It’s that time of the year again: it’s time to get out of that chair, out of the house and out of the country! Bored with how mundane life has become, or how work and projects have taken over your life so completely? We think you need a vacation and deep down inside, you know you do too. While travelling is not everyone’s cup of tea, there are now many apps to help you organize and plan your vacation well.

In this article we are featuring some apps that can help you get around a new place with ease, and find recommendations for places to stay or dine at. This list also features travel guides and planners, transportation apps, Maps/GPS apps as well as a bunch of useful apps that we’ve parked under Utilities. Are you using any of the apps listed below? Share your review.

Shortcut to:

• Travel Guides/Planners
• Transportation
• GPS/Maps
• Hotels
• Food & Beverage
• Camera
• Utilities

Travel Guides/Planners

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Plan your holidays on the go with apps like:

Yelp

The Yelp app is probably one of the best app available with lots of updates and reviews by the active and growing community of locals. Yelp helps you find and plan the best places to eat, drink, shop, relax and enjoy during your trip. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is a great tool to find hotels, restaurants and tourism spots in any destination, anywhere around the world. It comes with reviews and tips from fellow travellers and you can even sort the results by the ratings provided by reviewers. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Travelocity

With detailed information on flight and other forms of transportation, Travelocity helps you look for the best option and time to travel, as well as hotels and good deals near your current location. All these can be done with a simple search, with quick booking facility. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Tripwolf

Looking for the finest guide to discover the most popular cities in the world? Tripwolf may be it, with every information provided e.g. maps, guides, feature etc, accessible directly from your app even without an Internet connection. Truly convenient! [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

TripDoc

TripDoc helps you organize your trip with options to keep notes, mark your current location and share places or maps with friends via email. It also allows you to list places and show everything on a map. [$2.99]

Platform: iOS

TouristEye

TouristEye gives you the option to choose cities you want to visit and build a cutomized daily itinerary of the places you want to see. Not only that, you also get to find out about transportation bookings, lodgings as well as travel events. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet is synonymous with the travel world, and through its Travel Guide app, Lonely Planet offers an option to buy and store your country guides, city guides, audio phrasebooks and audio walking around tours. All these guides are accessible offline too. [Free]

Platform: iOS

WorldMate

WorldMate helps you to plan, book and manage your trips easily. It’s useful for keeping tabs on travel schedules, and it’s an axcellent all-round travel companion. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

KAYAK

Kayak, the no. 1 mobile travel organizer lets you organize your full itinerary at your fingertips. You can easily check or compare prices for flight, hotel and car rental. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

mTrip

mTrip uses augmented reality to display tourist attractions in your area, and it guides you to each tourist attraction with directions. mTrip also allows you to share your trip with friends over Facebook or email, with personalized e-postcards. [$5.99]

Platform: iOS | Android

Hipmunk

Need to find a better way to compare flights? Hipmunk shows you relevant flights on a timeline, making it easier to visualize your future plans and pick the best flight for your trip. Hotel search results are shown on a map, so you can see exactly where you will be staying. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

TripIt

TripIt is an easier alternative to organize and share your travels, as it “automagically” takes all your trip details and create one truly helpful itinerary. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Gogobot

Need an app to help you plan your trip? Gogobot helps you with that by browsing over 60,000 destinations and insider tips. Gogobot also has a tool to create stunning photo postcards of your trip to share on Facebook and Twitter. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Transportation

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GateGuru

It provides you with real-time flight statuses, airport wait times, even structured list of airport food, as well as shops based on over 30,000 reviews and tips from fellow travelers. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Amtrak

The Amtrak mobile application gets you access to all the travel information you need with the added facility to book your trip on the go. Stay up-to-date with the status of trains. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Taxi Magic

Need to find Taxi at your current location? Taxi Magic helps you with that with a booking facility that is integrated with taxi dispatch systems via the Internet. You can also track the arrival of your taxi via the dispatch updates and map. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

FlightAware Flight Tracker

FlightAware Flight Tracker not only allows you to track the real-time status and the tracking map of any commercial flight worldwide, but also general aviation in the US and Canada airspace. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

HopStop

HopStop provides you with detailed public transit, taxi, biking and even walking directions in dozens of cities throughout the US, Canada and Europe. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Skyscanner

Skyscanner lets you compare over 1000 budget and scheduled airlines in seconds, and buy air tickets directly from the airlines or travel agents for the best deals. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

aMetro

With aMetro, you can find the routes between stations and estimate travel time as it shows you the maps of transit systems all over the world including subways, metro, buses, trains and many other. [Free]

Platform: Android

GPS/Maps

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Triposo

Triposo offers you the best travel guide for your phone, all you need to do is just download the country guide and it will work offline. The guide includes detailed city maps of top cities. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder

The best app to find parks near you, along with activities you can do at every national park, state park and federal public land in the US. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Skobbler (US/CAN)

Skobbler is a visual guidance that gives you turn-by-turn navigation with voice. It also comes with take-me-home functionality. [$0.99]

Platform: iOS

Waze

Join forces with other drivers nearby to outsmart traffic jams, save time and money off gas prices using Waze, a community-based traffic & navigation app. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

OffMaps 2

OffMaps store maps locally on your device and lets you search maps even when you are offline; you can also bookmark wherever you are. [$0.99]

Platform: iOS

Trapster

Trapster is a cool app that will alert you of speed traps, speed limits, red lights as well as other road rules that can get you in trouble in real time. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

AroundMe

Need to find out what’s around you? AroundMe allows you to quickly find out information about your surroundings. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

iExit

iExit may be your best friend when driving on the interstate as it will tell you which upcoming exits have what you need e.g. gas, hotels, rest areas or specifically a Chick-Fil-A. [$0.99]

Platform: iOS | Android

Where To Go?

Where To Go is a fun-to-use app with the ‘Shake-To-Suggest’ feature, helping you to explore and find the closest bars, grocery stores, pharmacy, taxi firms or historical point-of-interest. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

bohoGuides

BohoGuides is a simple app that lets you download and store over 1000 localizations and 800 of guides and maps. [$2.99]

Platform: iOS | Android

Swim Guide

Swim Guide lets you know if a beach is open for swimming and when the water quality is poor from within the app. Areas are marked with colors for water-quality reference. It also tells you the beaches closest to you, lets you do searches or browse maps. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Hotels

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Jetsetter

Need to find the world’s greatest hotels, homes and vacations? Get Jetsetter to provide you with all the best. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Expedia Hotels

Expedia gives you great deals even for tonight, at over 130,000 hotels worldwide. The app helps you find room anywhere and book directly with only 4 taps. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Hostelworld.com

The app that brings you over 25,000 hotels and budget properties in over 6,000 destinations worldwide. Do a quick or book on the go. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Airbnb

A growing and trusted community, Airbnb is a marketplace that connects you with people who have space for rent, worldwide. Find a room of any distinctive space: from a private apartment to a private island! [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Hotels.com

The Hotels.com app provides you with the best interactive hotel booking experience. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

HotelsByMe

HotelsByMe allows you to easily find and book over 120,000+ hotels worldwide, with detailed info of the hotel. you can easily view amenities for all hotels, or filter and sort the hotels to find what you need. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Food & Beverage

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Sweet Spot

Sweet Spot helps you to quickly and easily find bakeries, candy and ice cream shops in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Find Chocolate

Craving for chocolate? Find Chocolate uses your current location to create a list of nearby chocolate shops, and uses maps to help you get there. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Zagat

Zagat lets you browse restaurants while traveling by plane, subway, or anywhere even without reception. [$9.99]

Platform: iOS | Android

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is a cool app to discover nearby dishes, or find whatever you’re craving and see what’s good at any restaurant. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

OpenTable

With over 20,000 restaurants partner, OpenTable lets you make free restaurant reservations in the United States and Canada. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Lunchbox

Lunchbox is another app that helps you discover new food around the corner, the best coffee in town, or the trendiest bar in the city. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Camera

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Instagram

Quickly snap a picture with Instagram, choose a gorgeous filter to transform its look and feel, then share it to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

AutoStitch Panorama

A state-of-the-art technology that automatically recognizes and smoothly combines overlapping images, AutoStitch is your best option for making panorama creations on your iPhone. Plus it’s easy, fast and fun. [$1.99]

Platform: iOS

Photosynth

Also a panorama creation app, Photosynth makes it easy and fun to capture and share interactive panoramas of the places, people, and events around you. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Camera Awesome

Camera Awesome takes your photos to the next level by making your memories come alive with photo filters of stunning professional effects. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Utilities

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GasBuddy

Out of gas? GasBuddy locates gas stations near you and provides you with the price too (USA and Canada only). [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

EveryTrail

With EveryTrail, you can plot your trip, photos and videos right on the map in the mobile app and upload it to EveryTrail.com, Facebook or Twitter. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Go Select Passes

Save more with Go Select Passes as it turns your phone into a mobile pass to more than 400 U.S. museums, attractions, tours and more with up to 40% savings. [Free]

Platform: iOS

ChatTime

Fancy making free, crystal clear phone calls while on the go? Use ChatTime to talk to other ChatTime Users wherver you get a cellular signal. [Free]

Platform: iOS

Currency

Currency provides up-to-date exchange rate information for over 100 currencies and countries. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Trip Journal

Trip Journal is the ultimate travel app as it lets you track, record, and documents your travel in a beautiful app, then share it with friends and family. [$2.99]

Platform: iOS | Android

Google Translate

Travelling to a place where you don’t speak the local language? You’ve got nothing to worry about with Google Translate. Supports up to 60 languages. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

WIKITUDE Augmented Reality Browser

A truly engaging and immersive experience with this app as you can see places, points of interests and other exciting AR content through your camera’s field of vision. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

uPackingList

Need a packing check list for your travels? uPackingList application is designed to turn packing into a fast and convenient activity for any journey, be it business, fishing or a roadtrip. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

GPSnote

With GPSnote you can easily add and edit notes on a map, or delete it when needed. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

iMedjet

An abbreviated version of Medjet’s medical consultation benefit and mobile medical information that you can carry wherever you go. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Goby

Goby uses push notification to send you recommendations of cool things near you, even when you are not browsing the app. Just log in once and you’ll instantly begin receiving recommendations personalized to your unique interests. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

Wi-Fi Finder

Wi-Fi is most important when you travel, and this app helps you to quickly and easily find free or paid Wi-Fi near you. You can download the offline map for reference too. [Free]

Platform: iOS | Android

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4. Mobile App Design/Dev: Beginner’s Guide to jQuery Mobile

So we’ve reached the end of our "Responsive Web Design week", tonight’s post will be the last of the series. We are going all out to help you hone your skills in manipulating those codes to respond at will when displayed on different devices. And to do this, we are featuring 30 Responsive Web Design Tutorials found online. This list is not meant to be an exhaustive one but it will get you started on understanding the basics of designing an adaptive website that will cater to all sorts of screen sizes.

We’ll start off with introductory tutorials in ‘Breaking the Ice’, something like an RWD: 101 class you should attend to get the hang of the concept before we move on to ‘Start Building’ exercises.

Lastly we’ll end with a ‘Do More’ section in which we’ll feature tutorials that play with horizontal layouts, ‘elastic’ videos, drop-down menus and slide-to-top accordion navigations, thumbnails and the sticky issue with tables.

But first…

Here’s a recap of the two tutorials that were featured earlier this week by our authors:

Responsive website Navigation

By Thoriq Firdaus – [View tutorial]

Here’s a tutorial to help you make your very own responsive website navigation. One of the most important aspect of a website is how easy it is to navigate through different parts of the site. Find out how to optimize this with CSS3 with this tutorial.

Responsive Resume

By Jake Rocheleau – [View tutorial]

If you are a web professional and an online resume is already part and parcel of your career, then you should take the opportunity to turn that resume responsive as well. Make it easier for employers and clients to find you on any device. And while you’re at it, your own resume doubles as a portfolio of what you can do as a developer.

Breaking the Ice

Now, where were we? Ah yes, let’s get some ice-breaking action started!

Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design

By Nick Petit – [View tutorial]

This tutorial is a great starting point for beginners as it describes what web responsive design means, how it came to light, as well as explanations about fluid grids and media queries among others. Check out the resources listed at the bottom of the tutorial as well.

Introduction to Responsive Web Design: Video

By Nick Petit – [View tutorial]

This is a tutorial that is close to 9 minutes long which skims the surface of what responsive web design is about, how it came to be, the impact it has on the design of a website and what elements are involved in producing a responsive web design. If you are looking to understand what responsive web design is about without heading into coding first, you should start with this video.

How to Turn Any Website into a Responsive Site

By Rochester Oliveira – [View tutorial]

This is another tutorial that starts from the basics but breaks everything down bit by bit, including the OS and browsers you are turning your website responsive for as well as the elements that are affected when the website is viewed from different devices. The author also featured some useful WordPress and jQuery plugins to help make your work far easier.

Responsive Design in 3 Steps

By Nick La – [View tutorial]

This tutorial, will explain how you can produce a responsive web design with meta tags, HTML structure and the all-important media queries. You need some knowledge of CSS to understand it..

Designing For A Responsive Web

By Max Luzuriaga – [View tutorial]

Here’s an article that is not so much a tutorial as it is a guide to creating responsive web design. That said, the author literally tells you the do’s and don’ts of responsive web design. There are explanations about why certain features are not responsive enough, how to work with proportions and modules, and best of all, it is relatively short and easy to absorb.

Responsive Web Design: A Visual Guide

By Andrew Gormley – [View tutorial]

If text-filled tutorials are not viable options, try this video tutorial instead. It is still rather technical but if it makes you feel better, you don’t have to do much reading. It’s about 25 minutes long and the video-maker actually fast-fowarded through the parts where he codes, then goes back to explain what the codes do.

Start Building

Alright, let’s start building some responsive designs, starting with…

Fluid Grids

By Ethan Marcotte – [View tutorial]

Say grid, and you would think ‘rigid structures’, say fluid and you’d think that it could flow from one side of the screen to the bottom or top or side when you apply pressure to the browser, but put those two together and you would probably think you need to look at this tutorial to fully appreciate how fluid grids can help make your design more responsive.

Fluid Images

By Ethan Marcotte – [View tutorial]

By the end of this article, you should know who Ethan Marcotte is. Here’s a hint: he is the one who came up with the concept and term for web responsive designs. His name will pretty much turn up in every other tutorial in this list so why not take advice about fluid images straight from the Master himself?.

Scalable Navigation Patterns in Responsive Web Design

By Michael Mesker – [View tutorial]

This tutorial talks about the lessons the author learned from a working on a large-scale responsive web design project. Read his ‘walkthrough’ about how to create templates that are easier to configure for user-friendly and responsive results. It is a great look behind the scenes in understanding how to design interfaces in the best way for desktop, tablet and mobile views.

Responsive Web Design with CSS3 Media Queries

By Nick La – [View tutorial]

And another excellent tutorial to make you learn how to design a cross-browser responsive website template with HTML5 and CSS3. It’s a step-by-step approach and there are demos of a web design before and after the media queries were implemented to better appreciate the impact of media queries.

CSS Effects: Space Images Out to Match Text Height

By Zoe Mickley Gillenwater – [View tutorial]

This tutorial makes you learn the trick of making fixed-width images change their size and spacing in order to line up with the accompanying text, no matter how the browser window is resized.

Adaptive Layouts with Media Queries

By Aaron Gustafson – [View tutorial]

Learn how to use adaptive or flexible layouts with CSS media queries. Just follow the exercise to learn to adapt your design to double-column view or single-column view as well as to prepare the design for the iPhone and iPad.

Responsive Images: Experimenting with Context-aware Image Sizing

By Scott Jehl – [View tutorial]

Here’s a tutorial that used the build-from-mobile-first approach. This technique specifies a larger size for the images to use on larger screen resolutions, minus image requests as well as UA sniffing.

Do More

Elastic Videos

By Nick La – [View tutorial]

This tutorial deals with the scaling of videos as your browser window is resized. It’s essentially a CSS trick and there’s a demo to see the trick at work in the tutorial itself.

Hiding And Revealing Portions Of Images

By Zoe Mickley Gillenwater – [View tutorial]

The tutorial is actually taken from the author’s book, describing how to reveal or hide portions of images depending on screen resolutions. It teaches you how to dynamically crop images when the screen size changes, showing you only part of the full image when there is limited space.

Responsive Content Navigator with CSS3

By Mary Lou – [View tutorial]

Prefer a fancier way for users to navigate around your side? Then, you should read through this tutorial to learn how to code in some cool transitions: fade in, slides, rotations and scaling up. The transitions are essentially content layers that were shown or hidden with specific coding.

Create a Responsive Web Design Template

By Harry Atkins – [View tutorial]

This is a short tutorial to produce a responsive web template that works both on the desktop as well as on the iPhone.

Responsive Horizontal Layout

By Mary Lou – [View tutorial]

This tutorial teaches you how to create a horizontal layout with several scrollable content panels. Using The Origin of Species as the sample text, each chapter of the book is separated in columns placed next to each other in full-browser mode but when shrunk down to small enough, the layout changes to a fully vertical scrolling ‘book’.

Convert a Menu to a Drop down for Small Screens

By Chris Coyier – [View tutorial]

This tutorial will show you how to convert a menu to a drop-down list when the browser window is narrow, or when you are on a mobile device. The row of links in the upper right corner of the page gets converted into a drop-down menu to save space without sacrificing navigation options.

Flexible Slide-to-Top Accordion

By Mary Lou – [View tutorial]

Learn how to create a simple and flexible accordion layout, with fade-in transitions and adjustable widths based on screen size and resolutions.

How to Use CSS3 Orientation Media Queries

By Ryan Seddon – [View tutorial]

Based on the simple rule that defines portrait (height larger than width) and landscape (width larger than height) modes, you can write a media query to target specific styles based on the mode you view it on. This tutorial will show us how to do just that and it comes complete with a link to a color-changing chameleon that uses color to demonstrate this change as you shrink the browser window.

Responsive Data Tables

By Chris Coyier – [View tutorial]

Tables are a source of headaches when it comes to small screen sizes but that doesn’t mean that we need to completely avoid tables. Learn how to use media queries to make your table change formats completely when you switch to mobile screen sizes. View the demo to get an idea of the magic you can make based on this tutorial.

Fluid CSS3 Slideshow with Parallax Effect

By Ring Wing – [View tutorial]

Create a CSS3 slideshow where two background images are used and when the positions of the backgrounds are changed, a parallax effect is seen. Apart from that, the slideshow is flexible, resizing itself as the browser window closes in on it.

How to Build a Responsive Thumbnail Gallery

By Joshua Johnson – [View tutorial]

This is great for websites that feature thumbnails in a gallery. As the browser window is resized, the layout is changed to occupy between two columns (smaller screen sizes) and five (maximum) columns. For more similar slideshows and sliders, check out our Top 10 Free Responsive Image Galleries/Slideshows article.

Optimizing your Email for Mobile Devices

By Ros Hodgekiss – [View tutorial]

Even emails can be optimized for small-screen view like how websites are. Most of the time the text in an HTML email is resized to a point that is not made for comfortable reading; learn how to manage this and more from this tutorial.

using frameworks

Build a Responsive Mobile-Friendly Website with Skeleton

By Joshua Johnson – [View tutorial]

Skeleton is an awesome framework to build responsive websites with it. This tutorial takes you in a step-by-step guide on how to use Skeleton framework to build awesome responsive designs. You will be stunned to see how easy it is to implement.

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 & Less Framework 3

By Louis Simoneau – [View tutorial]

If you haven’t been properly introduced to Less, then do check out our own Less CSS tutorial first to get a taste of Less. In this tutorial, the Less framework was used to let you see clearly the effects of media queries.

Conclusion

And that concludes our Responsive Web Design series. We hope that the themes, tools and other resources featured in this series have helped exposed the concept of responsive web design to our readers. But how would we know if you don’t tell us?

Let us know your feedback on the series and if you have suggestions for more ideas you want to see at hongkiat.com. Drop us a line, or a comment below.

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Google Search on the smartphone can be handy since we can do it via keyword tapping, voice dictation and search by image. Now there’s another new way to start a search on your smartphone – by handwriting.

Google just released a new feature named Google Handwrite for mobile search. Write a query anywhere on your smartphone screen and your handwriting will be recognized and converted into search terms by Google.

Enabling Google Handwrite

Google Handwrite is disabled by default, so you’re required to update your Google mobile search settings in order to turn on Google Handwrite.

1. First of all, visit Google on your mobile web browser and sign in. After that, scoll down to the bottom of the Google page, tap Settings.

   

2. At the "Handwrite" section, tap on Enable to turn on the feature. Then scroll down to the bottom and tap Save. That’s it.

   

Using Google Handwrite

Now you can use Google Handwrite when starting a query.
To activate Google Handwrite, you might need to refresh the Google page first.

1. You will see the Google Handwrite icon at the lower righthand corner of your smartphone screen.

   

2. Tap the icon to start writing your search keyword anywhere on the screen.

   

3. Handwritten text will be converted into typeface in the Google search box. If you need to delete a letter, tap the backspace icon.

   

4. Tap on an autocompletion itself or the search button to submit your query. Alternatively, you can click the arrow on the right to add the keyword to your query.

   

5. To start a new handwrite search, tap the "X" in the Google search box.

   

Some Tips:

Here are some tips to enhance your Google Handwrite experience.

1. Google Handwrite understands print writing better than cursive.

2. Google Handwrite supports symbols like + @ # $ % { } [ ].

   

3. Write number one in serif form [ 1 ] and zero with a strikethrough [ Ø ].

4. Queries can be handwritten in multiple lines.

   

5. To switch between keypad and handwrite, simply tap the search box.

Conclusion

Currently, Google Handwrite works for iOS5+ devices, Android 2.3+ phones and Android 4.0+ tablets and it’s available for 27 languages. Try writing with Google Handwrite with your thumb while holding your phone with the same hand, it’s pretty handy!

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2. 18 (More) Services to Convert Websites For Mobile Devices
3. A look into: Designing for Mobile Devices
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