shane glass

I was driving home from class today, when I remembered I had not checked in on Gowalla while on campus. Then I recalled the rumors about the possible iPhone OS 4.0 update enabling some method of multitasking. This is some mighty fine news for us iPhone owners who, after three years, are still stuck running one user application at a time (which excludes Mail and Safari, apps Apple allows to run in the background). The only feasible way around this is to run Backgrounder, a jailbreak-only app. It’s decent, but due to the iPhone/iPhone 3G’s low memory, programs will be forced to quit after a while.

Back on track. As I recalled the rumor of multitasking for iPhone OS 4.0, I thought how cool it’d be to have Gowalla run in the background, automatically checking you in when you get close to a known location. Then I thought of the main stretch in town, where over half of my local Gowalla locations are within one or two kilometers of each other. How would Gowalla know exactly which location I wanted to be checked in if it became an automated process? (Because let’s face it, checking-in is a work-around method for these popular iPhone apps because of the lack of running apps in the background). And how would it know I moved from place to place, with such proximity to each location? Sure, GPS can be pretty accurate, but sometimes it’s not. So how would Gowalla know? Then I had an idea.

Gowalla could be setup to automatically check in a user to a location if that user has been to that location x amount of times. For instance: I have checked into my home over 50 times, so it stands to assume I like people knowing when I’m home. Gowalla could incorporate some settings the user could change, something like “Check-in automatically at locations with over x visits.” This could be user-modifiable, allowing a personal degree of automation.

It doesn’t solve the issue of GPS-reliability, which is really beyond Gowalla’s control any ways, but it keeps the check-in process on an interactive level (in that you must choose to let people know you’re at different places), while giving you the opportunity to automate the process for the locations you visit the most.

Of course, this idea is moot with such a shoddy battery life for the iPhone 3G/S. I live two hours away from the nearest 3G-blanketed area, so my 3G is always disabled. I keep my screen’s brightness around 75%, and WiFi enabled. With this, I’m lucky to get a whole day. Toss an app running GPS services in, and you’ll be lucky to make it to lunch.