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TUAW First Look: Trip Cubby 2

In the past year, my iPhone has become packed to the gills with apps. Some are for fun and some are for work. A prime example of the latter is Trip Cubby. My job (and Uncle Sam) requires me to keep close tabs on mileage. Trip Cubby makes recording my trips simple and fun, and version 2 improves upon a winner.

To get started, add a new trip and fill in your destination, purpose, any tags you'd like and so on. Designate a vehicle and its starting odometer reading. You can also categorize a trip (business, charity, etc.) and add relevant notes (tip: Add frequent trips to favorites for future reference).

From there, click done and you're off! Once you arrive, select your trip again, enter the final odometer reading and click Done. Trip Cubby assumes a mileage rate of $0.550, but you're free to change that if need be.

Here's where it gets good. You can sync all of your data online at App Cubby, should you lose anything. Also, you can mail all of your data to yourself from within the app as a CSV (a HUGE time saver at tax time). Typically I'm a pen-and-paper guy, but Trip Cubby has replaced the notebook in my glovebox.

Here's where it gets really good. Version 2 has introduced fantastic new features, including:

  1. Predictive text input and data entry shortcuts. The main reason I use paper for text-heavy input is that I can write much faster than I can type. Predictive input helps a lot.

  2. Charts. Oh, the charts. My favorite aspect of Gas Cubby is the beautiful and informative charts and graphs. It's so very helpful to see your data presented with a graph, and with a simple tilt of the iPhone you can view your Trip Cubby data depicted by category, paid vs. unpaid and miles driven per day, all across various amounts of time.

  3. Bulk edit trips. Delete several trips or mark them paid all at once.

There's more to this update, but these are the highlights for me. Trip Cubby is an app that I use and rely upon every day. It's a free upgrade for registered users and can be purchased via the App Store for $9.99US.