Adventures for iPhone a decent travel log
Adventures for iPhone is a travel log (currently on sale for US$1.99 in the App Store) that syncs photos with Evernote. The idea is that you create an album, or "adventure," snapping photos along the way. The app collects meta information like location and your custom tags, then sends the lot to a notebook in Evernote.
I spent last Sunday exploring Boston and took Adventures along for the ride. My experience was mostly positive. Read on for my day of capturing Boston with Adventures for iPhone.
Last May, Evernote's Brett Kelly published an article on 52 Tiger about using Evernote as a traveler's companion. His idea was solid: by capturing photos in Evernote, you've got everything tagged, categorized, accessible and ready to share. I like the idea, but in practice found it cumbersome. In short, producing from-the-hip snapshots with a basic photography app is significantly faster. Evernote is a great storage solution, but it's a poor camera.
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Adventures seems like a great solution. It syncs with your Evernote account and uploads your photos in the background. It's a lot faster than using the Evernote app, though you do have to enter some info with each shot. But before we get to use, let's take a look.
Looks
Adventures is pretty. Very pretty. It features flat-as-a-pancake buttons that will feel at home on iOS 7. The font is skinny and legible and the settings are easy to read. It's also quite responsive, with no noticeable lag on my iPhone 4S.
Your completed adventures are displayed in a grid, each with a title, representative thumbnail (you can't choose the poster image, which is unfortunate if your first shot is a stinker or not representative of the group as a whole), the number of images, or "memories," included and finally your title.
Tap any adventure and its images are sorted chronologically into nice-looking, rectangular thumbnails. Again, it's a pretty app. Now onto how it works.
Use
To get started, tap the "+" in the upper right. An "adventure creation" screen appears, with a field for a title and tag search. Note that Adventures imports your existing Evernote tags. You can also create your own (these become available to Evernote also).
When I was learning the app, I accidentally tapped the "+" when I meant to take a photo for an existing adventure. A new, unwanted adventure was created, which is fine, but I couldn't figure out how to delete it. I still haven't.
Once inside an adventure, tap the "+" again to add a photo (or "memory"). A creation screen appears, and you can enter the location (powered by Foursquare), add any notes and finally snap a photo. Note that you can't add a photo without entering the location. Notes are optional. Some may balk at the additional time requirement, but Adventures is a logging app. If you simply want to snap photos and be done with it, there are a bajillion camera apps ready to heed your call.
You'll find several sharing options on this screen as well. Opt in to sharing via App Dot Net, Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare. Your credentials for each can be entered via the app's settings. Additionally, access to each can be toggled on or off individually.
You can edit any memory by tapping the "i" next to a photo. An edit screen appears, which also features my favorite button of all time:
If Adventures could literally erase certain memories from my brain, I'd pay a heck of a lot more than $1.99.
Once you've collected a few images, tap the map button in the lower right to see a map of your travels. A pin represents the locations at which you snapped a photo.
Evernote Sync
This is the app's marquee feature, and I'm disappointed to report I couldn't get it to work. Adventures creates a notebook in Evernote called "Adventures." Inside, each adventure is a separate note. I shot seven photos while in Boston, but only two made it over to Evernote on my Mac and iPhone. I couldn't figure out why.
Conclusion
Adventures is a great start. It looks fantastic and makes the process of getting tagged and meta-ified photos into Evernote a lot faster than using the storage app itself. It's fast and simple to figure out.
It's possible that my trouble with Evernote sync is unique or my own doing, but I can't say for sure. For now, I'll say wait until the next version drops.
