The App Store is full of amazing apps for when you travel. There’s everything from apps to book tickets to specialized cuisine apps for cities. I’ve always missed an app that helps you pack and stay organized. Stow fixed that. It is perfect for people who don’t want to worry about remembering stuff like how many pairs of jeans you brought along.
Stow has a lot of great things going on. Keeping track of what you pack is annoying enough but actually maintaining a list of the stuff makes me not want to bother at all. Stow takes care of that as well with templates and the ability to create templates for your own trips. Stow asks you to enter a few details about yourself on launch like your gender and a few details about whether you wear glasses or not so it can keep track of that while you pack as well.
On launch you see a list of trips you need to pack for. You can customize everything about the lists by swiping to the right after tapping the list. The bottom of the main screen has a bar with buttons for the three main sections of the app. The people section lets you add details about people you travel with and doing this in the beginning makes using the app quicker and easier than it already is. Tapping the ‘+’ button at the bottom brings up the templates already available. The default templates include beach trip, business trip, family visit among other things. Tapping a template allows you to enter the name of the trip and Stow has an amazing way to select your trip dates. Swiping to the right gives you a huge menu of customization options and sharing options for your trip list. I really love the icons used for everything in the menu. There’s even a setting for laundry. The pack for weather section allows you to quickly add weather specific items. The top of the trip view has a filter section for you to see what you have and haven’t packed so far. Tapping the checkbox will mark an item as packed. You can access all the items available by swiping to the left. Custom items can be created here as well. The settings screen lets you pick when your week starts and also view a few tutorials for using the app online.
The templates really make this app shine and with sharing options that allow you to email the list in tabular form along with a file that can be opened in another copy of Stow there’s really nothing I can complain about. Stow has interface sounds and even basic stuff like sliding to delete a trip has been given a nice animation. Stow is great and if you go on trips and want to let something else worry about your packing, it is an absolute steal for $1.99 on the App Store.