Review: Gas Cubby-MPG & Vehicle Maintenance
by Erik Wallace
December 9, 2009
Overview
Gas Cubby-MPG & Car Maintenance is a highly resourceful and insightful tool for managing ones auto expenses and maintenance history. This app manages your vehicle data by having you enter your fill ups and vehicle servicing. The app is full of features and aims to be the perfect companion to anyone with a motor vehicle, but does it succeed?Features
Gas Cubby excels when it comes to logging and managing your fill ups and vehicle servicing, Using the information it can graph your miles per gallon(MPG), and your gas and service expenses over varying lengths of time. The UI is very clean and intuitive to navigate.
After entering your vehicle information you will be directed to the home screen, in which you can add fill ups, either partial or full, and vehicle servicing. When entering your fill ups, or servicing, you will get a list of various data entries that you can customize to your needs.
Once you have entered your vehicle data turning your device sideways will display a series of graphs that help you visualize your data clearly. You can see your gas milage and vehicle maintenance expenses fluctuate over time.
Gas Cubby comes with a free online syncing. When first launching the app you will be directed through the sync process, which requires a valid email address. You also have the ability to export your data through an excel friendly email and CSV file. You can also import CSV files to bring the app up to date on your previously recorded data.
The Breakdown:
The Good:
Gas cubby not only tracks your MPG and vehicle maintenance expense, but it also reminds you of important servicing. After adding a vehicle to Gas Cubby it automatically adds standard servicing reminders like when an oil change is due. All servicing reminders are adjustable and you can leave the ones you do not want to be notified for blank. The reminders are seriously thorough. Ten percent until your service is due will trigger the first reminder. You can silence or snooze over due reminders. Silencing them will stop them until the next one is due. Snoozing an alert will cause it sound in ten percent increments until the service is recorded. The icon badge will also display the number of overdue services. This feature is extremely helpful to those who procrastinate. Unfortunately, these alerts only sound when entering the app so you must be dedicated to entering your fill ups and servicing regularly.
As aforementioned the free online syncing is a high value feature. Gas Cubby supports multiple vehicles. So if you share cars with other iPhone/iPod touch yielding individuals you can sync your data between devices via the online syncing.
The app also supports advance searching features. You can sort by service or fill ups. You also can add customizable tags to entries for sorting and searching. So not only can you log your data but you can find it at any given time.
The Bad:
To be honest I find it very difficult to fault this app. It does everything it intends to do very well. A lot of features of this app many other app developers could certainly stand to adopt. After using this app for awhile I was shocked to find that it was built for iPhone OS 2.0. The addition of some 3.0 features like push notifications and perhaps syncing between devices with bluetooth would make this app pretty close to perfect.
