Alert that I may have missed a fuel-up?

[ggarnier]

I log by odo reading from my iPhone. Since I don't always fuel-up my wife's car, I may or may not be in the "missed a fuel-up" situation. Would it be possible to show the mileage* at the last logged fuel-up, to warn that I might have missed one? This would save having to go to the site later to edit the fuel-up.

(*And an "I missed a fuel-up" button on the mobile version to use if it was obvious that I did miss one?)

Along the same line, could there be a user-settable Range setting in the Profile? When using odo mode, if the mileage increment from last fuel-up exceeded the Range value it would alert the user that a fuel-up was probably missed?

[pb]

We do have an "I missed a fuel-up" checkbox on the mobile version. You just need to scroll down past the first "fuel-up" button.

We'll think about adding a "last odometer" to the fuel-up page. I'm hesitant to add any info there because we want that page to be as simple as humanly possible. But I can see how knowing the last odometer reading would be helpful once in a while.

In the meantime, you could always bookmark your vehicle fuel-up log on your iPhone and visit that before you fuel-up. Not as handy, but it would give you your last odometer reading.

[ggarnier]

pb -

Thanks, I'm an iPhone newbie so will find out how to bookmark the site. I support keeping the mobile screen as clean as possible.

A message alerting that Range had been exceeded would not add any clutter to the general screens for the mobile version.

[pb]

I'm not sure how the message would help though. Here's the flow:

1.) You add your fuel-up info.

2.) You click 'fuel-up'.

3.) You get an Error message that the fuel-up can't be added because you have exceeded your range.

I think adding this block would end up being more frustrating for those times when someone has a really good tank, than the frustration of having to go back and edit a fuel-up. Granted, both situations are frustrating but in the end someone is going to be frustrated. When these situations come up we always err on the site of capturing the info first, knowing that sometimes folks will have to go back and edit things.

[ggarnier]

I was thinking:

1.) You add your fuel-up info.

2.) You click 'fuel-up'.

3.) You get an Error message that the fuel-up can't be added because you have exceeded your range.

4. In the message box you have an option to over-ride and complete the fuel-up anyway (maybe since you remember that you have just driven downhill for the last 200 miles!)

I'm no iPhone programmer so I don't know if that kind of operation is even possible.

Thanks!

[pb]

oh yeah, it's all possible, it's just a question of how much we want to bug people as they fuel up. I still think this falls on the side of too much hand-holding, but I understand that it's frustrating to find out you missed a fuel-up after the fact.

[BDC]

I'd like to chime in here. I think I've got a good idea of exactly how much functionality the Fuelly team wants to put into the site; it is a fairly basic gas-logger that caters to everyone, thus features that only cater to a certain minority of cases (such as iphone users) are rarely in the scope of the project, especially with fuelly not being a revenue-generating site.

Nevertheless, I think this might be a good feature to include for accuracy's sake. While browsing I've noticed many cars with a reasonable average MPG and an astronomically high best tank, obviously an indicator that somebody added mileage from two tanks together or something along those lines. Far as I can tell it's mostly a problem for the odometer users rather than the trip-odometer users. But just giving a warning to double-check the input numbers might be worthwhile for everybody.

The problem lies in determining the "range" for each car. It could be something as simple as a tank with 25% better mileage than the current best. That probably would be easiest.

Just my 2 cents

[ggarnier]

I'll probably switch to trip mode to counteract my carelessness. Certainly no hardship there.

I confess that my desire for a warning stems from my use of Fuelly for something it was probably not intended for: a real-world mpg database. When using Fuelly to check out realistic fuel economy on a car I'm interested in buying, bizarre best tank numbers are fairly easy to identify and ignore, but it's harder to filter the affect they have on overall averages. Granted, if it's only one tank in ten, that doesn't affect long-term averages much.