Plan Your Next Trip On Your Mac With A Knapsack.

I like to travel. I’m always on the go. Always. If it’s not business, it’s personal. If not personal, it’s family. I like to travel.

My Mac comes with me, but other than booking flights online, my Mac doesn’t do much for my travel experience. Until now and Knapsack.

Let’s face it. Some Mac users may use their Macs for recipes and home inventory, but most of us use the killer applications. Mail. Safari. Office. If anything, the killer application of the 21st century is the Mac’s ability to run many different apps and utilities.

What I’ve not seen much of is travel applications or utilities for the Mac. Sure, there are Dashboard Widgets to help you search for airfare. Your browser is a window to all the airline schedules, discount travel dealers, and locations. But what else? Not much.

On the same day that I’m trying to figure out what to do on my spring vacation, Tiny Planet Software releases Knapsack, a personal travel organizer for Mac Leopard users Suddenly, there’s a handy way to manage the details of an upcoming trip, and look back at where you went and what you did (besides 500 new photos stuffed into iPhoto).

As Mac OS X Leopard adds even more built-in graphic features for Mac users, Mac software developers find creative ways to use the tools. Knapsack starts with what looks like the traditional Mac utility, ala iTunes and iPhoto. The left column is a library which holds trips, schedules, and Groups like iPhoto holds albums and iTunes holds playlists.

Dead center an impossible to ignore is a huge and colorful map of the world, similar to the maps you used in school, complete with little pins to mark where you’re going or where you’ve been.

Zoom in and out using a simple slider bar. The grabber moves left, right, up and down.

That’s the visual part of Knapsack. Simply assign a trip to any pin anywhere on the map, business or pleasure. From there, visit the familiar Mac toolbar to add a day to your trip, add an activity or a to-do, or add another pin for another destination.

Click the edit button for the full itinerary details, including a notes area for activities, and detailed checklist with nested items (nice touch).

What’s really cool about the itinerary builder is the ability to add as much detail as you want, and then rearrange everything. Like that doesn’t happen when you travel, right?

Planning a trip is actually fun, because all the trip planning elements are right there, except for booking tickets, and that’s only a click away to your browser anyway. So, not only can you plan the details on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis you can also make notes along the way, using Knapsack and your Mac (or, make notes when you return home to stuff 500 photos into iPhoto).

No itinerary builder is complete without the ability to print and email the itinerary to carry, leave behind, or send to others (What? you don’t email your itinerary to yourself before you leave on a trip?) Knapsack does all that. Think about what happens when you use a nifty Mac utility to plan your trips, activities, itineraries, and details. Your little library of travel details becomes a big library of travel details.

Search Knapsack for where you’ve been and what you did. Create groups of trips, upcoming trips, recent trips, unscheduled trips, best trips, work trips, business trips, personal trips. The onscreen map adds pins to display where you’ve been. Click on a pin to view details, including a link to a Google Map. Click the pin to open the trips details or to edit.

Knapsack is not only fun, it’s easy to use, and it’s beneficial for travelers, frequent or otherwise. What’s missing? The toolbar needs a ‘home button’ to bring up the world map. There needs to be a way to store expense information; receipt details, shopping items, all the usual stuff you need to track when you travel.

I’d also like to see a way to import photos to a gallery or some kind of integration with iPhoto albums for the same thing. The Google-like maps are a cool feature, but the zoom in doesn’t zoom in far enough. I like to see people standing beside their car waving to the satellite as it passes by.

Other than that, TinyPlanetSoftware has an elegant and handy utility for travelers and travel planners with Knapsack.

Do you use your Mac to plan travels for business or pleasure? If so, how? What tools do you use (besides your browser to check fares and book flights)? Share in the Comment section below.

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