Introduction
littledots is an app for travel enthusiasts.
Some people collect stamps.
Other people collect concert wristbands.
We collect adventures.
littledots is our digital scrapbook for that. Every island we snorkeled, every metropolis we got gloriously lost in and every night-train memory turns into a little dot on our map. Put together, the dots are a map of our lives, told in travel notes and photos.
littledots is an online corner for people who treat travel as the point of life, not a break from it.
How the app works
The app is where you plan your trips, keep the photos you took on them, and watch a map of everywhere you have been fill in.
Planning a trip
Every trip gets a title, dates, and a place on the map. You can leave it bare (a weekend away, nothing else needed) or go deep with an itinerary: flights, hotels, restaurants, that one bakery someone told you about. The app can fill a lot of that in for you if you let it, which is what Magic helpers does.
The Trips tab shows the trip you are on at the top, under Current travels, and everything you have planned under Upcoming travels, soonest first. The trips you are back from sit further down.
While you are away, Travel mode gives the trip you are on a screen of its own: today's plan, a big button for adding photos, and the trip's chat. You turn it on from Current travels, and back off from the menu behind your avatar.
Pinning where you've been
Once a trip is done, pin it to your map. A dot lands. The country fills in. Pinned places is the tour of that map.
Not every place you go is a planned trip though. Weekend drives, layovers, a friend's wedding two towns over. Drop a pin. It counts the same.
Every trip has a map of its own as well. Its Map tab shows the route you took and places the photos you took along it, and it offers to fill in what your itinerary is missing, like the location of a boat tour you only have photos of.
Your photos
The Photos tab holds the photos from every trip in one place. You can tag them, find them again by trip or by tag, and turn a handful of them into a collage to share. Where photos live on a trip, and how they differ from the documents you keep with it, is in Photos and documents.
The awards you collect
As your map fills in, you collect badges. Countries. Continents. A percentage that ticks up every time you pin a new place.
Tap Awards at the top of the Map tab to see what you've unlocked and what's close to tipping. It scratches the "okay but how many countries have I actually been to" itch nicely.
Bring people along
Travel is rarely a solo thing. Invite the people you're going with as contributors, and they can plan alongside you. Invite the people who just want to follow as guests, and they see the itinerary without being able to change a thing. Everyone on a trip shares its chat. Who can change what, and what happens when somebody leaves, is in Shared travel.
Your trips, in your calendar
Subscribe to all your trips in your calendar app. Work meetings on Tuesday. Dentist on Thursday. Lisbon in three weeks. Kyoto in November. The fun stuff sitting in your week right next to everything else, making you look forward to it.
Start small
Your first dot is the easiest. Pick a place you've already been and pin it. Watch the map update. That's the whole product, in one tap.
Then do it again. And again. A little dot for every place you've been, and every one you're planning next. When you want to show somebody, Your public journal turns all of it into a page of your own.