For many mission trip participants, days spent abroad are some of the most memorable and meaningful moments of their lives. So much is packed into such a short period of time—new people, places, cultures, ministry experiences. Memories that you want to cling to for the rest of your life.

Many assume they will never forget these times. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long after returning to life “as usual” that those memories fade.

 Keeping a written journal is helpful, but many find the fast-paced demands of these trips prohibitive to journaling. Even if we take pictures we often forget the stories behind the photos.

 The good news for iPhone users: There’s an app for that!

 This is our fourth in a series of blogs on “apps” (mobile phone applications) useful for mission trips. Today we look at two apps that promise to revolutionize how we remember our trip experiences.

We must say upfront that the claims that both apps make are exciting but judging by user reviews may not completely live up to their hype. Regardless, we think you will find enough functionality to make it worth the $2-$3 download costs.

Travel Diary with Zoom allows you to record the story of your trip with text, pictures and maps. Instead of taking a picture with the iPhone camera application, you use Travel Diary, which automatically saves the time and location of each picture.

In addition to the pictures, you can add comments describing your activities, which also get the time and location stamp. You can press a button from any picture and a map appears showing you where it was taken.

Travel Diary allows exporting to Facebook, although some users report problems with this feature. The app cost is $1.99 and is available from the Apple app store.

A similar but apparently more robust app is Trip Journal, selling for $2.99. It calls itself the “Ultimate trip tracking, recording, documenting and sharing solution currently available for iPhone.”

Trip Journal does have several features missing from Travel Diary, including the ability to send friends real time updates from the places you are visiting. It also tags photos with your location and offers user friendly map controls, along with real-time trip stats.

Trip Journal exports to Google Earth, Facebook and Picasa.

Since reviews are mixed for both these apps, we would suggest if you do use one of them that you download it well in advance of your trip. Do some test entries to make sure the app delivers what you expect.

Do you have a suggestion for a journaling app not listed here, or one for mobile phones other than iPhone? We’d love to hear about it! Please comment and let us know.

Our next blog will look at apps for communicating cross-culturally.

Stay tuned—there’s an app for that!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Missions, Travel Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.