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Travel Notes: the concept

So you know by now I have a problem with taking travel notes and I want to fix it. But how you ask? It's gonna be great. It's gonna be the best travel app out there. Together we will make travel-note-taking great again. It's true!

I hereby promise that’s the one and only Trump-reference I’ll make here. Sorry about that. Let me tell you how I’m fixing my problem. Trust me, it’s huuuge!

Didn’t read the Travel Notes introduction? D’oh!

The problem

… only one

So according to a huge group of very experienced, highly intelligent travellers (me ?), us travellers are facing a huge problem: Taking note sucks when it comes to travelling. Not because there are not good note taking apps out there. There are plenty. But because it’s not focused enough on our needs: we take notes for ourselves, but we tend to meet awesome people we want to share parts of them with.

So let’s make the sharing part easy too!

The fix

… is in

So give us our personal travel journals and let us magically pull out a page to share with others while not losing the original page. Magic!

Do I make sense? I’m never sure.

The result

All this results in an app I’m going to try and develop. So let’s talk about that. What does it do?

  1. Pick a location and add your travel notes
  2. Share it with awesome fellow travellers
  3. Let them make it their own (easy as pie!)

That’s all there is to it, really. It might sound like a lot of apps do this. But I haven’t found any that really do only this.

The challenge

For now my focus will be on nothing more than three challenges:

  • picking the location
  • taking note
  • sharing notes

The former two being a design challenge, the latter mainly a technical challenge, since I plan to make proper use of existing sharing options in our operatings systems (Android, iOS, etc.).

The opportunity

Later on I’ll have to focus on making it work offline – very important when travellling, user accounts and making use of the information you all will potentially be generating. I’ve already received suggestions for a map view, a Lonely Planet like travel guide-like presentation, a photo / video slideshow mode to tell people at home about your travels. There are many opportunities. But first things first: taking notes and sharing the love!

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