I love to travel and explore new places. Not just new places away from the city, but even the lesser-known spots in the city known for their food or scenic beauty. I also love maintaining a journal and documenting where I’ve been and what places I’ve traveled to. Gowalla was an absolutely gorgeous app to document spots before it was acquired & shutdown by Facebook. I then moved to the lovely suite of Day One. I am not interested in the perks of “checking-in” at a spot, I just want a place to save the places I’ve been to. So when I came across Rego two days ago, I was ecstatic.
Rego is a carefully crafted iPhone app that lets you document & organize your favorite places. It lets you quickly add any spot from a map with a few simple taps. But Rego is different in the way that there’s no system of “check-ins”. Rego just lets you bookmark places that you love or are interested in. You can save places that you’ve been to, the ones that you are current at or even the ones you would like to visit some day. All these places can be neatly categorized into collections, with each place belonging to multiple collections if need. For example, I could have a collection for all the glorious Forts in Maharashtra that I’m planning to visit this year or one for my favorite coffee places in town. So Rego is like a bookmarking service for places. The app also lets you add photographs to each place you bookmark, and offers a bunch of photo-filters to enhance the look of your photos. You can add notes and captions, thus remembering notable tips about that place. However, Rego is not a social network. There are no friends you can follow or invite, no perks you can win by adding X spots. Rego is your private collection of your favorite places. If you really feel like sharing a spot with someone, Rego generates a unique URL that you can share with your friends. Anyone viewing this URL on his phone will automatically get the option to add it to his Rego.
I’m in love with the way every pixel in the iPhone app has been meticulously designed and crafted to perfect. The UI that Rego boasts is elegant and aesthetic, yet refreshing and modern. I also love the neat little icon that app has. So beautiful. Rego is available FREE on the App Store, but you are limited to 10 places and 1 photo filter. You can unlock all the features of the app with an in-app purchase of $2.99 (current discounted to $0.99).
My only complaints about the app are its decision to use Apple Maps instead of Google’s. While this won’t bother majority of the users, for me in India, Apple Maps means random white lines with no labels in most areas. Moreover, there’s also no way to export your data from the app, though this is something that should arrive with an update. If traveling is your thing, grabbing Rego from the App Store is the obvious thing to do now.