Truck Harder
Truck Harder is a webapp that ISoft is making, and it's going to be totally sweet.
What it does
- Keeps track of what maintenance you need to do on your vehicle, and gives you reminders
- Keeps track of the maintenance you have done on your vehicle, giving you a good maintenance history (including cool graphs and such)
- Keeps track of your vehicle's mileage
Who it's for
Our main target audience will be truck owner/operators.
Eventually, there will probably be a fleet management interface.
A car-specific version will probably exist, in order that all my car-driving friends can use it and test for me.
Architecture
- Will be tested/compatible with these from day 1: IE8+, Chrome ~4+, Firefox 3+, Safari on iOS (reference)
- Will be fully-featured in offline mode (without a connection to our servers)
- Local storage will probably be handled with jStorage
- Will be fully touch-friendly from day 1 (iPad, iPhone/iPod, and hopefully Android-based devices)
- Swipe support where appropriate (Scrollability is awesome)
- Big buttons that are difficult to miss
- The ability to not use a keyboard wherever possible
- Will use an actual MVC structure
Screens/features
Every screen besides the main screen should have a "back" button at the top-left, in the style of iOS apps, that takes you to the screen directly before it.
To state it another way, the screen layout should be representable as a tree (with a depth of no more than 2, ideally).
Main screen
- List of upcoming/possible maintenance issues on left. Choosing one of those items should take you to the record maintenance page
- Update current mileage
- Menu of things to do
Record maintenance
- Field to enter mileage (defaulting to last known value)
- Field to enter date (defaulting to the current date)
- Field to enter cost
- Other fields which may be appropriate, depending on the type of maintenance. What should those fields be? I hope to find that out sometime soon!
Record fueling
- Field to enter mileage (defaulting to last known value)
- Field to enter date (defaulting to the current date)
- Field to enter number of gallons
- Field to enter cost
- Field to display price per gallon
- Section to display recent miles-per-gallon (assuming they have entered at least one fueling record previously)
- Field to enter fuel type (defaulting to diesel)
Schedule maintenance
Should display a list of pre-existing maintenance options, and let the user pick the ones that they care about.
For maintenance options that the users care about, they should be able to enter in how often they want to be reminded to do them: either in number of miles, or number of days (months?).
I'm thinking that the list of options will be on the left, and when you pick an option, you'll see
- A big checkbox that says something to the effect of "check this in order to see this option in the main list!"
- Field to enter in how miles should be between maintenance (optional)
- Field to enter in how many days/months should be between maintenance (optional)
- Field to enter in how many gallons of fuel should be between maintenance
- A field to select the default maintenance action: Inspect, Replace, or Repair
Edit truck information
This screen should be displayed to the user as soon as they start using the application. All fields should be optional.
- Field to enter in a descriptive name, defaulted to something like "My truck"
- Field to enter in vehicle make
- Field to enter in vehicle model
- Field to enter in vehicle year
- Field to enter in VIN
- Field to enter in engine manufacturer, model, year, horsepower, other information?
...and so on. We should identify which part types would be worth entering details for, and what those details should be, and there should be fields to allow entering that information.
Graphs and stats
Oh man, what all do we want to show? Add ideas here, people.
- Cool graphs
- Mileage (miles per gallon) over time
- Miles driven over time
- Reports/lists
- Maintenance done (a straight up list of what you've done to your vehicle, in reverse chronological order)
Vehicle disambiguation screen
This may not be in on day 1, as the initial version will probably only support one vehicle per user. However, that will probably not always be the case.
In the case where one driver/user has more than one vehicle, they will need to indicate which user they are dealing with/configuring.
At the moment, I'm imagining that whenever they pick a menu item on the main screen, they will be directed to this screen, which will contain a list of vehicles for them to choose from.
Of course, users with only one vehicle will never have to choose.
If the user is picking a scheduled maintenance that is coming up/past due for a specific vehicle, they won't need to see this screen, they should be sent straight to the record maintenance screen.
