other users are liking, or talking about, go to the Trending section.

In short, GetGlue is a fun and great way to interact with other people through the things you love and care about. 

Tweetdeck, for some good mobile tweetering!

If you have a Twitter account (and who doesn't), you would want an app that allows you to tweets and keep track of all the tweets you follow on the go. If you're iPhone or iPad users, you're in luck, cos there's a handful of apps that will let you do just that. Now, one of the better apps designed for Twitter is, IMHO, TweetDeck. What sets this app from other Twitter apps is that it's very user-friendly, has a clean interface, and the ability to integrate your Facebook account as well.

The app is divided into pages, where you can micro-manage your Tweets and Facebook live feed seamlessly from one location. All you have to do is simply flip through the pages to get to the social networking site you want to access. 

As you can see here, the majority of the window is for the tweets you follow. By tapping on a tweet, you will be taken to a new window where you can reply to the tweet, retweet it, or mark it as favourite. You can also access personal info page of the particular Twitterer from this window. The same functionality also extend to the Facebook page here. At the bottom, you can choose to see how many new and unread tweets or messages you have, a refresh button, the ability to add more columns (this is for those of you who have more than one Twitter of Facebook accounts),  mark read tweets, as well as the 'More' function, which simply allows you to add more tweets to follow.

There's one column that specifically post all the tweets that other people send to you. This is quite useful, as it can be easy to lose track of the tweets you send out from time to time. You can also post pictures and links through this app.
This is definitely a recommended Twitter app from me. It does its job well, and it looks great too.  And it's free peeps!

Recreates photography magic with Swankolab

If you're one of those young people who have never experience what it is like to take pictures the 'old-fashioned' way (aka non-digital), then this app is the one that will allow you to do that, to an extent. This app not only successfully simulate the whole experience of taking photos and processing them in what you call the 'darkroom', but it also lets you get creative in altering the colour compositions of your photos. The 'darkroom', simply put, is the lab where films were taken to be processed and turned into printed photographs.

This is a nice-looking app. The whole design and execution are very impressive.  Priced at USD 1.99, I must say this app is worth every cents spent on it.

This is the main 'area' of the app. From here, tapping the 'pinned photo' area will let you upload any picture form your library. Then, on the top is a collection of eight chemicals that you can choose and mix randomly to process your picture. These chemicals can alter the colour tones of your pictures. Just swipe your finger left and right to choose the chemicals you want. As there is no way of knowing which combination of chemicals will produce what colour themes, the key rule here is to experiment and find out for yourself. The animated tube will change depending on the type of chemicals you have chosen and mixed. After you have picked and mixed the chemicals, tap on the switch on the right, which will start the photo-altering process.

You can see the whole process here as your photo literally drop into the tray filled with the chosen chemicals. There's a timer at the bottom to tell you the time required to complete the processing.

Once the process has been completed, your altered picture will appear for your viewing, where you can choose to save to your library or email it for printing. 

One useful feature of this app is the ability to save whatever combination of chemicals, or formulas, you have came up with, and rename it as you see fit. Once saved, the formula will be saved in the formula book section, where you can open anytime and choose to re-use the said formula for the next picture. This helps to avoid having to pick and mix the chemicals again and again each time you want to process your photos using the preferred formula.

Here are some photos of mine that were processed using this app.

As you can see, the end results are gorgeous. This is a must-have app for those of you who frequently edit and alter their photos for great effects.

Cartoonize Your photos with Toon Paint

Fancy turning your mugs into cartoon-like caricatures? Well, now you can, even if you not that artistically inclined. There's an app called Toon Paint that does just that. It transform your pictures into cartoonish images in just seconds, and I do mean SECONDS.

Toon Paint is an app developed by Toon-FX LLC that is fun and simple to use. Simply pick a photo from your phone's photo library, and the transformation will start immediately. The whole process never, and I do mean NEVER take more than a minute to complete. And the final images are stunning to say the least.

The final image is always in black and white. You can change the intensity of shades here to achieve the most desirable effects. Or, I you want, you can also colour the picture using the provided palettes. You can adjust the brush size for more refined colouring. If you don't like the coloured version, you can always revert it to black and white using the 'bomb' button.

I like this app because not only it is very simple to use, but the end results are always very pleasing to the eyes. Give it a try, you won't regret it.

Photo-Psychedelic with PhotoTropedelic!!

There are tons and tons of photography-related apps available in iTunes, so much so that sometimes, it can be hard to pick up something that's really unique and interesting. Fear not, for I would like to recommend an app that is absolutely FTW! It's called PhotoTropedelic, (I know, it's a tongue-twister of a name), which is available for US 1.99.

The app is allows you to transform your pictures into art pieces inspired by the 60's pop arts, complete with swirls of crazy colours and symbols. You can choose to take a picture using your phone camera, or pick an existing one form your library. Once a picture has been chosen, the process of transforming your picture will start immediately, and you'll be able to see the whole process layer by layer.

I've included some samples picture here, along with their original copies, so that you can see for yourself how cool they look.

From the 'Change Settings' option, you can choose the detail levels for your picture transformation, the intensity of colours, the amount of stars and other symbols that appear on the picture. You can even choose to download the final picture in PDF format. The only thing you cannot choose is the picture size.

This is really a good app for you to experiment with your photos, and try to come out with some snazzy artworks that will sure to impress!