Review: Fuel Manager

Published by Steve Litchfield at 7:48 UTC, December 8th 2011

Summary:

Yes, yes, talk about mundane - apps to log fuel fill-ups and calculate economy have been around since the dawn of PDA time (1993). But every time you fill up your car, don't you get a tiny twinge of guilt that maybe, just maybe, you should still be still logging all this petrol or diesel? Maybe you should get a feel for how much your metal steed is costing you each week? Fuel Manager is one of the latest entries in the Nokia Store to claim to help...

First impressions of Fuel Manager are good, there's a promising main menu and the application utterly respects Symbian UI guidelines, using your own choice of theme (in this case, I'm running an AMOLED-screened N8, so I'm saving power with the nice dark 'Midnight' series).

There's good use of standard Symbian dialogs for entering the data for each fillup and, cleverly, there's intelligence behind the number fields. You only need to enter total cost or total volume filled - the other figure is calculated for you based on the quoted price per litre. If you do have a brain failure and enter both figures and get one wrong, you get a helpful warning from the application. 

Number entry is in split-screen form, as shown below, and my only quibble is that there's no decimal point on the keypad. Having to tap '*' and then tap on '.' every single time gets very tiresome.

  

With a few weeks motoring under your belt, you can sit back and see how Fuel Manager copes with its core function - reporting back to you. And, if I'm honest, this is where it disappoints. 'Fuel log' presents each fill-up (in my case weekly) and tapping on an entry lets you examine it or edit a value if you think you made a mistake.

'Generate report' sounds like the heart of Fuel Manager and I was hoping for at least a basic chart showing the rise and fall of calculated economy week by week - such things are the staple of this app genre. Sadly, this is where Fuel Manager lets itself down. There's just a textual summary of average consumption (i.e. a single figure), along with current and previous month's expenditure. Currently, if you want to track fuel economy, you've got to periodically write the stated fuel consumption down on a piece of paper and 'Delete all entries' and then start again for another month or two - and then compare the two numbers. More, much more work needed here by the developer.

  

In addition, although the idea of working in either metric or imperial is appealing, most of us (in the UK, at least) live in a mixed world where fuel is sold by the litre (i.e. metric) and economy is quoted in miles per gallon (i.e. imperial). So an additional calculation line or option to switch the report into a particular system would be welcomed.

There are basic help dialogs - and I use the term specifically, because the developer has piggybacked these into standard note dialogs - it's an efficient way to build a UI (I did the same for grid positions way back in 1997 for Team Psion) but it's not exactly pretty or that useable.

Fuel Manager will help salve your guilty conscience about keeping better track of your car's thirst, but there's little here to inform or delight you in the long run - so much more could have been done and I'd welcome a serious update by the developer in the near future.

Steve Litchfield, AAS, 8 Dec 2011

 

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