Exhausted & Happy

The last two weeks were extremely hectic.
Trying to accomplish so much in so little time was hard (but at the end, very rewarding).

First, the Qlibri app is finally up and running in the AppStore, Google Play and Windows Phone Marketplace. It was really rewarding to finally get all the three apps out there after all the months of hard work.

Second, the team managed to accomplish some quite impressive things on the non-technical development: our twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles are ready and good to go and we are almost ready with our AngelList page as well.
We had some really useful late-night brainstorming sessions where new ideas popped up, some demo videos were shot and ample amounts of beer were drunk.

Exhausted. But happy.

The Zen of Trip Planning

If you ask ten people how do they plan their trips, you're perhaps going to get ten different answers. Not only that, but actually planning a trip will mean different things (and sometimes radically different) for different people.

For some, planning would be limited to booking flights and hotels, for others, it would be the housekeeping stuff (keeping your booking references and confirmations), while other people would prefer to create full-fledged detailed itineraries, splitting the trip days into hours and minutes.

Obviously, it is impossible to make an app or a service that would satisfy everybody. One size simply doesn't fit all in this market.

We didn't try doing this with Triply. Instead, we designed Triply around our own needs and preferences. The idea is that if it's useful for us, chances are good it will be useful for big enough group of people (unless it turns out we're some sort of weirdos, which is, in fact, quite probable).

So here are the basic principles and thinking behind the app user experience.

- Speed. This is important. There are multiple dimensions of speed, though. The most important is not the raw app speed,but instead, the speed with which you can create a trip plan. With Triply, you can literally do this in seconds, or if you plan to visit more places -- minutes.

— Simplicity. Simple is beautiful. And while it's always hard to nail the balance between function and elegance, we think we did a good job with Triply. For instance, we knew from the outset that we need to make the app do ninety percent of its job in the background, hidden from the user. If there were forms to fill or guides to download it would be useless.

— Limitations. While this doesn't sound as something to brag about, we strongly believe that deliberately setting limits to what you can do is actually beneficial for the user experience.

Try it out. It's free. Download it now on the AppStore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/triply-discover-interesting/id720646508?ls=1&mt=8

Announcing Triply

How do you plan your trip?

OK, maybe planning is a bit misleading term here. By 'planning' I don't mean booking your flights, keeping track of booking references and other housekeeping stuff (services like TripIt do fantastic job in this area).

By planning, I mean more like 'How do you know where to go? How do you discover places worth visiting? How do you collect and keep information about them?'

The truth is, most people don't plan at all. This is why you still see people roaming through cities waving booklets and paper maps, while at the same time their smartphones rest in their pockets.

In fact, when asked about planning, most people will say something like "Planning? Nah, it's just too much of a hassle".

While there is no lack of travel apps available in the App Store, most of them simply take the ancient (and I do mean ancient) concept of a travel guide and put it in a digital form (yes, yes, there are videos and animations and some really nicely designed apps) but all in all, it's the same millennium-old concept, made digital.

Meet Triply -- the travel planning app we have been working on in the last 4 months.
The idea behind it is really simple: "Make planning a trip so quick, seamless and easy, that people won't even notice they create a trip plan".

It really works like magic -- you simply tell Triply the name of the city you're going to visit:

You will instantly see the most interesting places in this city (notice how we show you the most relevant ones so you are not overwhelmed with 3,675 things to do in London as in some other apps):

You can easily filter by category:

And you can specify a certain area of the city:

So with this simple interface you can do pretty powerful filtering like 'I want to see all the bars in the area of my hotel'.

Creating a trip plan is as simple as tapping 'Add to Trip' button. From your perspective, this is a 0.5 seconds job.

Behind the scenes, Triply will do some really heavy lifting without you even noticing.

Triply will find and download information from services like Foursquare, Google Maps, Google Places and Wikipedia, will structure it in a beautiful way and will store it safely on your iPhone.

Within seconds, and with minimal input from you, you will have beautifully organized trip plan.

I have been using this app a lot in the last few months. Obviously, I am heavily biased, but I can say it is one of the best apps in its category.

- It utilizes the most powerful APIs available on the Internet today;
- It has access to the World's most complete venue and places database (Foursquare's);
- It is simple, lightweight and fast;
- The ease of use is simply unmatched -- you can create a trip plan while waiting to board your plane or while enjoying a couple of WiFi minutes, sipping your coffee at Starbucks.

I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.


Triply is a free download on the AppStore.

Squarespace Note

I am really a note-taking type of guy. I constantly type on my phone,  jotting thoughts, tasks and sometimes entire projects on the glass touchscreen.

Normally, I use Wunderlist for anything reminder and task-oriented and Evernote for notes and organizing information. I also use some task-specific tools like Elevatr for the app ideas I decide to explore and work on (sidenote: if you are into developing apps, you should try Elevatr -- while nothing so groundbreaking, its structure helps you with evaluating and thinking about your idea from different angles).

I just recently discovered Squarespace Note. This app is very simple and really helps you collect thoughts and ideas with minimum friction.

I have lots of ideas, lots of thoughts on the go. Launching Evernote, finding the appropriate notebook and tapping on the New Note button is just too much friction. Squarespace Note opens into a typing screen and you can start typing your thoughts right away. Then, the app pushes your note to Evernote or to your inbox. It's that simple and it tries hard to stay out of your way.

If you like collecting your thoughts on the go and you haven't tried this app, you should definitely consider giving it a chance.