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...