Guest Post by 
Lawrence Ingraham @LawPower, Founder/Lead Developer for TriOut.
This is the sixth in a series of posts detailing the history, design and features of TriOut v2 for iPhone.
We’ve shown you two new ways to check in using TriOut version 2. First by using our new Check in Bar, and second by scanning a QR code. Today I’m going to show you our third and final new way to check in.
Back with version 1, we introduced the concept of pre-arrival check in. You could bring up a location in the app, tap on “Go Here” and send a tweet or update your facebook with a message “I’m on my way to…” with a link to the location. This was a great way to let your friends know where you’re going, and it still unmatched in the LBS space.
Today I’m gonna show you the natural progression of pre-arrival check in, Background Check In. Because iPhone iOS 4 allows for multi-tasking, we’re able to track your location even while you’re not using the app. This means that if you tell the app where you’re going, we can check you in automatically when you get there. Pretty crazy stuff.
Check out this video demo of my checking into my favorite coffee shop, 2 miles away.
As you can see, it actually checked me in while I pulled into the driveway. That’s within 100 meters of the front door, pretty good. We’ll be tweaking this in our beta to see if we can get it ever closer.
Privacy note: It’s important to mention that your location is never stored on our servers nor is this feature EVER turned on by default. You have to specifically tell us where you’re going and that you want us to check you in automatically to enable it. Once you reach your destination, location services are turned off and we check you in.
We take this privacy stuff seriously. You should too.
