Collecting Data with Editorial

Fuel Tracker to Editorial Automation

One of the applications I use on my iPhone is to keep a record of the fuel used by my car. It looks like the app might go the way of the dodo in the next version of the operating system. The next version of the operating system is going to be 64-bit only and this 32-bit application probably won’t get updated in time.

Bringing in Launch Center Pro

What I’ve done is to create some programming in the Editorial application. I have made it so that from Launch Centre Pro I’ll be able to go into a customised automation. It will ask me for the kilometres on the odometer. Then it will ask me for the price per litre, I’ll get a notification to put in the amount paid. The automation works out how many litres I bought. Also have it set so that the date of the event is put in automatically. All of the information I was having from the application I was using before. There is a benefit that I don’t need an specialist application. I just need to work out is how to connect graphs in Numbers to show the same information as in graphs in the old application.

Converting the Data

I was having some difficulty in getting this information out of the old application. It was coming out in a comma separated value format. I’m able to import this file into Numbers on the Mac version of the application. This worked out really good and no problems at all, but when I try to do the same thing on the iOS side of things it came in at all as one lump per row. For some reason or other it wasn’t seeing the commas in between. I don’t know where the problem was, although I did find it later it was possible to make this work if I changed the commas to semi colons or tabs. It’s a good job I don’t have to do that operation too many times or I would find an automated way to get the file ready. I did want to get my hands on the raw data from the application which came out in a JSON format. The information was a complete mess, but I was able to use applications on the iPad to set it up just right. I was quite pleased with myself for finding ways to delete whole rows of text and then to do find and replace to clean up further.

Keep moving Forward

I could continue using the fuel tracker application, but I don’t hold out much hope for it to be updated to work in iOS 11. But in any case now I have this new way of doing it I think I prefer this new way.

One thought on “Collecting Data with Editorial

  1. DavidAllenWizardgold says:

    I’ve just deleted the app Blogsy from my iPad. It used to be OK but now it is easier to go into the WordPress through a browser to publish.

    I wanted to use Ulysses for the job but it failed.

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