Need your feedback on what you want in an electronic build log

Hi all,
I am starting this thread in hopes of getting some feedback from you all that are currently building, or have finished building. I am starting my build and I have struggled with finding an electronic build log that fits what I want. Kitlog Pro is very long in the tooth and very limited (photos, etc). Some of the online logs seem clunky. I also looked at Wordpress and shoehorning some sort of way to calculate totals. Everything I looked at...well...sucked.

So, I figured why not build something that works and works well? I myself am not very good and wiring code, as my career centers around building datacenters, orchestrating and automating them to be cost effective and dynamic so that developers can build those whizbang applications. However, being in this industry, I have contacts with some highly skilled developers, and one of them is a very good friend of mine.

He and I have been talking about this dilema for a while now, especially since he has to hear me griping about no good solution out there for builders. We both agreed that between the two of us, we could build a really good platform.

Here's our challenges. My friend, whom is one of the best coder/developers/maker of software that I know, has no idea about building aircraft and what we'd need. I myself am a very very new builder, just starting my tail kit. While I have a pretty good idea of what I'd like to have, I would like some feedback from you experienced builders as to what you'd like to have.

Some of the ideas I want to incorporate are:

1. "Cloud" based logs, so you don't have to worry about loosing your logs. This includes the ability to save your logs locally on your PC and export them into PDF's for printing.
2. Easy to use interface for creating an entry. This should be quick and easy, you don't want to spend ALL your time logging your build.
3. Is mobile ready, meaning you could use your smartphone to snap photos, take quick notes, etc while you are actually building. Those entries get uploaded to your account so that you can finish the log entry from the comfort of your computer (or on your mobile device if you prefer). This let you sync your entries between all your devices, and lets you edit or create entries from anywhere.
4. Optionally can integrate with social media. You can post your log entries to your Facebook page to share with your friends or family. Post can also be easily linked from forum software like vBulletin (which is what VAF uses). This would let you post a link to your log entry and ask questions in the forum for help or advice or even boast
5. Is able to format your logs so that they print beautifully on paper to be bound, or to present to an inspector. This would also include the ability to export to a PDF if preferred.
6. Allow you to categorize and group entries so you can easily build reports by selecting what you want. Report on how many hours the tail took, or how many hours just the horizontal tab took, or how many hours you spent on priming, etc. Also including the ability to privately track your costs (only you can see costs if you choose). The costing function would act just like hours allowing you to report on many different categories or sum total.
7. A section for "ideas" and "notes" on the build. Lets you store links to threads, links and photos of things you want to do later in the build, or helpful information.

Thats just a very quick and broad list of things I could think of to get started. What I want to do is start a discussion to gauge interest and get feedback from you guys as to what would make the "ultimate build log software"

Then of course, the reality. This is going to cost money. Nothing in the "cloud" is free of course, and it takes man hours to build software like this. Would anyone be willing to pay for something like this? A small monthly fee? a one-time fee? or a combination of both depending on what you want (local vs cloud storage of logs, etc). When we started digging into the costs, the big one was storage. We are both good at optimizing code and infrastructure, but the photos and raw data have a cost to them.

In summary, we are willing to build this, but we are just not sure of the interest, or what folks want. The good thing is that discussion doesn't cost us anything but the time to type up a reply! What do you all think?

Prior to starting my build I checked out Mykitlog but didn't care for the lack of customization available. Your build log end up looking like everyone all the others, a sort of rolling photo album with a build in time tracking function. In reality it would of worked fine, just wouldn't have been pretty to read.

In the end I spent about 15 mins setting up a Blogspot page and have had zero issues. You record your progress in a journal format and post it when you want, I post when I complete iterations of my build. The time tracking component I'm using is just a manual process which I'm fine with. I've had several people comment that it's easy to follow so my hope is that translates well with the inspector upon completion.

Not trying to stifle your innovation but it's always a hard sell when there are 'free' options available. If you want to monetize it you'll want to figure out a different way... advertising, sponsorship from EAA, ect.

I have tried Blogspot and Wordpress, but there is not way to categorize items for reporting and the like. Wordpress you can *kinda* make work but it required fudging around with some of the html pages and that causes problems when you upgrade, or change templates. I don't want to have to keep up with a running tally manually for my time entries.

Im envisioning something where you can just enter time spent on an entry and it "tags" that entry with a category. Then you could query and report on any combination of tags. This way I can see the exact amount of time, money, or other things I spent on the sub kits or even combinations of parts.

Also, I had a hard time trying to print my logs from Wordpress and Blogspot in a format that would make a nice bound hard copy.

Blogger

AviatorJ said:

Prior to starting my build I checked out Mykitlog but didn't care for the lack of customization available. Your build log end up looking like everyone all the others, a sort of rolling photo album with a build in time tracking function. In reality it would of worked fine, just wouldn't have been pretty to read.

In the end I spent about 15 mins setting up a Blogspot page and have had zero issues. You record your progress in a journal format and post it when you want, I post when I complete iterations of my build. The time tracking component I'm using is just a manual process which I'm fine with. I've had several people comment that it's easy to follow so my hope is that translates well with the inspector upon completion.

Not trying to stifle your innovation but it's always a hard sell when there are 'free' options available. If you want to monetize it you'll want to figure out a different way... advertising, sponsorship from EAA, ect.

Click to expand...

Mine is much the same and basically free. My process is a tiny bit cumbersome but it's backed up and I'm used to it.
Only one suggestion but not sure how to word it. Many logs I look at are chronological making it very difficult to see how a builder accomplished a certain task. For that reason, mine is by component first then date.

airtable

I've been messing around with airtable. I still use excel for my main tracking though. Airtable is free for limited use, but there is a monthly charge if you use more. I haven't figured out if I would go over the free allotment or not. If I do I will just keep my excel spreadsheet, it's cheap and building a plane and buying tools is more than expensive enough.

Jeff

The Blogspot site is searchable and you can view things chronologically if you want. There have been a few times that I wanted to look back on something and it was easy enough to use the search function.

As far as those additional features mentioned I can't speak for everyone but I have no use for information down to such a granular level. Knowing how much time I spent working on an individual component doesn't enhance my experience. I jump around sections/steps at times and it would be cumbersome to start splitting up the documentation time.

When it comes to financials you really can't beat using Excel. If someone wants the 'free' method then they can use Googledocs which has a lot of the same functionality to it.

That sounds like a great idea. I am not building, but was looking for a more advanced way to write and store maintenance/modification records, particularly with an easy way to use phone pictures. This would allow more elaborate maintenance or modification logs, but be very easy to quickly examining the history of a subsection of an airplane.

Freebird said:

That sounds like a great idea. I am not building, but was looking for a more advanced way to write and store maintenance/modification records, particularly with an easy way to use phone pictures. This would allow more elaborate maintenance or modification logs, but be very easy to quickly examining the history of a subsection of an airplane.

Click to expand...

I like this idea. It would be easy for us to design, since we would already be building the "log entry" form, it could be easily duplicated for maintenance items. Likewise this would also apply to the mobile log entries. The idea being that you can start/edit/complete a log entry from your phone and attach photos.

After giving this some thought, We could incorporate sections/categories for Engine, Airframe and Prop to give us a full electronic copy of the logs that track with the aircraft.

Building on that, I thought it would be a good idea to have the option to "transfer" or "Copy" logs to another person, in case the airplane is ever sold. The builder could give a complete copy of the build log and maintenance history to the new owner.

Your feature ideas all sound great. I especially like the emphasis on a mobile app. Maybe you could make it work with an established photo upload service-- that would cut the storage costs down. If you make it tailored to airplane builders, with the PDF download/print capability, hour and task logs... I'd probably buy such a service.

A one-time fee is much preferred to a subscription-- I thought at the beginning, I don't want to spend money every month on this thing forever. Good thing, it's 6 years and counting...

I went from a Blogger blog and a "real" camera, to simply uploading photos I took with my phone to the Picasa mobile app. I could add a quick note on the caption, and it was all done. When Google killed Picasa, then I switched to Flickr. The thought is, it's all saved in the cloud, and when I'm done, I can upload my pictures to SnapFish and make an honest-to-God book for my paper log. The dates are all recorded, and most photos have a note about what I did and learned.

In the beginning, it was fun to sit down and write about all my adventures learning how to build. As time went on, this became less of a focus for me, and I spent more time actually working on the plane, usually working on it til my feet or neck hurt so much I couldn't stand it or I got too tired to focus. And THEN, all I wanted to do was plunk down on the couch and eat dinner, NOT spend an hour or two writing another blog post. As Louise famously said here, "you're building a plane, not a website." Or something like that. So, it's gotta be quick, easy, and accessible with your phone.

Just wondering if this idea ever came to reality? Sounds like what I am
after..

It's not as easy as the OP made it sound. I've played around with this too, but the problem is trying to make it universal or customizable. Designing a universal UI is not a project to be taken lightly, considering the number of platforms to support. The real problems for my take on it, though, started when I looked at media support. I wanted to not only allow unlimited pictures, attachable to the logs as well as log entries (wouldn't you like a picture of your engine for the engine log section?) but also allow other media. But what media to support and how? If I make the app browser based, for cross-platform capability, what media player add-ons can I count on or integrate? This kind of thing is solvable, but not by a one- or two-person team. There's a reason Matt has not done development on KitLog Pro for a long time. The kind of dream app we want will take a much larger development effort and will require more capital than the niche market it is for is likely to provide.

Ironically, I have a non-media (essential a port of existing paper logs) system up and working for pc/mac/etc. browser based systems and it wouldn't be hard to port it to tablet and phone interfaces. But without media support it is pretty lackluster; it's actually easier to use the paper logs (this coming from a guy who lives for computer systems). I could easily add file support, too. It's just the UI to display all the media types on all the possible platforms that breaks the app down.