Road Trip Planner LITE

Road Trip Planner LITE is intended to carefully plan your trips. Thus, it lets you trace routes by placing pins on locations of interest.

The application interface may feel somewhat jam-packed with different elements, such as maps, list of pins and much relevant information about each place, which makes the tool hard to use at first. However, you can definitely flatten the steep learning curve by studying the short tutorials, reading the user’s manual and trying some of the downloadable sample files.

In my opinion, the best advantage of this product is related to the great deal of information about your itinerary that you can collect and organize. In this respect, route pins help you create the route while POI pins are intended to signal points of interest and act like sort of nodes holding most of the data. For example, a given pin can store the arrival and departure date and time, notes and images, weather reports, satellite views, lists of planned activities, driving distance to the nearest pins, calculated cost of fuel, and much more.

On top of that, each of the activities you are planning to do at that location can be further described by estimating costs, attaching notes and pictures, as well as entering contact information (phone, fax and email address).

The application allows you to use Apple Maps or OpenStreet Maps. Even though I understand this has to do with non-availability of SDKs for other technologies, Road Trip Planner LITE is based on Apple’s maps technology only, from which it inherits some limitations. For instance, there are areas that cannot be routed.

In short, Road Trip Planner LITE is a great option if you are looking for an application that helps you plan every little detail of your trip. It is a free version of the full product, and as such, it has some limitations. In this regard, you cannot save the resulting itinerary, which would otherwise allow you to enter data into GPS devices or share the files with other users and devices. Still, it can be used as a free viewer by non-editing users. This free product can be downloaded from the Mac App Store, from where you can also get its fully featured version.