Recently, I’ve been asked many times about an iPhone app and direct download from meters. So here is the current situation ...

I thought about developing an iPhone app but decided against it for a number of reasons, most of them based around two points:

1. I believe that to fully support any application I write we need to be a regular users too. I have an iPod touch but it’s my wife that would be using a mobile app, and she is happy with her phone.
2. There are quite a number of iPhone logbook app appearing now, so why not import data from them.

So, I’ve purchased/downloaded a few iPhone logbook apps that say they have export functionality and I’m now looking at which ones export data that can be imported easily (CSV file, saved email text) using the same principles that are already used to support the various Palm OS apps. Another alternative app type is a general database app.

I haven’t started work on coding support for these just yet, as I thought that most needed a while to stabilise, especially in the data export areas. However, I will definitely be working on this feature and have contacted a couple of the app developers.

Onto direct meter download: the situation is still the same as when I last wrote about this subject (see here). I did looked at it again, briefly, but don’t expect this to happen. Sorry if that isn’t the answer you want to hear. Again the reason is that we won’t use the feature since we would have to edit every entry to add more data anyway, and I still haven’t worked out how to code it.