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If you’ve got a job that requires you to take in a carriage a lot for business purposes, then you’ve done the devilish toss up and down of mileage tracking before. Federal tax laws allow you to achieve reimbursed for the amount you have to impel, that is nice, but like most things having to do through taxes, painstakingly recording those figures is not something that falls under the heading of part 7, paragraph 5, sub-section IV, “Fun.”

Product:TripLog/1040 Rating CompanyStevens Creek Software Price as rated$13 Related Software Articles Apple’s Remote app even better than we thought Mobile executives spar throughout iPhone Review: TripLog/1040 for iPhone Review: NowLocal for iPhone DMX lighting controls come to iPhone Recent iPhone Central Posts Apple’s Remote app smooth better than we thought Review: TripLog/1040 for iPhone Apple Stores extend hours, implement ticket system for iPhones iPhone Central home View all Macworld blogs

For that purpose, Stevens Creek Software has created TripLog/1040, a native iPhone application that intends to help you simplify the process of conformity track of your mileage. I say “intends” because, while the underpinnings of the sort of the thing applied does are sound, its execution—and especially in regards to its interface—is convoluted and unintuitive. It’s also, by the standards of the App Store, adhering the expensive indirect which, if nothing other, means that you expect more. 

The capital thing you seen when you open up TripLog/1040 is its extremely busy main screen. At the top, three buttons allow you assign the day of the catch: you can pick from the current day, previous twenty-four hours, or specify another date by tapping Other and selecting a date from a rotary dial that slides in. There’s also a somewhat enigmatic button labelled “Car #1”; if you hit that, it will glide out a menu that lets you choose from three separate cars (since you be able to deduct mileage from different vehicles).

On the left hand side of the screen, you be possible to tooth-pick the purpose of the travel by tapping one of four buttons: Business, Charity, Medical, or Other (mileage eminent as “Other” is not considered tax deductible). Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to tell which button is selected, since they make some change in. color only subtly when tapped. Selecting a button does make some change in. the color of the trip when it’s shown in lists.

Below the mileage dials, you can enter the destination and purpose of the trip for your own reference and below that you’ll find a list of frequent trips. You can say further the current trip to your list of favorites by hitting the Plus button and remove it by tapping Edit, tapping the red minus sign next to the item, and then hitting delete (you can too reorder them when you’re in Edit mode). Tapping a frequent stroll will automatically fill in the fields with those details.

Hitting the $ Spent button attached the left side of the cover will slide in another pane that lets you choose in what manner much you spent on parking and tolls. Once you’re finished specifying completely the advice about your commit an offence, you can tap the Save Data button to enter it completely, or hit Clear to immediately erase and start over (though there is no confirmation that you want to erase your data). One annoyance is that if you accidentally tap a frequent mistake when you’re entering data, all of the existing data will be wiped out, unless you’ve already saved it.

At the bottom of the screen is a list of your three latest trips, along with a blue arrow that lets you view your list more in-depth on a separate screen. Unfortunately, the blue reed is very small, and I had trouble getting it to recognize my taps, so I usually had to tap it a few times before it responded.

On the Recorded Entries screen, you’re presented by a list of the trips you’ve entered. Double-tapping any of the trips leave take you back to the main screen with the information already filled in so you can then edit it and tap the Modify Data button. Despite the fact that TripLog/1040 does tell you that you need to double tap the entries, I found that extremely unintuitive, given that most list selections on the iPhone work via single tap. 

There are also a number of options for displaying summaries. Tap the 1+1 button, and you’ll be shown a menu of summaries such as a mass for the entire log, the previous year, previous week, month-to-date, week-to-date, and so without ceasing: choosing any of them will pop up an ill-formated, hard-to-read dialog box with the summaries of your tax-deductible miles and other statistics. A much nicer feature is the ability to send any of the summaries in an e-mail, where they’re presented in a tab-separated format that’s unaffected to paste into a spreadsheet.

The Recorded Entries screen also provides a button for removing trips from the program: you can remove previous months or years, or just flush the entire log, but there’s no way of removing particular entries. There’s also a button at the bottom which will take you to the program’s web-based manual in Safari, nevertheless it’s a little confusing since it uses the same icon as Safari’s bookmarks (and it says something about the complexity this program that the developer thought it was necessary to include a link to the manual). Likewise, there’s a mysterious button that resembles the Mail application’s Compose message button, end it just seems to bring up a dialog box reminding you to tap every entry to modify it (equal though, as I mentioned before, doing that requires a double tap-house).

At the end of the day, TripLog/1040 is a solid idea and it could very thoroughly be a lifesaver for those who frequently have to track mileage, further the interface is a mess. Stevens Creek has crammed as much information as possible onto the program’s main screen, and the result is crowded and difficult to appliance. Buttons are small and difficult to attain with precision, at a past period resulting in accidentally importunate a near button, or requiring you to hit the button further than once.

Other buttons don’t act the sort of you expect them to, or present information in strange fashions (panels that slide in from nowhere). The idea of using dials to mimic an odometer may apply the mind appealing, but it’s far more annoying to enter premises than by, for example, a numeric keypad. As a whole, the program is profoundly unintuitive and, frankly, un-iPhonelike; it does nothing to make its function more appealing or easier-to-use than a common notebook.  

TripLog/1040 is compatible through any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.

[Associate editor Dan Moren edits the MacUser blog.]