aCar - Track your vehicles

koticphreak said:

Great work on this app, just one thing doesn't make sense to me. I'm on the fuel statistics screen and after 4 fill-ups, I have 30.42 average MPG and cost per gallon of $2.77. which would cause me to assume my cost per mile would be $0.09, however, it shows $0.12...

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[Copy from my email reply to a very similar problem]
You are quite right. I should confess that some of the statistics are slightly wrong. For example the average MPG is calculated as mathematical average of MPGs while it should be calculated using "total distances" and "total fuel volume". Because many of the statistics you get are based on others, one small mistake will propagate to other statistics as well. For example if I calculate the total fillups wrongly, the entire "cost per mile", "cost per gallon", "cost per etc" will go wrong!

The problem is that the first fillup must be totally dropped from "some" of the calculations. Perhaps only the cost of first fillup must be used (that's what drives you to the second fillup). Actually I'd updated all my calculation formulas (actually the database queries) and was ready to release. But in my final testing I found out that when I filtered the records, the calculation formulas didn't work correctly. You know it gets very complicated when you have a subset of the data and have to update the whole statistics based on that subset. Just imagine you may have non-continuous set of records for calculating total cost, total miles, total gallons, etc. The details are a bit complicated. If you've done it once on paper, you already get what I mean.
Anyways, I just reverted back my changes and never released that version. And now I'm working on backup/restore, the single most voted feature!! There are high demands and pressure for backup/restore so I have to do it first.

But the issues you've mentioned are definitely in my list (and from my point of view even more important than backup/restore), and I will attack them as soon as I release backup/restore and import/export features. I'm sorry if the situation doesn't look ideal! Just a note... As you go on and enter more and more records, the difference between the current calculation formulas and correct ones gets lesser and lesser and sometimes even not noticeable.

[Update] Let me assure you that all your entered data are safe. The problem is only with statistical summary which are recalculated every time. [/Update]

Thanks for your patience,

nicracine said:

Don't worry about the speed of delivery. I am totally with you in this; I would much rather have stable code and perfect backup feature and wait a few days more.

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Thank you

nicracine said:

In the meanwhile, is there any way to copy data files, or even the whole app directory, so that I can switch roms without having to re-enter all my data by hand?

Keep up the good work!

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Unfortunately there isn't any way to copy the whole database file to restore it later :-( Or at least I'm not aware of any such trick. Sorry! I wish I could help you more.

zyxwvu44 said:

wouldnt it be easier to just enter the fuel capacity of the tank instead of partial/full fillup?

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I wish it were possible! But we have the "missing a previous fillup" option as well. As its name says, that is for marking a record which has previous missing fillups. So when you mark a record as "having previous missing fillups" and you fill 13 gallons in your car tank, will it be a full or partial fillup (let's suppose the tank volume is 20 gallons)? Well, it depends!! If the car had at least 6-7 gallons left in its tank, it would be a full fillup otherwise partial! So you see in some cases you can not simply guess it.

The same story exists for the very first fillup record because you don't have any previous record of it. I put 3.3 gal in your car as the first fillup record. Is it full or partial? You say partial?? I say "full" because I already had 16.7 gal in my car tank (16.7+3.3=20)!

overcaffein8d said:

It would be really awesome if it used the GPS to report the price yoou paid to gasbuddy.com or something

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Looking up price and reporting the price to websites like gasbuddy.com is already in my list. I just hope they have decent API to work with... I will post the news here as soon as I start the implementation (and perhaps to collect more feedbacks). But don't expect it in a near future. I have many higher priority features and enhancements in my list.

overcaffein8d said:

oh, and one more thing:

In soviet russia, vehicles track you!
[/b]

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That's why I'm planning for "aHuman" application. That will be used by vehicles to track their owners ;-)

Guys,

aCar v1.1.0 is out now which is featuring manual and automatic backup/restore!

Feel free to share your feedbacks with me...

Cheersss,
Armond

iimre said:

First of all thanks for this great application. It almost fulfills my needs. I have item on my wishlist, a custom currency field. Just to be more international.

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Thanks for your feedback. Adding more currencies to default currency list and being able to add any custom currency is already in my list But I can not promise any strict release date for it.

Best Regards,

mj_b90 said:

I have just installed this and your app looks great so far!

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Thanks for your feedback

mj_b90 said:

Is there any way to set a default octane for each car's new fill ups? For example, my car requires premium gasoline so I have to change this field every time. Setting this as the default for that car would help to speed up the process of adding a fill up.

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You should already get a similar behavior. Every time you start a new fillup record for your vehicle, the last gas octane used for that vehicle will be fetched from database and will be set as default. Are you experiencing a different behavior?

mj_b90 said:

If there were a way to store stations after using them, this would also help. Since each station carries only one brand of gasoline, this field could be dependent on the stored station.

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As soon as you start typing the station/location name, you'll see a list of location being suggested to you based on your previous entries. So it's just a matter of typing one character.

But there isn't any feature to bind the station name to gas brand. I'm not sure if everywhere is the same as there. I need some help on this item

mj_b90 said:

If you were able to recognize the Gas station based upon location that'd be great. I'd be happy if this were able to store after the first use of that station, as I'd guess that looking up station names based on location coordinates would be more difficult.

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Yes, this would be nice to guess the station name using GPS. One very good usage of GPS it will be. This is already in my list but it's just a matter of time.

mj_b90 said:

I also really like the previously suggested ideas of submitting price data to a site such as gasbuddy.com, this would be really helpful.

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Okay. One more vote for this

mj_b90 said:

Thanks for putting so much work into this great app!

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Thanks for downloading and trying aCar.

prattleon said:

seems like a nice app, however, i was so annoyed by the restriction on adding a an older service (one in which the odometer reading is less than a more recent one). i started entering data and then realized i was going to have to start over because i didn't enter records in the order of the mileage reading. a warning would be nice but to restrict it is not cool.

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The problem is that you've not tried to keep the date/time and odometer reading of your fillup/service records in sync! Of course you CAN enter your records in whatever order you want but you should just keep them in sync. For example, when entering a record for "Jan 2, 2010" and odometer reading of "23,430.8", it's not logical thus not valid to enter a seconrd record for "Dec 23, 2009" and odometer reading of "23,822.6"!! You see the point?

prattleon said:

i went to use it again, hoping that i could find a way to enter data into a .CSV file and import it, but i could not find such a feature. the backup is a .abp file which is a barcode file from what i understand. is there a way to edit this so i can input records on my computer and import them into aCar?

Thanks!

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Data import feature has been planned for v1.2.0 and it will include import from CSV format. ".abp" is just a backup file extension indicating "aCar Backup Package" Nothing to do with barcode file format. Of course ".abp" is actually a ZIP file which contains some XML representing the application settings, your data and some metadata. But it's not a good practice to edit its content and to add your data there (for import). I do not recommend this at all! If you can wait a while, you'll get a pretty clean import feature!

Cheers,