This past week, I spent some time in Colorado to see my friends at Foraker Labs to talk about some new iOS work. Boulder isn’t all that far from Santa Barbara in the grand scheme of things but it was a chance to remind myself of some of the travel apps on my iPhone and iPad that make the experience far more tolerable.
Here’s a list of a few of the apps that kept me company last week:
* FlightTracker Pro – if there’s one app that is truly useful when traveling by plane, it’s FlightTracker Pro. You enter your flight info and then you’re fully up to date about changes in the schedule, sent via push notifications (they even use the awesome seatbelt-sign tone when they arrive).
* TripIt – I don’t use the Pro version but even the free edition of TripIt is helpful. Simply forward your hotel, airline and other confirmation emails into the service and it will create a complete itinerary, right in the app. It’s also integrated with FlightTracker Pro – once your flights are in TripIt, it will automatically populate that data in the other app.
* Instacast – I listen to a lot of podcasts but when traveling, I don’t usually bring along my main Mac. This means I don’t have my iPhone ‘sync’ computer to download podcasts onto. Enter Instacast. Subscribe, cache and stream podcasts right into the app along with show notes and other info. It’s a great podcast client for iPhone – something the built in iPod app doesn’t really strive to be.
* Instapaper – One of my all-time favorites. Instapaper is a great way to capture and read articles from the Web, wherever you go. It caches and keeps the data so it’s easy to use when you’re flying around in a metal tube.
* OmniFocus – This wasn’t a pleasure trip so I had to keep my tasks rolling as normal. OmniFocus syncs between my iPhone, iPad and Mac and has never let me down. Not cheap but I’ve definitely gotten great value out of it.
All of the above apps are available on the iTunes App Store.