Tripometer 1.3 Released

Tripometer version 1.3 is finally available. The big new feature in version 1.3 is improved email reports. Email reports are now sent directly from your phone (we used to have to send them via the Green Arrow Software webserver). This means your email address will show up in the “To” field and your email is much less likely to get flagged by antispam software.

Another handy feature is the home screen badge showing unfinished trips. If you often enter the starting mileage for a trip but then forget to add the ending mileage when you arrive at your destination, this feature could be the reminder you need. It tells you how many trips are missing a distance or ending mileage. If you don’t like the constant reminder, you can disable it in the settings screen.

There are lots of other improvements as well. Here are all of the new features and fixes in Tripometer 1.3:
  • Reports include the total distance
  • A bigger, multiline box is used to enter notes. The notes field in the trip view is sized to fit the length of the note.
  • When deleting a category, all trips it contains are deleted (after asking for confirmation)
  • End odometer value is updated when distance is set
  • When entering distance and odometer readings, invalid characters from the keyboard are ignored
  • Default email subject for reports is now "Tripometer Vehicle Travel Report"
  • When Tripometer is closed and reopened, the list views remember their scroll positions
  • Fixed issues with scrolling and the toolbar
  • Memory leak fixes (makes Tripometer less likely to crash after heavy use)

Green Arrow Software Supports the Pan-Mass Challenge & Jimmy Fund

We're proud residents of Massachusetts at Green Arrow Software, so we're pleased to be able to support the Pan-Mass Challenge Software Charity Fundraiser. The PMC is a charity bike ride across Massachusetts that raises funds for the Jimmy Fund, which in turn supports cancer treatment and research at Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

The Jimmy Fund is a great local cause, so we jumped at the chance to donate 40 copies of Tripometer. We'll provide another update once the fundraiser starts. If you just can't wait to buy Tripometer but also want to help out, consider making a gift directly to the Jimmy Fund.

You can follow us on twitter for more updates here.

Tripometer email fixes

We've made a few improvements to the Tripometer report emailing system. First off, the emails now include all of the data as an HTML table. There's even a total at the bottom, so just scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how many miles/kilometers are included in the report.

We've also worked on our email server to make report emails more likely to go through. Unfortunately, some email systems are pretty hardcore about blocking suspected Spam, so some emails occasionally bounce. We're still working on consistently getting emails through to Earthlink addresses.

We ran into an issue where the library we're using to create the emails (Swift Mailer, highly recommended) was taking massive amounts of memory to encode the HTML part of the email. A 30 kB file was requiring over 20 MB of memory. That was causing problems for our server, so reports with more than 50 to 100 items wouldn't go through. (It turned out that switching to base64 encoding for the HTML got around a very inefficient quoted-printable encoder in the current version of Swift.)

Fortunately, many of these issues will become a thing of the past once we release the next version of Tripometer. Tripometer 1.3 will take advantage of the new features in iPhone OS that let us send emails directly from the app instead of having to upload the data to our server to be detailed). We're hard at work to make 1.3 our best release yet.

You should follow us on twitter here.