QuickAdvice: Watch Family and Friend's Vacations Unfold with Tripmate
Tripmate (Free) by OnTheRoad.to is an app to help you keep tabs on any friends and family that are on [vacation] trips, and see what they see and think while there.
The app uses an online travel diary service called ontheroad.to, and allows you to view your friends timeline and even a public timeline. It appears that even though this app uses ontheroad.to's service, you can't post your own travel diary entries from the app - it's strictly a read-only app.
When you want to view a travel diary that is posted on someone's profile, just select it and it will pull up all the posts for that trip. It's organized by day, and will show how many different locations were visited during that day. If there are photos attached to a post, it will be displayed at the bottom. Selecting a photo will view it, and then a 'gallery' like option can be accessed when the 'View All' button is pressed, like with the default Photos app.
You can scan your friends and family's posts, or have some fun and view some complete stranger's travels. Though I noticed that a lot of the public postings are in foreign languages, so that wasn't as fun.
Views can be switched from timelines to just a list of your friends or random people, and you can also keep an eye on a trip by adding it to your 'Watch' list.
This is a good app if you know people that use the service, ontheroad.to, but I didn't at the time of this posting. So I was exploring the random strangers that appeared, and I would see myself using this a lot more if I knew more people on it. This is pretty much a traveling version of Twitter or Facebook, in a way.
If you've used the service before, you should check out this app. If not, then maybe it's something you'd be interested in using in the long-term if you get some friends and family to use it. The interface is nice, but a little plain. But overall it has potential to be a pretty good app. It also needs to be able to let users post their own entries directly within the app.
Until then, check it out, explore it. It won't hurt, after all, it's free.
