Sale / Fund drive / Garmin Auto-Sync

UPDATE

The response from everyone has been truly astounding. We’ve already hit our goal, so we’re dropping the donate button – we’re really blown away by the support we received. We’ll keep the sale running to give everyone a chance. Thank you to everyone. We’re super excited to make this a reality.

One last thing. We added FIT support yesterday (mouse over gear in upper right and select import file). This is a prerequisite for the new Garmin API, so if you get a chance to import a test run or two it’d be great to get some feedback/bug reports. For most watches, a FIT file is used to represent the raw data as recorded by the watch, so it’s almost always going to be the best format to import.

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Lately we’ve been spending a great deal of time working around Garmin synchronization issues. We sync with Garmin Connect, but we’re not an official Garmin API partner. Official partners pay $5,000 to get files pushed directly from Garmin watches. Thus far, we’ve resisted this route both out of principle and shallow pockets.  But it’s become clear that we’re not in a position to do so much longer. The method we’re currently using has gotten increasingly buggy recently, and it threatens to disappear entirely. We’re going to need to suck it up and make a change.

We’re not a big funded startup. We’re just Jacklyn, Chris and Steve, and we could use your help getting the cash together. So, from now until we raise the needed funds, we’re going to slash the price of Smashrun Pro by 25%. If you’ve thought about buying a Pro Membership for yourself or someone else, then now is a great time. Once we connect to the official Garmin API, Smashrun Pro users will never have to click the sync button again. And, of course, when/if/probably Garmin removes their “unofficial” API, we’ll enable auto-sync for all users.

A few other items:

• You can now  import FIT files.  It’s beta, not yet rigorously tested, so if you encounter any problems at all, email us the file and we’ll sort it out.

• The latest version of Garmin Express appears to not be sending duration to Garmin Connect, you’ll notice that your speed graph is missing on Garmin Connect, and since we’re downstream it’s affecting us as well. This resulted in some messed up Garmin imports. We’ve just put a workaround in place, so that we’re using the time of day instead and so far that seems ok. If you’ve had some runs affected this week, you can fix it by importing the TCX file, or shooting us a quick email with a link to the run and we’ll fix it.

• If you’re a new user from Nike then you may have been affected by a bug that has prevented many older runs from being imported. We just put a fix in place but, to get your older runs, you’re going to have to do a full reimport. If and only if you’re missing runs, you can do an emergency full reimport by setting a far past minimum import date, and then clicking the Nike sync button 3 times,  one after the other. The 3rd time will trigger a full reimport.

• If you’ve got your user profile set to Private, you can now share your badges and run stats on Facebook. We generate a url with a unique key which unlocks either the badge or stats page, and share that.

UPDATE: Some people asked for a Donate button, so we added one below. (You guys are awesome!)

(We hit the goal, and removed the donate button I can’t believe how quickly and how generously this was received. Excited to start hacking away and building!)