FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - CoMETS for Windows (and Mac OS X) is now available
Old Dec 27, 2004 | 1:44 pm
  #2  
scirel
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Akita, Japan
Programs: UA, Hilton
Posts: 459
Thanks for the program...as I expected, it's excellent and is already helping me to get a handle on next year's status. Since you're looking for feedback, here's a few bugs/suggestions:
  • I added All Nippon Airways to the Preferences screen, and it doesn't show up in the "Credit To" list next to it or in the itinerary screen. Nor does it seem possible to add anything to these lists. Thus, I can't credit anything to ANA's internal program or indicate that I took a flight on ANA metal. Is there a way to make all the dropdown lists customizable?
  • When changing the mileage for a city pair, you correctly indicate that mileage may vary by airline. However, only allowing one mileage amount between cities effectively limits CoMETS to tracking one FF program only. (This may seem like a trivial difference. But consider the case of a person who does the same round trip every week. After a year, a difference between programs of only 10 miles would magnify into a discrepancy of over 1000 miles, not to mention the large differences in bonus miles.) I don't know which would be better...to have mileage city pairs tied to the FF program or by the airline actually flown. I suspect the more common case is to have it assigned by airline, since they probably report to the FF program credited how many miles were flown. But is there a way to do both at the same time?
  • Maybe on the mileage city-pair customization screen allow several entries for each city pair, either by metal or FF program. Then for each leg of an itinerary have a toggle box for which mileage value to use (airline or FF program). That should be generic enough to cover pretty much all real-world cases and allow accurate tracking of many programs.
    I suspect that many will want to have a copy of CoMETS on their home/work machine (for everyday use) and their laptop (for real-time flight info entry).
  • What is the best way to sync the two? Import/export? If so, what format is best? Or copy files between the machines? Might want to include some instructions in the User Guide.
  • I discovered that on the itinerary screen, entering PWM in the itinerary causes "PW" with no M to show up in the segment breakdown below. Maybe a problem with the box length, because it shows up fine in the summary screen.
  • Not sure if it's a planned feature or a bonus, but I also discovered that you could enter ground transportation to another airport but maintain the integrity of itineraries by leaving a space between the two airports you don't fly between. That's an excellent feature and you might want to mention it in the User Guide.
  • Other fields to consider adding: Trip ID (AmEx Travel assigns these) for an itinerary; dropdown box per segment for paper tickets/eticket/some other form of ticketing which I've never heard of; dropdown box for VDB/IDB/rebook (so I can indicate flights that were a bump and I decided to keep the credit from my new itinerary). In fact, if you added the VDB field, you could add another field for compensation and include these calculations in the summary.
  • It might be interesting to be able to note that, for example, in the 2nd quarter of 2004 I got $550 in travel credit (yeah, I wish).
  • A minor thing, but you might want to indicate what CoMETS stands for in the About box.

Thanks again for your hard work on this program...it's a real service to the FT community. I'm anxiously waiting for the next version!
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