Introducing Dev 0.2
Date Posted: 23/08/2009 09:38 by Peter Grace
The second significant release to the Dev website has now been published and I’m hoping that it will start to make the site much more usable. The main thing I’ve concentrated on is providing a responsive interface for you to view and analyse the data that you record, which is probably most evident in the sortable tables that make up the Dashboard, and pages for Bike Rides and Fitness Metrics. The ability to record daily Fitness Metrics is actually new in itself to this release, and if you use this facility on the main website (previously called Daily Metrics) then you may be interested to see that I’ve added some new fields – as ever if you have any more suggestions then let me know.
Another key element to the design is that if something can be viewed in more detail, it should be clickable, where you see the name of a route, it is now a link to the page for that route. Likewise if you click on a date then it will take you to a page that consolidates all the activity you have recorded that day.
The fields for the Bike Rides page are tied in with the Favourite Fields that you use on the Add Bike Ride page (in fact you may notice the columns appear, then disappear and reappear again as it goes through the logic to display the right ones!), the aim being to make it as straightforward as possible to view the information that you’re interested in. Still on the ‘to do’ list is to give you a means of choosing the fields from the Bike Rides page, and decide whether you want to save those changes to your Favourite Fields.
You’ll notice with the Bike Rides and Fitness Metrics pages that they display all the data on one page, which may lead to a high initial wait time for some of you if you have lots of rides recorded. One of the next things I’ll be working on will be views for displaying one month at a time.
The other area that I’ve worked on for this release is displaying route information, in particular the maps that you’re uploading via your Garmin. As well as giving you a bigger map (depending on your screen size) than for the main website, the appropriate zoom level now gets calculated automatically so that the route should fit inside the map window when using the default Google Maps option. I’m also very pleased to be able to offer an Ordnance Survey alternative which you can select on the page for each route. I’ve not been able to get in working quite as nicely as the Google one in terms of selecting the zoom level, and I also want to disable the link when the route is outside the UK (i.e. no OS coverage), but nevertheless I thought you’d be interested to see it anyway. As well as this I’ll be looking at how to let you edit routes with both the Google and OS options.
Just to round up, there are a couple of other tweaks that I’ve made – one being to correct an oversight from the first release which was the lack of a datepicker on the Add Bike Ride form. That’s now been addressed and incorporated into the Add Fitness Metrics page as well. I’ve also added a bit of code to detect the width of your browser every time you go to a page and choose the page width accordingly. So far it switches between styles for 1024 and 1280 pixel page widths / screen resolutions.
Any feedback you have at all will be most welcome. The best way to send it is by commenting on this blog using the form below (if you’re logged in), but you can also email mail@mycycling.co.uk.
Comments
Pete (25/08/2009 21:41:00)
Thanks for the suggestion Nick. I've added a field to the next incremental release that I'm putting together called Weather Conditions, with options of Dry, Mixed, Wet and Very Wet. It's actually proving quite easy to add new fields and have it update all the right places (touch wood!), which is a very good sign compared to all of the different places I'd have had to update on the old site.
I'm going to try and bundle one or two other small improvements before making the release live, so it will probably be available either for the end of this week or the middle of next week.
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drumsmasher (24/08/2009 15:51:29)
Pete, congratulations on the new My Cycling!! Its really good and gives some great info. Would it be possible to add a "Wet or Dry" field to the log as this can make a lot of difference to ride speed? If not thats fine i'll just stick it in the ride comments box. Anyway, thanks and well done!