Knapsack Tip #2: Sync your trip to iCal, iPhone, and MobileMe

The iCal integration released as part of Knapsack 1.1 provides a simple way to get trip information to and from iCal, iPhone, iPod Touch, MobileMe (formerly .Mac), and anything else you may have synced with iCal for use while you're traveling. Any changes you make in a synced device (iPhone, iCal, MobileMe, etc) while on your trip will be synced back when you return home and relaunch Knapsack.



To sync a trip with iCal:

1. Select your trip from the trip list or double-click your trip to open it.


2. Choose Sync with iCal from the Trip menu.


3. You can now choose which iCal calendar you would like to sync with. It is recommended that you choose the New Calendar option to keep your trip on its own calendar. You can choose an existing calendar, but any items already existing on your calendar during the date range of the trip will be added to your itinerary in Knapsack.


4. Click Sync. Now, any changes you make in Knapsack will be made in iCal and vice versa. When a trip is synced, activities on your itinerary will show up as iCal events and to do items on your checklist will show up as to do items in iCal.


5. Once your trip is complete, it is recommended that you stop syncing with iCal to preserve your trip data. Knapsack will automatically prompt you to end syncing when you open a synced trip which has an end date in the past. You can also choose Stop iCal Sync from the Trip menu at any time.

Has this tip helped you? Have you used iCal syncing before? What other tips or tricks do you have that you'd like to share with other Knapsack users? Leave a comment here or email us directly.

New Year's promotion ends tomorrow

Just a quick reminder that our New Year's 2009 25% off promotion ends tomorrow. If you've been trying out Knapsack for the last few weeks but haven't purchased yet, head on over to our store and enter the coupon code NEWYEARS2009 before time runs out!

Resolve to travel more and save 25%

According to Wikipedia, one of the most popular New Year's resolutions is to take a trip. Many people make a resolution to visit a new place or to better document their travel experiences. That sounds great to the four of us here at TinyPlanet Software. We have taken many trips together and even formed our company while traveling. Because of our love for travel, we designed our flagship product, Knapsack, to be the personal travel organizer for Mac OS X Leopard.

If your New Year's resolutions include traveling more often or you know someone who wants to take the trip of a lifetime, we'd love to help. To celebrate the new year and get you on your way, we're offering 25% off a single-user or 5-user family pack license for Knapsack from December 29th to January 15th. Just enter the coupon code NEWYEARS2009 on our online store and the discount will be included automatically.

Enjoy and Happy New Year from the TinyPlanet Software crew!

Knapsack Tip #1: Reuse Checklists with Template Trips

New Blog Series: Knapsack Tips
We've decided to start a series of blog entries containing tips and tricks to help our users get the most out of Knapsack. Our first tip below deals with reusing checklists by creating custom template trips. Future items will include topics covering all aspects of trip planning and organizing with Knapsack. We'll be sharing our own Knapsack habits plus some ideas we've received directly from our users. Of course, we'd love to hear from you. Let us know how you're using Knapsack for your travels. Feel free to leave a comment here or send us an email directly.

Knapsack Tip #1: Reuse Checklists with Template Trips
As we're preparing for our trip to Colorado this winter, we need to make sure we've packed everything. In this case, it's a trip to visit family, exchange presents, work on our software, and snowboard. As you can imagine, that involves a lot of different items: warm clothes, presents, snowboarding gear, laptops, power supplies, etc. It would be tedious to re-enter every single item to pack in every new trip, so we use previously-created packing lists from a "template" trip to make this easier.

In this case, we'll copy the existing "Snowboarding" and "Business Trip" packing lists from a template trip called "Packing Lists" into our new "Colorado 2008" trip. This is simple to accomplish and can save a lot of time when creating new trips.

1. Create a new trip and name it "Packing Lists"



2. Use the Checklist area in the itinerary view to create various packing lists for different types of trips


3. When planning a new trip, open this Packing Lists trip, select the top-level item in the list you'd like to use in your new trip, and choose Edit > Copy


4. Create and open your new trip file, click in the Checklists area of the itinerary, and choose Edit > Paste

Within a matter of seconds, we have a great start on our packing lists for Colorado. This same technique can be used for checklists other than packing lists: souvenirs to buy, postcards to send, etc. In fact, sharing content between trips isn't limited to only checklists: activities can be copied and pasted between trips just as easily. Use your imagination to prepare some fun and useful templates or get started by simply borrowing from trips you've already taken.

What has the TinyPlanet crew been up to?

The short answer: A lot!

We've all had quite an eventful year and we just wanted to take a moment to reflect on it all.  To recap, we launched Knapsack in March, followed by our first supporting dot release in May.  But what's happened since then?  Well, shortly after our last release Chris finally, and when we say finally we mean after 12 years finally, pops the question.  Not "Would you like fries with that?", but "Will you marry me?".  Chris and Ruby are engaged!  The four of us squeezed in WWDC in June; lots of brain storming, lots of iPhone planning, lots of fun! Then in August, it was off to Hawaii for Chris and Ruby's wedding.  Picture a breath-taking Maui sunset, a private ceremony on a grassy bluff overlooking the ocean and classical guitar music playing as Ruby walks down an orchid petal isle; you get the idea.  The trip to Hawaii was an especially meaningful trip because we were also there to celebrate 10 years of blissful marriage for Brad and Merrilee.  Way to go guys, you're an inspiration!  In November, to honor Ruby's Chinese heritage and to honor her family, Chris and Ruby threw a semi-traditional Chinese Wedding Banquet; lots of family and close friends, lots of food and an open bar, ah good times.  All this excitement took our attention away from Knapsack, but now we're re-energized and itching to get back to it.  So, in December we'll be going on a TinyPlanet Software coding retreat to Colorado.  There'll be some relaxing, there'll be some snowboarding and there'll definitely be some designing and developing to kick 2009 off with a bang.  Speaking of 2009, we have a few more surprises still to come...

Knapsack 1.1 reviewed by About This Particular Macintosh

About This Particular Macintosh posted a very nice review of Knapsack 1.1 in their August 2008 edition. Head on over and give it a read. My favorite quote:

Knapsack’s integration with iCal seems particularly impressive. Not only can you export a trip to iCal, but you can also sync a trip with iCal. In this latter mode, changes made to the trip’s calendar are mirrored back into Knapsack. This includes both the trip’s itinerary for a given day and the to-do items.

I was able to create my trip in Knapsack, sync it to iCal, then modify the trip information on my iPhone. When I later synced my iPhone with my computer, the changes were reflected back in Knapsack.

That's exactly the use we had in mind when we designed the two-way iCal syncing included in 1.1. We're thrilled to see our users enjoying the tight integration!

Meanwhile, we're continuing work on the next version of Knapsack. We've reviewed and re-reviewed all your input and put our heads together to come up with what we think are some great improvements to the map and the overall integration of Knapsack's different components. We think you're going to like what we have in store. Keep the feedback coming and we hope you continue to enjoy using Knapsack to plan, organize, and relive your travel adventures!

Getting the most out of WWDC

The four of us here at TinyPlanet Software will be traveling to Apple's annual Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) in just two short weeks. This is the first year that the show has ever sold out, so there will be a lot of new faces milling about Moscone West in San Francisco. After a recent Cocoaheads meeting, we received questions from other developers asking how they can best prepare for the conference and what to expect. Now, we're not experts - WWDC07 was our first year - but we know some experts and had them review our advice (thanks, Scott and Roelof)!



WWDC07 was pivotal for TinyPlanet Software and our flagship product, Knapsack. We came back from San Francisco with a redesigned and largely re-implemented application. We were on a Cocoa-high for weeks afterwards. We hope this advice helps others get the same benefit out of Apple's annual developer-fest.

Here's our advice for making the most out of WWDC:

1) Set your planned schedule:
First and foremost, you really need to work out your schedule ahead of time. Spend some quality time with Apple's Schedule. Pick out the most interesting sessions you see, and pick backups in case you want to duck out of a session if it's not going where you thought it would. Read about the sessions and the APIs which will be covered. Make a special note of the TBD sessions, as they often cover material revealed during the Keynote. Also, be sure to watch for schedule changes when you get there and update accordingly.

2) Set your planned after-hours schedule:
There are lots of events that happen after-hours, both Apple and non-Apple sponsored. So far, we know of the following. There will probably be others. For example, last year there was a great Cocoaheads meeting at the Apple Store just down the street from Moscone with Brent Simmons, Daniel Jalkut, Gus Mueller, and Wil Shipley talking about "Going Indie".

• Sunday: MacCommunities Pre-WWDC Social Gathering


• Sunday: The sfIndieMac Soiree


• Monday: Apple's WWDC Welcome Reception


• Monday: Buzz Anderson's 5th Annual WWDC Party


• Tuesday: VMWare Fusion User Meetup WWDC Edition


• Tuesday: Ars Technica and Gizmodo WWDC Party


• Wednesday: Apple Design Awards and Stump the Experts in Moscone


• Thursday: Apple's WWDC Bash

3) Prepare questions:
If you're working on an app or a specific problem, compile a list of 10-20 very specific questions to have handy. Take advantage of the lab sessions, Q&As, and chance meetings to ask these questions; you can often talk to the very people who wrote the framework you're trying to use.

4) Sign up for a UI consultation:
If you would like your UI reviewed by an Apple human interface expert (and who wouldn't?), sign up for a 30-minute one-on-one UI consultation. Sign-ups usually begin on Tuesday morning on a first-come, first-served basis and are only available one day at a time. We radically redesigned Knapsack after going through two UI sessions last year.

5) Take notes:
Bring a spiral notebook to take notes during the sessions. Write down the names of the presenters, demonstrators, lab helpers, UI consultants, and anybody who you might want to talk to - or refer to - later.

6) Meet people:
Hand out your business card, shake peoples' hands, get other peoples' cards. We're all engineers, so we tend to be introverted and taking that first step can be hard. Be an extrovert for the week. Write down context information on the backs of others' cards so you remember the person and can stay in touch after WWDC is over. Stay in touch after WWDC is over.

7) Show up early:
If you have a chance, pick up your badge before Monday morning to avoid the crowds. Similarly, admission to WWDC does not guarantee admission to the Keynote with Steve Jobs; you may end up in an overflow room. If you want to be in the actual room, plan to get up bright and early on Monday morning.

8) Bring gear:
This may go without saying, but bring your laptop, iPhone, and whatever else you need to be a productive developer. Bring a small external hard drive or a hard drive partition to install any beta software on.

Anything else? What do other folks think? Anybody else want to throw their own tips in for the good of the community? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing you developer-types in Moscone!