About the Add Bike Ride page
Date Posted: 24/06/2009 11:58 by Peter Grace
It goes without saying that the functionality to be able to record a bike ride is the most critical to how MyCycling works, so it therefore seemed the logical place to start in reworking the design.
I have tried to respond to one of the most common requests in the feedback that I’ve received, which is to be able to log a bike ride directly from a data file produced by a device such as a Garmin Edge. In this first release you can upload a Garmin TCX file and generate a single bike ride from it. At the moment it will not be able to parse files that contain multiple activities, or any activity other than Biking, but that’s something we can look at if there’s demand for it.
As well as generating a bike ride, you can choose to generate a new route from the file if you so wish. I’ve made a slight performance compromise in the way that routes get constructed by only taking a point every 50 metres, but the functionality that MyCycling offers for Routes in general is something that I’m planning to revisit in one of the next releases, depending on how much interest there is.
The other enhancements are designed to improve usability in the long run whilst also giving you more options for what information you can log. I appreciate that many of you will only be interested in logging the basic details about each ride, but equally there will be some amongst you who are very scientific in the way that you train and so want to be able to record data relating to power, cadence etc. However with more fields comes a more cluttered user interface.
It is with this in mind that I’ve split the fields into three sections – Mandatory fields which must always be entered, Optional fields, and a category called Favourite fields. To start with everyone’s Favourites will be empty, but the idea is that you can drag any of the Optional fields that you tend to use into there, and then when you log a ride it will save your preferences. Hopefully you’ll find this interface intuitive and useful, rather than merely a gimick – it’s something I’m particularly keen to hear your feedback on.
The final new feature to point out is with the fields for Route and Bike. Wheras before you had to switch between a text box to enter a new route, and a dropdown to select an existing one – you can now enter either using an autocomplete textbox. Again, let me know if you don’t think this is intuitive enough. I’m hoping that if like me you’ve got over 100 routes it will become easier to record it without having to ask “Have I logged this route before?” – if you have then it should show up in the search results as you type.
There is an apology I need to make and that is to those of you who like to log turbo sessions on MyCycling. Please be assured that it is still something that you will be able to log going forward but for this intial release the functionality has been left out. The reason is that I want to give proper consideration to how best we classify and store activities in a scalable way. For example, some of you have asked previously about logging spin sessions, which don’t have a distance you can put in and nor would you want them to affect your average speed.
Likewise I will probably look at allowing running sessions to be recorded, and these of course have their own form of stationary training. The same issues of how we aggregate data to ensure that average speeds etc. are accurate and relevant will need to be considered then. Therefore I’ve decided that the best approach will probably be to tackle all of these sorts of decisions in one release, hence why the turbo session functionality has been deferred.
That’s completes the overview of the functionality and the rationale. I await your feedback with interest!
Comments
drumsmasher (01/07/2009 20:04:23)
This site has been a massive help to me as i am one of those "freaks" who likes to analyze all my data. The new additions such as wind direction help because this can make a massive difference to times. Would it be too late to suggest a "perceived effort" box? I know that intensity is already there but a perceived effort of say 1 to 10 or 15 would make it more accurate. I usually go by heart rate/av speed/wind but just having either low/med/high intensity might not offer enough scope. Please dont take this as any criticism as i have already said this is a great site and will continue to recommend it. Good work that man!!
Pete (01/07/2009 21:45:50)
It's certainly not too late to suggest new fields, that's really the whole reasoning behind why I've come up with the Favourite Fields section, knowing that different people will want to record things in different ways. It means that hopefully I can add as many fields as people request without cluttering up the interface (except for maybe the first few times that people are logging rides and working out what fields they want to use).
I'm thinking maybe the best way to implement Perceived Effort would just be as a standard integer text field, whereby you can put whatever number you want in depending on the scale you like to use (perhaps with an upper limit of 100 to keep things sensible). If you've got a better suggestion though let me know.
Jules (09/07/2009 20:40:52)
Hi, having trouble uploading my Garmin .tcx file, it's from a Forerunner 50 and therefore doesn't have all the GPS, speed data etc, should it still work OK? Anyway, it's still a great free site to record my cycling data so a big thanks!
Pete (09/07/2009 22:48:02)
Hi Jules, thanks for letting me know about that. I've done some debugging using your file and worked out where it was going wrong - it was as you suggested the lack of GPS data that the parser couldn't handle. I've corrected this now in the latest series of bug fixes that I'm working on, which will probably be released early next week.
plia (25/07/2009 18:20:21)
hello guys
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Pete (27/06/2009 22:17:04)
Apologies to those of you who've been encountering errors whilst trying to log rides today. There was a bug with the unit conversion which meant that if you use miles and didn't specify a max speed for your ride it would fall over. This should now be fixed.