Mobile/Desktop Car Application Ideas

[vaironl]

Hey Everyone,
I've been leaning to make iPhone apps for a couple of months now, and I was thinking it would be cool to make some type of car app. One that would actually be useful.

Now I was making a small application to learn database concepts and I feel as if it's useless. For that application you simply enter basic car information a picture and store it in an SQLite database. I thought on expanding this idea by allowing the user to enter car parts, maintenance schedules, etc. But now I feel as if no one would use such a thing.

So please chime in and if you would like throw some ideas at me I'll try to tackle this project. I have about a month before college starts so it will be difficult to tackle a big project in that small amount of time. If it were to ever be released it would be totally free.

I'm attaching pictures of the car app in my iphone (which I recently messed up trying to support a couple of formats) and the same application for desktops.

Mobile Screenshot:


Desktop Screenshot:

[vaironl]

Well apparently a lot of people don't like my idea. A contest to win a phone came up and I'll be making this app with a better UI and more features. This app will be made for the android platform (for which I don't have a device) I'm thinking about adding lots of ways for the user to customize their cars. For example, you can log oil change, tire change, and previous problems among others. An example I have is allowing the user to log CELs after an installation of an air intake or any part. Simply put, a mobile platform car maintenance book with some more features.


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[why?]

it's a good idea to get started on learning how to make apps. If you could make something that can read info from the obd ports it would be a little more useful.

[vaironl]

Originally Posted by why?

it's a good idea to get started on learning how to make apps. If you could make something that can read info from the obd ports it would be a little more useful.

Hey why,

Thanks a lot for giving me that idea I immediately thought this would be near impossible, but it seems there are quite a lot of people with these apps out there. I'll do some research on what's possible. One thing that's for sure it's that it'll take me a lot of time.


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[vaironl]

Have been pretty busy with life, but I've transferred my app to android as I don't want to keep paying the $100 annual fee for the apple store vs $25 onetime fee for android here's what I have so far. I'm stuck and now the current content is useless so I'm trying to think what could realistically facilitate our lives.

[tk-421]

Good work!

One idea that comes to mind is a module to track what has been done to the car every time it's sent to the mechanic, as well as to add a to-do list for the next visit. This could then be extended to give you an alarm telling you when you should be scheduling said visit (maybe by tracking how many miles you have traveled by using GPS?). HTH

[vaironl]

Originally Posted by tk-421

Good work!

One idea that comes to mind would be to track what has been done every time the car is sent to the mechanic, as well as to add a to-do list for the next visit. This could then be extended to give you an alarm telling you when you should be scheduling said visit (maybe by tracking how many miles you have traveled by using GPS?).

Just my 2¢.

Thanks a lot for the great feedback/ideas Tk!

I had a service schedule idea in mind, but your given feedback has led me to extend that content. I originally had a service name, cost, date, and notes layout but I'll get working on a to do type list which reminds you of the parts that need replacement, or checkup. The gps tracking is something I definitely never thought about before, but I don't see why not. It is however outside of what I believe I could do within a short amount of time (battery life and accuracy).

I will be doing alpha stage rollouts soon( these will be missing LOTS of features) in case any of you want to try it.

[tk-421]

I'd be happy to try it out.

Yeah, I think a more detailed itemized structure would help a lot. For example, say you just did an oil change today. You could have your app remind you every 5,000 miles (or every 6 months, if you'd rather not go the GPS route) that you need to change the oil again (or even add the item to your to-do list automatically). It would also help to show the mechanic exactly when a part was swapped so that you can complain if the new part fails prematurely.

A drill down menu approach would probably be a good thing to have in this case, since one can enter lots of information with only a few taps.

[vaironl]

Originally Posted by tk-421

I'd be happy to try it out.

Yeah, I think a more detailed itemized structure would help a lot. For example, say you just did an oil change today. You could have your app remind you every 5,000 miles (or every 6 months, if you'd rather not go the GPS route) that you need to change the oil again (or even add the item to your to-do list automatically). It would also help to show the mechanic exactly when a part was swapped so that you can complain if the new part fails prematurely.

A drill down menu approach would probably be a good thing to have in this case, since one can enter lots of information with only a few taps.

Very exciting to have someone interested in trying it out :). I changed my s3 with my dad last year to get a 4s, so all of the testing occurs in the emulator. This means the app might not work on a device. I will try to get a cheap device in a couple of weeks to confirm any future changes.

I will wake up pretty early tomorrow and work on this throughout the day. I really don't know how to thank you for the ideas tk!

[tk-421]

Don't mention it. I'm a developer myself and love nerding out on stuff like this.
Have you tried MIT's App Inventor yet? If not you should take it for a spin sometime.

[vaironl]

Originally Posted by tk-421

Don't mention it. I'm a developer myself and love nerding out on stuff like this.
Have you tried MIT's App Inventor yet? If not you should take it for a spin sometime.

Another developer, car enthusiast, yaris owner!! This can't get any better.

I've thought about using it after seeing it on some YouTube tutorials. I watch Derek Banas for android/java tutorials and he had a couple of videos about the usage of app inventor. Lately I've become fairly well at reading documentation and stack overflow answers, so I skipped on it :lol:. I remember the days I asked the simples questions "how to for loop".

[tk-421]

Hey, everybody has to start somewhere! I use StackOverflow all the time as well.

The App inventor may look like a toy, but it's quite useful in many cases. For instance, I built a proof-of-concept app for a client in less than two days.

You should definitely try it out, if only to see how easy it is to get stuff like GPS tracking working in a few minutes.

[vaironl]

Originally Posted by tk-421

Hey, everybody has to start somewhere! I use StackOverflow all the time as well.

The App inventor may look like a toy, but it's quite useful in many cases. For instance, I built a proof-of-concept app for a client in less than two days.

You should definitely try it out, if only to see how easy it is to get stuff like GPS tracking working in a few minutes.

Tried just a bit of app inventor and added a listview,textfields, etc. but I couldn't connect to an sqlite database. I have to do more research on it, but I'll stick to good old code for now. I know it's very time consuming, but I enjoy tearing my hair while writing some good old java code . Trying to figure out how to upgrade databases right now so that users don't loose all of their data.

[tk-421]

Here's the documentation for the database component in MAI in case you want to try it out later:
http://puravidaapps.com/sqlite.php

Then again, if you want to bump horns with Java, be my guest. I wouldn't touch Java to save my life.