Even though some features of this app keep annoying me, admittedly I keep coming back to it for two reasons:
1. It is the only logbook app that records the level of details that I require, and
2. The developer provides very good support.
While most other logbook apps basically just record the track of the vessel, this one offers a wide variety of manual and automatic entries to rival the level of detail that you would record in a conventional logbook.
Where the app disappoints is the level of user guidance that we have come to get used to from modern apps.
For example, if you write a detailed entry for 20 minutes, and then click on anything other than “save”, everything you have written is lost without warning.
If the app crashes ― which it does quite frequently when in the background, where I keep it most of the time, because my navigation app runs on the same device ― important details like e.g. engine hours are not updated when the app comes online again. The engine hours are simple enough to update manually, but you have to do that for every entry — manual or automatic — since the crash, which could amount to dozens of entries. How I wish the app would just record the time period and add it to the base value, rather than recording an absolute value every time, so that I only have to fix one entry after a crash for engine hours to be right again, instead of all entries……….(!)
Similar, if you forget to change the status to “moored”, the app will happily keep logging for days, even if you have moved hundreds of miles inland, moved at 70 mph (because you are now driving a car and not a boat), etc. We are used now to apps having a certain amount of intelligence, e.g. my Apple Watch will automatically stop logging a run if I start to move with a speed that is not compatible with running. All of this is aggravated by the fact that the app now of course also still keeps logging engine hours, so you have to delete even hundreds of entries manually. Because I use the engine hour record to decide the maintenance cycle for my engine, I tend to get quite emotional about those bugs.
I guess eventually I will get used to the peculiarities of this app, and how its user interface differs from other iOS apps, but at the moment I am still inclined to see those peculiarities as bugs rather than features.
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Red Wolf UK