iPhone App Reviews

iLove Travel – Packing

Chrisa | Mar 27, 2009 Travel, Utilities

Have you seen the movie, “As Good As It Gets” with Jack Nicholson?  It’s the one where Jack plays Melvin Udall, a writer with severe OCD, but learns to overcome some aspects of it due to the love of a Brooklyn waitress and a gay neighbor.  He got nominated for an Oscar for the part.  Anyway – I like to think there’s a little obsessive-compulsive in all of us about certain aspects of our lives.  For me, it’s travel.  I travel quite a bit for business, yes, but when I travel for leisure, it’s more stressful, because I have three teenagers to pack as well as myself.  Not to mention a husband who has a short-term memory issue that I think is chromosonal in nature.  I call it X-Y Chromosone Poisoning, and its symptoms also include not being physically capable of asking directions, and not being able to watch TV without the remote firmly grasped in his hand.  I think he passed it on to my son.

Anyway – I have been known to create elaborate Excel spreadsheets of packing lists to hand to my teens and hubby so that they don’t forget to pack anything for our vacations.  I spend a crapload of time creating them, just to have to re-create them for the next trip.  So imagine the Nirvana I achieved with Packing, the travel app from Quinn Genzel.  From the first moment I felt I had found my soulmate in an app developer.  Packing contains sample packing lists of commonly packed items, one for male, one for female, even for the size of trip.  The demo trip shows how the different categories of item can be configured, customized, and added together to create a unique list of items that need to be packed for any sort of trip, from an overnight business junket to an African safari. 

And don’t be afraid, if you don’t know where to start – the templates make it easy to start from the basics – everything from your passport and traveler’s checks to your hiking boots and elephant gun.  If there are items you normally pack that aren’t on the master list, that’s fine – add them, and they’ll always be available.   If you’re creating the list for someone else, like I do my kids, simply click the email icon and the list will be emailed to them from your default email account. 

I created the packing list my oldest kid needs for his upcoming trip to Germany in 10 minutes, and that includes the time it took for me to create the list from an existing template, edit the template items, add items to the master list and select them, and email it.  It was – dare I say it? – almost orgasmic.  The Melvin Udall in me was completely sated. 

Quinn spits out updates like a gumball machine, too – I downloaded version 3.4 and got updated to version 3.6 in literally 7 days.  It works like a charm, does what it advertises, and is hands down my new favorite travel app.  Bravo.

Tags: $1.99, Travel, Utilities