Garmin Uploads

pleader

Is anyone having any problems uploading to the garmin site today?
I've been trying to upload tonight's spin. It's taking ages to upload and when it does it tells me that it was completed by a different user.

edit: They've just taken site down for "maintenance"

ednwireland

ahh thats why mine wont upload - thanks

Tenzor07

Looks like the layout has been changed on the upload page, new buttons etc..

Idleater

ednwireland wrote: »

ahh thats why mine wont upload - thanks

Take this opportunity to have a look at strava. That's what I did this morning. The maintenance pictures are good though.

ednwireland

Idleater wrote: »

Take this opportunity to have a look at strava. That's what I did this morning. The maintenance pictures are good though.

no, no i rather be logged in in norwegian, lifes too boring normally

Norwayviking

ednwireland wrote: »

no, no i rather be logged in in norwegian, lifes too boring normally

I know the feeling,lol;)

cantalach

Just switch to Strava and forget about Garmin Connect. Strava continues to move ahead with great new features (some released just in the last 24-36 hours) while Garmin Connect increasingly lags behind. It's clear that Garmin are more interested in selling the devices than in providing a good website with which to use the devices.

ashleey

And since I installed lion garmin training centre interprets the files from the edge all wrong. It put me down for 16000 metres of climbing in the tour Kilkenny. Ran it on windows on the same machine and it was 1000m as per what the actual edge said on the day. Garmin software us rubbish anyway.

on_the_nickel

cantalach wrote: »

Just switch to Strava and forget about Garmin Connect. Strava continues to move ahead with great new features (some released just in the last 24-36 hours) while Garmin Connect increasingly lags behind. It's clear that Garmin are more interested in selling the devices than in providing a good website with which to use the devices.

Strava integrates with Garmins, right?

I've just started using Strava on the iPhone but find it eats the battery so only track parts of my spins, and also find some of the data completely inaccurate.

I'm in the States in a few weeks and thinking of buying a Garmin - am I right in thinking I can continue to use it with Strava, and that this will iron out (most of) the data inaccuracies?

cantalach

on_the_nickel wrote: »

Strava integrates with Garmins, right?

Yes.

I've just started using Strava on the iPhone but find it eats the battery so only track parts of my spins, and also find some of the data completely inaccurate.

The iPhone and Android apps for Strava are sh1te. They are very inaccurate, constantly lose data, crash, etc. To be fair, it is actually quite difficult to develop a position logging app for a smartphone, for technical reasons I won't go into here.

I'm in the States in a few weeks and thinking of buying a Garmin - am I right in thinking I can continue to use it with Strava, and that this will iron out (most of) the data inaccuracies?

Yes. Using Strava with a Garmin is a completely different experience.

on_the_nickel

Thank you. Will deffo get myself a Garmin so.

Cookie_Monster

Idleater wrote: »

Take this opportunity to have a look at strava. That's what I did this morning.

looks good actually, flicking around the site now...

pleader

Just looking at the Strava site as well. Looks good from what I've seen.

markcroninbsc

cantalach wrote: »

Yes.
To be fair, it is actually quite difficult to develop a position logging app for a smartphone, for technical reasons I won't go into here..

no its not. its the easiest thing you can do on a smartphone. I develop a blackberry app gpspeedometer, its as accurate as any garmin and can run for about 9 hours on a full charge. a good few of my users have emailed me and showed me links on ebay where they sold their garmins and just used my app instead.
you can get other apps for iphone that'll run for about 6 hours and be accurate. cant think of the names of them now but i think one of the better ones is cycle meter??
androids are just ****e tho and theres too many people making ****e apps on there but its not hard to make a proper one. people just dont bother.

cantalach

markcroninbsc wrote: »

no its not. its the easiest thing you can do on a smartphone. I develop a blackberry app gpspeedometer, its as accurate as any garmin and can run for about 9 hours on a full charge.

In many ways, you have just beautifully illustrated my point! Getting accuracy equivalent to a Garmin requires a major compromise: reducing battery life to just 9 hours. This relationship between accuracy and power consumption is the technical bit I was trying to avoid boring everyone with! 9 hours is frankly pathetic. I have had many long days touring on the bike where the ride time has been longer than that. More to the point, I have been on multi-day tours where power has not been available to recharge phones at night. This isn't a problem with a Garmin but if I rely on a smartphone-based logging app do I just have to accept that I will only have data for the first 9 hours?

In any case, even if the power/accuracy relationship wasn't a factor, the location APIs on the BB are far from easy to use. When APIs are difficult to use, this inevitably leads to poor quality apps. I was a full time BB developer for two years, roughly up until the end of 2009. Now, I haven't been following the API changes in OS6 and perhaps things have moved on a bit since 2009, but back in the OS4.6-5.0 days, you had to use the JSR-179 Location API to talk to the GPS hardware. By any stretch, this is a 'fussy' API with poor documentation when it comes to describing exactly how to implement the LocationListener interface. I seem to recall, for example, that the API can occasionally send the application an "I've completely lost the plot" notification. On receipt of this the application has to completely re-initialise the location API from scratch. That's total bullsh1t - app developers shouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. Again, perhaps this has all improved in the 20+ months since I used it. But I've just done a search for LocationListener on the BB Java dev forum and if the number of hits is anything to go by, this doesn't appear to be the case.

markcroninbsc

Ah well now what i meant was 9 hours is more or less the minimum battery life ive seen with the app. ive got a bb torch and it'll run for about 12 hours. on a bb bold you'll get longer because of the screen size. that 9-12 hours is if you have it on the handle bars with the backlight always on. if i put it just in my pocket like most people do with the phone then you can turn the screen off and it'll last for over 20 hours. never really tried how long it'll actually go for. isnt a garmin only somethin like 12 - 15 hours anyway? most people only do 3 or 4 hours on the bike anyway so its not really a problem.

about the location listener being complicated, fiddly, undocumented; thats basic stuff really and since os 4.2 a sample app has come with the sdk that if copied n pasted would work grand. and theres really not much to the api to document but ive found blackberries documentation to be spot on.

there is no relationship to batterylife and accuracy. the battery life problem for most apps is developers being messy and too lazy to use the api and instead make loads of calls to google's api's, this always online aproach or using brightly coloured backgrounds on a screen always on apps is the real problem.

the hardest part about these apps isnt using the api's its processing the data once youve got it to calculate accurate distances/gradients/times (you get speed direct from the api) and thats where most apps go wrong. altitude is a big one but my apps got a built in correction table for that

cantalach wrote: »

In many ways, you have just beautifully illustrated my point! Getting accuracy equivalent to a Garmin requires a major compromise: reducing battery life to just 9 hours. This relationship between accuracy and power consumption is the technical bit I was trying to avoid boring everyone with! 9 hours is frankly pathetic. I have had many long days touring on the bike where the ride time has been longer than that. More to the point, I have been on multi-day tours where power has not been available to recharge phones at night. This isn't a problem with a Garmin but if I rely on a smartphone-based logging app do I just have to accept that I will only have data for the first 9 hours?

In any case, even if the power/accuracy relationship wasn't a factor, the location APIs on the BB are far from easy to use. When APIs are difficult to use, this inevitably leads to poor quality apps. I was a full time BB developer for two years, roughly up until the end of 2009. Now, I haven't been following the API changes in OS6 and perhaps things have moved on a bit since 2009, but back in the OS4.6-5.0 days, you had to use the JSR-179 Location API to talk to the GPS hardware. By any stretch, this is a 'fussy' API with poor documentation when it comes to describing exactly how to implement the LocationListener interface. I seem to recall, for example, that the API can occasionally send the application an "I've completely lost the plot" notification. On receipt of this the application has to completely re-initialise the location API from scratch. That's total bullsh1t - app developers shouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. Again, perhaps this has all improved in the 20+ months since I used it. But I've just done a search for LocationListener on the BB Java dev forum and if the number of hits is anything to go by, this doesn't appear to be the case.

triggermortis

my iphone struggles to last 9 hours on standby....

Might look at strava though, new Garmin user and I haven't had any issues with their site so far

markcroninbsc

triggermortis wrote: »

my iphone struggles to last 9 hours on standby....

Might look at strava though, new Garmin user and I haven't had any issues with their site so far

Ah you need to get yourself a blackberry, far better phones. Some cool new ones comin out in the next few months.

Ridewithgps.com is another good option for garmin users. They've a nice site and the 2 fellas that run it are sound. I did a bit of work with them integratin my app with their site. They're very good if you want some new feature or anything added to the site, if its a good idea they're good to take things on board. Good support if your havin problems