Travel

Street Notes will get you ready for the most organized trip of your life

I know I’ve mentioned before how much I love lists. I am a big fan of organizing everything. I know it is silly, but I am not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of girl. I like to know what is coming, even when I’m trying to plan a trip to go sit on a beach and do nothing.

Street Notes is an organization app that lets you prepare for your trip in advance by collecting and storing notes, websites, and other information to get you ready for the best, most organized trip of your life...

Best travel apps for iPhone

Around this time of the year, families are preparing to hit the road, over the mountains and through the woods. Holidays mean travel. You may be only be a few hours away from the in-laws, or you may be thousands of miles from home.

If you are planning a trip this Thanksgiving, or anytime in the future, you can use your iPhone to take care of pretty much all of the arrangements. Whether you want a great deal on a hotel, recommendations on good eats, or are planning an all-inclusive trip to the Bahamas without the kids, we’ve got a list of the best travel apps that will help make that come true…

Pinterest app updated with new ‘Place Pins’ for planning trips

Pinterest announced last night that it's moving into new territory: travel. The popular photo-sharing service announced Place Pins, a new feature that will allow its users to share photos of the amazing places they’re visiting.

That new feature is now available in the iOS app. And with it, users can essentially plan vacations by easily adding maps to their pin boards, as well as other useful travel information like hotel addresses and phone numbers...

iTravelGo, your no-nonsense iPhone guide to the world’s 36 most famous cities

I'm a Sagittarius so traveling, meeting fresh new people and exploring interesting new places I've never been to is my thing. As any world traveller could tell you, planning a journey normally involves doing extensive research about your favorite destination. But yours truly is a lousy planer: I'm the type of person who instead pulls an iPhone out of my pocket  to check out the top places to eat or stay, educate myself on a specific landmark, learn a little history and so forth.

But as much as I'm inclined to research places on the spot, roaming charges on my wireless bill are a painful reminder that pulling quick facts from the web, while abroad, is a big no-no. Having tried lots of similar apps that offer offline functionality, the iTravelGo app by developer Oleg Baranovskyi in my view is one of the more compelling city guides on the App Store.

Not only does it look nice, it sports a high-quality database of points of interests and is packed with useful information on the world's 36 most famous cities. And as a bonus, there's even a handy glossary in seventeen languages...

New Cupertino hotel offers an Apple TV in every guest room

If you look around your next hotel room, there's a fair chance it will have an alarm clock with a 30-pin dock connector for your iPhone. It's a popular amenity for hotels to list, since there are some 500+ million iOS devices out in the wild.

But one hotel in Cupertino, California is taking their iOS compatibility to the next level. Starwood Hotels' Aloft Hotel has announced today that it now has an Apple TV, connected to a 42-inch LCD television, in all 123 of its guest rooms...

Proposed bill would finally allow the use of iPads during takeoff

In 2011, the FAA green-lighted several commercial and charter airlines to replace their bulky, 50-page paper flight manuals with iPads. And last year, they expanded the rule to allow pilots to use their new tablets during all stages of flight.

So why in the world are passengers still required to power down their electronics before takeoff? No one really knows. And that's why Senator Claire McCaskill says she's putting together a bill that would, by law, remove this silly restriction...

Seven easy ways to improve your travel iPhone Photography

Welcome back to the lessons in iPhone photography. I hope you have enjoyed adding a little creative lens flare to your images the last couple of weeks. I have enjoyed looking at them! This week I thought we would do something a little different. I travel quite a bit with my iPhone and as you know by now, I take a lot of photos with it. I shot close to 4,000 iPhone images last year. Today I thought I would share a few tips to improve your own travel iPhoneography...

Australian airline to serve up in-flight entertainment via iPads

This is pretty interesting: Qantas, an Australian airline, is now handing out iPads to passengers on all of its B767 airliners. The tablet is being used to provide an in-flight entertainment service, called QStreaming, which features more than 200 hours of on-demand content.

QStreaming is free, and offered to all Qantas Business and Economy class customers. Here's a brief overview of the new service:

Vancouver hotel replacing guest phones with iPhones

Hotels offer a wide range of amenities for guests-on-the-go. This includes on-site pools, Wi-Fi, bars, and workout rooms. But for one Canadian hotel, this also includes complimentary iPhones.

That's right, the Opus hotel in Vancouver has started replacing the landline telephones in each of its rooms, with iPhones. And even better, guests can carry the handsets throughout their entire stay...

‘Currency Converter’ is one of the best looking Notification Center widgets

When traveling abroad, there's just some things that you should do that are just no brainers. One of them is knowing the exchange rate between your native currency, and the currency of the country you're travelling to.

In the old days this used to take a little legwork, i.e. reading the newspaper, going to the post office, etc. With the smartphone boom, though, currency conversion is often right at your fingertips.

As is the case with this new jailbreak widget, entitled Currency Convertor. It's a widget that conveniently sits in iOS 5's Notification Center for easy access...

How to add world clocks to Notification Center

If you're a big traveller, then would it not be convenient to have world clock access in Notification Center?

With a new jailbreak tweak aptly entitled WorldClockCenter, now you can.

WorldClockCenter takes all of the world clocks you have configured inside the stock Clock app, and places them in Notification Center, along with a few extra configurable options. Check out our brief video walkthrough inside...

Siri Can Tell You If a Plane is Flying Above Your Head

File this one under "crazy things that Siri can do." Apparently, thanks to the magic of Wolfram Alpha, Siri on the iPhone 4S is able to give you flight path trajectories. The real kicker is that Siri can use your iPhone's GPS data to determine if there are planes currently flying about your area.

Now you have a new way to see if your friend is ready to get picked up at the airport!