Yesterday we launched our Android app and already have close to 500 fans!

Our app currently supports v1.6 and higher, so if that’s you, come on down so you can also enjoy the smartest, free travel app out there.

To download, go to the Android Market, search on TripCase to read more and download. Be sure to have installed the Market app on your device first.  You can also point your mobile browser to http://www.tripcase.com/m , to find it right away for download.

Here are a couple of shots to show you what the main screen and alternative flight screen look like..Enjoy!

We are continuing to work on adding more and more ways to easily get your travel plans into TripCase.

Now you can add your flights into TripCase by just forwarding your confirmation email to us at trips@tripcase.com!

We will automatically create a new trip in your account and add the flight information to the trip. It’s that easy.

If you forward the email from an address we know, we will use that account. If not, we will hold the email until you either 1) add that email address to your account or 2) register with the email address.

Right now this only works for flights but we will be adding support for hotels and cars soon.,

Check it out. Send your flight confirmation emails to trips@tripcase.com.

Go from email…

To TripCase in minutes!

To help you even more with your travels, we’ve updated our website with new features to add and edit Trips, Connections and Profile information.

You’ll quickly notice the great map view where you can see all your Trips plotted for you. And, if you’re leaving from DFW, you’ll also see up-to-date parking availability along with great retail and meal deals near your gate.

Simply log into your account at www.tripcase.com and begin.

You can add or edit Trips on the “My Trips” tab.

You can add or edit Connections on the “TripLog” tab.

You can edit your Profile on the “Profile” tab.

TripCase web client view.

Travel smarter by having the information you need at hand.

Our message and alert stream provides you up-to-date flight information, special airport offers like parking availability and meal deals and baggage claim status.

Open up your current Trip and scroll down on the current page to see the important and relevant messages for your trip.

We are continuing to work on adding more and more ways to easily get yiour travel plans into TripCase.

Now you can add your itinerary information automatically from Virtually There. Simply open up your upcoming trips tab and then click on “Send to mobile” link to the right.

If you already have an account with that same email address, we’ll use that account and add the trip information. If not, we will hold the email until you either 1) add that email address to your account, or 2) register with the email address.

WOW… an incredible day for our team!
We announced the partnership with DFW International Airport and our Blackberry launch in grand style, the airport hosted an “Endless Summer” event in all 5 terminals.

Tiki Huts, hulu dancers, steel drum bands, food and beverages and lots of TripCase messages. Pictures and video coming in but here are some of the many links to coverage:

http://money.aol.com/article/sabre-travel-studios-launches-tripcase/648941?icid=sphere_newsaol_inpage

http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/sabres_tripcase_now_also_available_for_blackberry_devices/

http://www.eyefortravel.com/news/business-travel/sabre-launches-tripcase-blackberry-devices-ties-dfw

http://www.cnbc.com/id/32639098

http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/08/31/daily31.html

This week  BusinessWeek’s Atlanta bureau chief, Dean Foust named TripCase as his top travel app. http://bit.ly/19CsNh

 Pretty exciting stuff right? We think so and invite you to try TripCase for yourself at www.tripcase.com. Let us know what you think via our feedback link on our site or right from the app.

We’ve submitted our latest build and, cross fingers, it’s only about a week away from being live in iTunes.  Lot’s of great new features including:

* Weather preference in Celsius and distance in metrics, thanks to the feedback from our fans around the world

* Manually add and edit confirmation numbers for flights, hotel and rental cars

* Auto import iPhone contacts as followers

* Enhanced maps for rental car pickup location

* Enhanced www.tripcase.com with login for account, trip and follower management

So stay tuned and look for that upgrade notice on iTunes in a week or so.

Yippee! We made the move to spread the love and offer TripCase as a free download on iTunes. We’ve had an incredible amount of downloads, and awesome customer feedback.

We’re actively working on Blackberry and Windows Mobile now to round out the mobile platform offering.

Stay tuned…

I have been working on a story: “As a user, I should be able to search for hotels around a given location so that I can add the hotel to my trip.”.

I built my basic form for the user to fill out the location information and provided my awesome continue button to get hotels:

I quickly realized that the user’s location could be resolved to more than a single place. If the user entered in county: US and then city: Greenville, there would be 10 or so matches. I would need the user to choose which was the correct city. One way to do this would have been to take the user to a new UITableViewController with all the matches and ask the user to choose a match, then pop then continue on to find the hotels around the selected location. While this would work, I dont like it. What if it worked like Google Maps? The Google Maps application shows the user a UIAlertView with an embedded TableView. It’s pretty clean. It works well because the user does not need to go to a separate page to choose a location match. I want my user to have this same experience.

If you have used the UIAlertView much, you know it is very limited on custimization opportunity. I decided to subclass UIAlertView to build my new location selector. I ran into a few “a ha” moments when trying to mimic the Google Apps look and feel. First, their UIAlertView has rouned top and bottom corners that are independent of the TableView. They are actually using a PlainStyle TableView and when you scroll the table in the alert, the table looks like it is sitting inside of a rounded rect UIScrollView. Tricky Indeed!

Our solution was to use some transparent rounded corners with a dropshadow on the top image. We also wanted the height of the custom alert to be dynamic based on the size of the embedded UITableView. However, UIAlertViews do not have a frame or height property. The height of the UIAlertView is based on the length of its message property. Our solution to this problem was to identify the number of rows in the table and add return characters to the message property of the UIAlertView.

Here is what it ended up looking like: