Windows Phone is the only mobile phone that offers “Live Tiles”. 

These are like a mini window into the application and show you information you need quickly right on the start screen.  No need to open the app!

Well here at AceWidgets we wanted to offer our users a Live Tile in My Trips, so we added one to version 4.

The My Trips Live Tile will offer users a glimpse into what their next flight details are when they have it pinned to the start screen.

Here are a few samples of what your tile might look like. 

The first is just the standard tile you will see when you don’t have any upcoming flights. The second is showing you an upcoming flight that is current on-time and the last one is when a flight is delayed.

Trip-It Pro users have the benefit of TripIt monitoring their flights for delays and My Trips uses that information to show you if your flight is on time.  Non-Pro users will still get a live tile, but not real time flight status in the tile.

Our Live Tile is still in Beta while we smooth out any kinks in the system after launching it.

To turn on the Live Tile jump into the settings screen and switch it on.

Note:  You need to pin My Trips to your start screen to get the Live Tile:

If your Live Tile isn’t showing you correct information then we want to hear about it! 🙂 Click the “status” “cog” beside the Live Tile switch in the Settings page & click the “Email Tile Problem Report” button to send us an email with some information we need to help.

We hope our customers enjoy the Live Tile as much as we do.  We will continue to refine and tune it during the Beta period to get it just right.

As always if you have feedback, comments or suggestions please leave a comment or get in touch.

Thanks,

-Chris.

We love hearing from our users.  It really helps us prioritize what to add to My Trips next and fix any issues people might have.

Some times we get extra special feedback.  Here is a bit of email we had this morning:

Dear AceWidgets,

Just wanted to say I love the newest updates to My Trips. I love the tile, the old one was a bore, but the new one fits in very nicely with the WP7 design. And the Live Tile is very cool!

I travel over 200,000 miles a year, so this app is a work horse for me

The app works perfectly and displays my Trip It information very nicely.

A couple of suggestions:

· Would like to see a world clock tab so I can see the time in my arrival city and set my watch easily

· Would like the option on Start to automatically open into the current trip rather than going to the trips tab.

· Would like different color icons for each item (Flight, Hotel, Car and such)

Thanks for creating such a great app!

Best regards,

Thanks a lot!  It means a lot to us getting feedback like this and we really appreciate someone going out of their way to send it.

We totally agree with the suggestions they have and we will be looking at adding them to My Trips over the next few releases.

Thanks!

-Chris.

We have had two reports from people today saying that after their upgrade to 3.6 they need to keep logging into TripIt each time they start My Trips.

This is obviously not what we intended and we are looking into the problem.

UPDATE 3: Version 3.7 is now available in the marketplace. It addresses the issue of forgotten settings/login information in pre-Nodo (March phone update) phones.

UPDATE: This issue is present on phones without the "NoDo" update from Microsoft. Please update to the "March Update" (NoDo) from Microsoft and this issue will not occur. We are working on a solution for pre-Nodo phones, but for the time being you will need to log into the app each time.

UPDATE 2: We have identified the issue and have submitted a new version to Microsoft. It should be out in the next couple of days.

For the time being, please uninstall My Trips from your phone and then re-install it from the Marketplace (if you bought it you won’t be charged twice).

We are very sorry for this inconvenience.  The vast majority of our users are running 3.6 happily, so for those of you seeing this issue we are deeply sorry.  Please leave a comment here if you are unable to resolve this issue using the steps above.

Thanks,

-Chris.

My Trips version 3.6 is now in the marketplace, go get it now!

My Trips gets a new face in this release!  The first thing you will notice is the new tile, startup images and logo:

Thanks to Randy Drisgill who helped us out with the new artwork!

We also added Facebook and Twitter integration!

Now when you are viewing a flight you can easily Tweet or post to Facebook when you are about to depart on that flight, or once you have arrived.  This is a great way to let your friends know where you are.

Simply click the “tweet/post” button on a flight:

You have the option to connect to and choose either Twitter, Facebook or both.

If you tweet/post before your flights departure your update will read “Leaving Seattle (SEA) bound for London (LHR) on BA48”.  (obviously with your flight details)

If you tweet/post after your flight has departed you update will read “Arrived at London (LHR) on BA48”  (obviously with your flight details)

Here are a couple of samples:

Twitter:

Facebook:

The “Share” screen will remember what social networks you like to share on, so you won’t need to pick them each time.

If you want to disconnect a social network at any time you can do this from the newly arranged Settings page.

As usual please leave your comments and suggestions!  We love to hear your feedback!

Thanks,

-Chris.

We just released version 3.2 of My Trips which includes some new features as well as other general improvements.

Here is a run down of what is new:

1.  New Itinerary View

We introduced the itinerary view in version 3.0 and people love it.  However for long trips people said they wanted an easier way to skip to a particular day, rather than having to scroll down each time.  To address this we have changed the itinerary view to include a new “jump list” feature.  This allows you to quickly select a date at skip to that part of the trip.

Here is how it works:  In itinerary view you touch one of the squares (in this case they are blue, but they will match your selected theme color), then hit the day you want to jump to.  If there are lots of days to pick from them you just scroll the list with your finger.   It’s designed to work like the “all” view in the People hub.

We also made some nice changes that should really improve the performance of the itinerary view so it’s a much smoother experience when you are moving between various parts of your trip. 

2.  Past Trips.

We also wanted to give people the option of syncing their past trips.  Once a trip is over the trip moves from the “trips” list to the “past trips” list.  We wanted to make this optional since you might not be interested in past trips, so you can turn this on and off in the “settings” screen.

3. Weather

I like to know what the weather is going to be like when I am travelling and we heard so do others!, so we show the weather information TripIt provides for a trip.  To find this keep swiping right on a particular trip until you find the “weather” screen.

4. Settings menu

We have added some new settings and changed the screen a bit to make it cleaner and more user friendly.  First we changed to using a toggle switches to turn things on and off. 

We also added settings to turn on/off the downloading of past trips and the ability to switch between metric units (kilometers and Celsius) or US units (miles and Fahrenheit).

5. Other things

There are a few other things we added or tidied up that we also included.

We added the name of the trip to the top of the screen when you are in a trip for quick reference.

Added showing your seats assignments (if entered in tripit), made the confirmation number bigger and more visible for easy reference, wrapped the airline name and flight number to the next line if it was too long for the screen & added the original time of arrival/departure if a flight was delayed (tripit pro required).

A very kind user asked to see their Frequent Flyer number, so we added that too in the “passengers” view for a particular flight (if entered in tripit).

Finally,

We fixed a few bugs reported by our users.  If you see a message that says “Something went wrong” in My Trips click “OK” and send us the email!  We use any reports we get from users to help fix the problem and make it better for everyone.  Also feel free to send us any suggestions for new things you would like added and we will see what we can do. 

Thanks again to everyone who sends us mail with comments, suggestions, bugs and just nice “thank you” emails 🙂

-Chris.

We have been lucky enough to be picked by PC World as on of the “10 Must-Have Windows Phone 7 Apps for Business” !  What an honor!

10 Must-Have Windows Phone 7 Apps for Business
These apps for Windows Phone 7 smartphones keep you plugged in and productive.

Flick through to slide number 8 of 12.

Thanks PC World!!

-CJ.

** Updated 1/13/2011:  Version 3 is now available in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace ***

We just submitted version 3 of My Trips to the marketplace.  It should be live within a few days for people to download or update to.

The price remains the same at $1.99USD and everyone who has bought My Trips so far gets version 3 for free! 

Version 3 includes some new features as well as some bug fixes our wonderful and dedicated users have reported.

Here are some of the things we added:

1.  Itinerary View…

We wanted to give you a way to view your entire trip in a sequential view.  Itinerary view gives you a great way to scan your trip from beginning to end and drill into items.  We left the same Flight, Cars, Lodging & Notes pivots there incase you want to quickly filter your trip down to those items.

2.  All types of trip data

Version 3 now supports Transport, Restaurant, Cruise, Activity & Rail trip item types as well as all the standard ones v2 did like Flights, Cars, Lodging & Notes etc…

We also added a “booking” pivot on the flight details screen to view the booking information for that flight. e.g. booking site reference number, url, phone number etc…

3. Automatic refresh of data

We got feedback that it wasn’t clear why My Trips sometimes showed old data from TripIt.  In v2 you needed to hit the refresh button to sync with TripIt to get the latest information. 

In version 3 we have added automatic synchronization. 

My trips will now sync your Trips list every 60 mins and individual trip data every 5 mins.  You can always hit the Refresh button if you want to force a synchronization.  This auto synchronization only happens while the application is open & if you open it for the first time in a while it will sync automatically.  If you don’t have a connection to the internet for some reason My Trips will just show the latest data it has cached.

Also you can turn off Auto syncing in the settings screen if you like too 🙂

4. Flight Status

If you don’t have a TripIt Pro subscription you can now get flight status information via a handy link to FlightStats.com from the flight details page.

5. Online Check-In and Alternate Flights (TripIt Pro subscription required)

If you are a TripIt Pro subscriber (PS: you should be! Is awesome!!) then you will also see a Online Check-In and Alternate Flights link from the flight page.  Handy for those frequent fliers on the move!

5. Trial mode “nag” screen adjusted

We were over the moon to be included in LifeHacker.com “Our list of the best WP7 apps”.  Something they mentioned was the “very annoying nag window” in the My Trips Trial mode.  Well in v3 we adjusted it so it is only shown on the Trips page.  Hopefully this is a little less annoying 🙂

Finally,

We also included a handful of bug fixes for various things that we had people report

• 24hr time formatting bug
• Issue viewing a flights details when you have two flights with the same flight number in the same itinerary
• Crash when you have travel items with no date set
• Only first confirmation number shown for a flight with multiple flight bookings in the itinerary
• Intermittent Time zone DB crash on application resume

Try or Buy My Trips on Windows Phone 7.

Thanks for all the support and encouragement for My Trips!  We are currently #1 paid application in the marketplace Travel section & in the first page of all travel apps (paid and free).  All thanks you YOU!

-Chris.