Mobile App for keeping a Logbook

[Von Steiner]

Hello Again.
We all need to keep a tidy logbook regarding our performances and improvements, I am a big fan of pencil and paper but we are in the 21 century after all. Therefore I have made myself a little mobile phone app to keep a nice tidy logbook, it is mostly aimed to Olympic rifle , 10m - 50m in 3 positions.

I made a small video to share what I did so far, it's working fine but I guess you guys can provide a much better feedback, leading to new ideas and things you wish to see in such an app.

Assuming this is interesting for you, I will make sure that members of this forum will get it for free.

This video can be watched here:
http://goodappl.com/vids/shooterLogApp.mp4


And screenshots of some of the screens here:

I will welcome any feedback and requests,
I am not doing this for profit, and I thank you in advance for contributing to such endeavour.

more of my plans regarding data analysis in the next post (and assuming this indeed is interesting for people of this forum)

Cheers

[Mtl_Biker]

Looks very nice, but does it also actually SCORE your targets?

I'm using TargetScan on my iPhone and I love it. The scoring accuracy is excellent as is the ability to record tons of sessions in multi disciplines. You can also add notes to a session and see your progress over time via graphs and heat maps.

Plus I've got friends who come over to shoot 10 meter (rifle and pistol) with me and I can easily create another entry just for them so that we can also compare our scores over time. Quite fun.

I wonder if you looked at this app and found it lacking in some way? Seems like a pretty big effort to write your own (although it does look pretty impressive).

[Modena]

I'm also using TargetScan which is just super. I do however really like your weather functions

[Von Steiner]

Thank you Mtl_Biker and Modena.
I know TargetScan which is very nice and well made app, I am just a guy who likes to build his own tools.
I take it that one of the features people would like to have is the scanner / Auto counter element. A bit tricky to write in code but can be done with some effort, I will look into that.

Mtl_Biker's : when you say multi disciplines, can you elaborate or better still provide a full list of what your perfect app will have regarding this subject.

The 3nd element taken from Mtl_Biker's comments is the multi user feature - that can be done rather easy, I will implement that in no time.

as for the data itself, my plan is to elaborate the work on the data analysis, for example when your score is lower or higher than your average the app can find the correlation between the score and other data elements (for example: you shoot better/worse when using ammu type X, weather Y...)
I plan to add graphs and visual data representation, more on that later (with examples).

Thanks for your feedback insofar, I would love to hear more.

[Mtl_Biker]

Thank you Mtl_Biker and Modena.
I know TargetScan which is very nice and well made app, I am just a guy who likes to build his own tools.
I take it that one of the features people would like to have is the scanner / Auto counter element. A bit tricky to write in code but can be done with some effort, I will look into that.

Mtl_Biker's : when you say multi disciplines, can you elaborate or better still provide a full list of what your perfect app will have regarding this subject.

The 3nd element taken from Mtl_Biker's comments is the multi user feature - that can be done rather easy, I will implement that in no time.

as for the data itself, my plan is to elaborate the work on the data analysis, for example when your score is lower or higher than your average the app can find the correlation between the score and other data elements (for example: you shoot better/worse when using ammu type X, weather Y...)
I plan to add graphs and visual data representation, more on that later (with examples).

Thanks for your feedback insofar, I would love to hear more.

The multi-discipline I was talking about is simply a a lot of different targets/distances/guns. I'm only interested in air, rifle and pistol, and really only at 10 meters, but there's stuff there for all kinds of powder burners. And as far as the multi-user goes, nothing fancy is needed. For example if I'm using the ISSF 10m Air Rifle discipline, I have one set for ME, and another one set for my friend Bill. I do that in the notes/comment field for the discipline itself so that from the main disciplines screen I can easily see which is which.

Your screen shots seem to show that you record actual photos of the shot targets. TargetScan does NOT store the photos but converts them to small data. Very efficient. I certainly wouldn't want to store photos of the my targets as the phone would get full very fast. I've only been using this since the end of June, but already I've got well over 200 FULL matches (60 shots each) recorded. And it takes extremely little memory storage to do this.

The only improvements I'd personally like to see in TargetScan would be the ability to go back to one of the targets in a match and either rescan it or edit (move) the shots around. Once you've moved forward with TargetScan you cannot change a prior target. Sometimes it would be nice to do that. I'd also like to have the ability to select the time period (or number of recorded matches) I want to graph. Right now in the charts the average score displayed is only for the last 10 matches. I'd like to be able to select a range of my choice, either a particular day or number of matches. And then examine the graphs for those. Likewise for the "heat map", currently the choices are only shots from the last 1, 7, 30, 90, 180 or 360 days. If I make a change to my stance, or perhaps add/remove/move weights on the gun and then shoot several matches, I'd like to see the data for those to be able to compare with a different setup.

Your programming efforts are really impressive. You must be more than just a hobbyist.

Hope my comments are of help.

Cheers!

[TenMetrePeter]

I used to use Target Scan (Android) for 10m Airpistol where the main problem was grouping in 10s merging two 5 shot cards. Since moving to 10m Rifle the 5 shot cards cannot be read in one go and you have to scan every shot. If lighting is not perfect that can take more than one scan per shot. life is too short.
I use a simple excel sheet that maintains a running average of all entries. keep it on the phone and dropbox.

[Mtl_Biker]

I used to use Target Scan (Android) for 10m Airpistol where the main problem was grouping in 10s merging two 5 shot cards. Since moving to 10m Rifle the 5 shot cards (like my avatar) cannot be read in one go and you have to scan every shot. If lighting is not perfect that can take more than one scan per shot. life is too short.
I use a simple excel sheet that maintains a running average of all entries. keep it on the phone and dropbox.

I find it a lot faster to scan each of the 10 targets (10-meter ISSF rifle) into TargetScan than to manually calculate each shot and add them up. A spreadsheet is fine, but it doesn't show you how far you're off the ten and in which direction, which can be very handy for figuring out if your sights are properly aligned.

[TenMetrePeter]

if you have a 5 shot card you can score that in under 10 seconds. I couldnt scan one shot in that time with a Samsung S5.

[SlartyBartFast]

I had though of contacting the TargetScan developer and asking if they couldn't make the app work on a PC using a good quality scanner.
Would make a great club level tool.

There's also http://www.bullseyecamera.com. Compares pictures from the camera shot by shot. Drawback is the software has to be told after each shot to take a picture. They take a low power camera and put it close to the target with wireless to the computer at the firing line.

http://targetvisioncam.com/ is similar.

I've been looking at the 45X Red Tail Digital Spotting Scope. That could be a good alternative to the camera being downrange.

Our club already has target cameras. Would be nice to have firing line view screens and integration of scoring software.

The OP should try and work with the TargetScan developer. Two heads are better than one etc.