- James (Destinations):
- Blog
- My Idea
- About Me
- Judge's Comments
Round 2
Um…it’d be nice if James actually participated a bit in this beyond his original idea. I know that he’s on vacation right now, but I just don’t see him being a good person to work with if he were to become a winner.
Round 1
I do enough travelling to know that something like this would be very useful. I’d like to see some sort of integration with things like airlines and hotels. My concern is that to be effective, this would need to tie in a lot of disparate services, which can be a challenge. Also, some of the features (like linking images to a point on a map) are already accommodated by services like Flickr, which means the software would have to go above and beyond to be competitive.
This idea reminded me off applications that allow to relate pictures and other resources to a location on a map. Destinations is obviously much more. I really like the idea about planning your trip, exploring the route you may go on a map and look for local information at various waypoints. I imagine a beautifully crafted interface allowing you to fly along your planned route. It’s overlayed with information you gathered for the trip. After you enjoyed the anticipation and had a great trip, Destinations completes the experience by integrating with iLife to attach pictures and movies you took on your trip. Eventually it serves as a great travel book. I’m sold on this idea.
This seems like an app I’d use, like, once a year at most. I doubt I’d buy or even download an app for something that uncommon. I’d probably use a website, of which there are already plenty, and which has the advantage of being able to sell me tickets.
Also, why would I care to see what the weather is like someplace else in the world? Am I going to try to hop a supersonic jet and get there before it stops raining or something?
This is a really powerful idea that isn’t getting as much attention as I’d like. Trip planning is both fun and sucky, at the same time. It’s fun because, well, you know you’re going on a trip. It sucks because it’s a pain. I see Destinations as amplifying the fun and clipping the suck.
Austin’s call on using a groovy map rather than a source-list is dead on. This app should be all about the eye candy. For example, on my cheesy honeymoon photo site (http://corrieandjason.com/honeymoon), I don’t have a textual list of the places we went. I’ve got spiffy maps that took me 87 hours of screwing around in Illustrator to make!
So Destinations should be able to do the following:
- Provide a list of things to do, hotels, and flights for an arbitrary destination. They don’t have to be all-encompassing, they just have to provide the bare outlines. Making suggestions is a plus.
- Manage an itinerary.
- Handle travel journal entries.
- Sync with iPhoto albums.
- Provide trip timelines for later review.
There are few ideas out there that spark my imagination. This is one of them. A new way to organise your files. Combine it with the power of Google earth. Create iMovie templates for title animations. Create templates for an audiovisual travel blog. Now I feel like I was there… The planning aspect is not as important to me, but it might be to other people.