After months of hard work, I’m proud to announce that Knapsack 2 has been released.

Knapsack helps you plan, organize, and relive your greatest adventures.

With Knapsack 2, now you can research your trips with powerful new world maps with street level detail and map search.

Use “Check for Updates” under the main Knapsack menu or download it directly.

What’s New

Search the World

The powerful Map Search feature in Knapsack 2 lets you quickly find places, addresses, and even points of interest anywhere in the world. Locate cities, hotels, museums, airports, and more. Map Search uses an extensive online geographic database that is constantly improving.

Zoom from Continents to Streets

Knapsack’s incredibly detailed world map let’s you view your trip’s destinations at any level of detail. Get an overview of your trip or zoom in to see all the parking lots near your hotel.

What Else

The new maps provide tons of powerful new tools to help you plan your trips. But Version 2 also fixes a bunch of issues and several crashes.

Checkout the Release Notes for details on what is included in Knapsack 2.

Availability

Knapsack 2 is available for download as a free 30-day full-featured demo and is available for purchase as a single-user license for only $39.95. Five-user Family Packs are available for $59.95. Knapsack 2 is a free upgrade for existing Knapsack customers.

This article was originally published on the TinyPlanet Software blog on January 15, 2009.

The iCal integration released as part of Knapsack 1.1 provides a simple way to get trip information to and from iCal, iPhone, iPod Touch, MobileMe (formerly .Mac), and anything else you may have synced with iCal for use while you’re traveling. Any changes you make in a synced device (iPhone, iCal, MobileMe, etc) while on your trip will be synced back when you return home and relaunch Knapsack.

To sync a trip with iCal:

1. Select your trip from the trip list or double-click your trip to open it.
2. Choose Sync with iCal from the Trip menu.
3. You can now choose which iCal calendar you would like to sync with. It is recommended that you choose the New Calendar option to keep your trip on its own calendar. You can choose an existing calendar, but any items already existing on your calendar during the date range of the trip will be added to your itinerary in Knapsack.
4. Click Sync. Now, any changes you make in Knapsack will be made in iCal and vice versa. When a trip is synced, activities on your itinerary will show up as iCal events and to do items on your checklist will show up as to do items in iCal.
5. Once your trip is complete, it is recommended that you stop syncing with iCal to preserve your trip data. Knapsack will automatically prompt you to end syncing when you open a synced trip which has an end date in the past. You can also choose Stop iCal Sync from the Trip menu at any time.

Has this tip helped you? Have you used iCal syncing before? What other tips or tricks do you have that you’d like to share with other Knapsack users? Leave a comment here or email us directly.

This article was originally published on the TinyPlanet Software blog on December 17, 2008.

New Blog Series: Knapsack Tips

We’ve decided to start a series of blog entries containing tips and tricks to help our users get the most out of Knapsack. Our first tip below deals with reusing checklists by creating custom template trips.

Future items will include topics covering all aspects of trip planning and organizing with Knapsack. We’ll be sharing our own Knapsack habits plus some ideas we’ve received directly from our users. Of course, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know how you’re using Knapsack for your travels. Feel free to leave a comment here or send us an email directly.

Knapsack Tip #1: Reuse Checklists with Template Trips

As we’re preparing for our trip to Colorado this winter, we need to make sure we’ve packed everything. In this case, it’s a trip to visit family, exchange presents, work on our software, and snowboard. As you can imagine, that involves a lot of different items: warm clothes, presents, snowboarding gear, laptops, power supplies, etc. It would be tedious to re-enter every single item to pack in every new trip, so we use previously-created packing lists from a “template” trip to make this easier.

In this case, we’ll copy the existing “Snowboarding” and “Business Trip” packing lists from a template trip called “Packing Lists” into our new “Colorado 2008” trip. This is simple to accomplish and can save a lot of time when creating new trips.

1. Create a new trip and name it “Packing Lists”
2. Use the Checklist area in the itinerary view to create various packing lists for different types of trips
3. When planning a new trip, open this Packing Lists trip, select the top-level item in the list you’d like to use in your new trip, and choose Edit > Copy
4. Create and open your new trip file, click in the Checklists area of the itinerary, and choose Edit > Paste

Within a matter of seconds, we have a great start on our packing lists for Colorado. This same technique can be used for checklists other than packing lists: souvenirs to buy, postcards to send, etc. In fact, sharing content between trips isn’t limited to only checklists: activities can be copied and pasted between trips just as easily. Use your imagination to prepare some fun and useful templates or get started by simply borrowing from trips you’ve already taken.

I’m super excited to announce that Outer Level has acquired Knapsack, the personal travel organizer, from TinyPlanet Software.

Outer Level has taken over ownership and development of Knapsack and will continue to offer support and upgrades for existing Knapsack 1.x customers.

TinyPlanet Software created a very cool application and I can’t wait to jump in and take Knapsack into the future.

My wife and I love to travel the world. We’ve been snorkeling with penguins in the Galapagos Islands; photographing wild lions and elephants in South Africa and Botswana; exploring volcanic mountains and glaciers in Iceland; and scuba diving with sharks in Belize. We’re always in search of that next adventure and planning our trips is great fun with Knapsack.

There are tons of great features in Knapsack, like trip itineraries, packing lists, and iCal syncing. But, my favorite feature is the virtual wall map. Stick a pin on the map to mark where you’ve been and to see where you’re going. It reminds me of the giant wall map I used to have for tracking family vacations.

They say developers should work on applications that we are passionate about and that are related to things we enjoy doing in real life. I knew when I learned Knapsack was for sale, that I now had the chance to do just that.

Knapsack joins LicenseKeeper and Bullfrog in the Outer Level stable of products.