New features and fixes

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Everyone’s running is different, so each persons running stats can expose unique problems. Over the past couple months we’ve had dozens of bug reports from our users. In this latest release we’ve hopefully fixed most of the major ones. We’ve also added a few nice features and tweaks, they’re small things, but they’re things that we think you’ll like.

  • An enhanced battery meter for Nike+ users .Just click on the battery icon in the header to see a report of all the Nike sensors you’ve used in the past.

  • An enhanced PR section that includes a separate “official” flag for runs that you’ve tagged with “Race”. You’ll probably want to edit in your official time for the race as well. (Although this does lead to questions of distance ran vs. official distance for when your stuck in a big pack taking wide turns).

  • The morning/afternoon run pie chart now breaks out days in which you ran both.

  • On some badges where it makes sense, you can click on the badge to see how close you’ve come to getting the bade. The running streak, days logged in a row, and miles run in a week/month badges now show your records and when those records occurred.

  • We’ve also taken some steps to improve the internationalization of the site. Date formats, time formats, and kilometer/mile support should be working correctly throughout the site.

Happy Running,

Chris

PS.

Special thanks to Peter F, and the dozens of other users whose screenshots and detailed reports made our work a thousand times easier.

Tweet your 2011 running stats

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So last week: I posted my 2011 running report on Quantified Self’s LinkedIn group and got a message from someone who said I should also tweet it. Of course, that was easier said than done, especially because my post was so darn long:

 

 

 

I tested a few tweet variations and eventually we settled on something like Joe Cullin‘s – yeah!

 

 

 

Consider it our first step towards many more tweeting action for your sharing preferences. Keep an eye on that bouncy bird on the right… one day, that little guy will move on to doing bigger and better things within Smashrun….. but, for now, he’s sticking around so you can tweet your 2011 running stats.

Nike+ troubles / new functionality

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Nike+ has been going up and down all day again today. Lots of people trying out the sensors they got in their stockings for Christmas, I’m guessing. Expect some difficulty uploading your Nike runs until they resolve this issue.

We’re going to take this opportunity to push out a new release. Smashrun will be down for approximately 10-15mins, starting at 1:45pm

UPDATE 1:50pm

The update is now live. This includes a few small fixes, and a new Tweet your 2011 stats button stuck on the edge. It’s wiggling just now, so you’ll notice it, but we’ll turn that off in a week or so, or lose it all together if you guys hate it.

What do you think?

Facebook patches

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We’ve just put in a fix for some of the Facebook issues we’ve been having. There’s a few changes to how Facebook works now that you’ll want to note.

  • Relink your Facebook account. If you log in with Facebook this will be done automatically, but if not you’ll want to go to Settings -> Facebook -> Connect to Facebook. You’ll need to do this to see publish your runs, or see your Facebook friends on Smashrun
  • Follow your Facebook friends On the Facebook settings page you’ll see your Facebook friends who are on Smashrun. Just click their photos and their stats will appear in your friend list. Follow relationships are one way like they are in Twitter.

Hopefully this will fix the problems we’ve been having as Facebook makes changes to their API, but if you notice any strange behavior, please shoot us an email at hi@smashrun.com and we’ll start fixing it right away.

Facebook troubles

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Facebook has made some changes which are causing some user’s to have trouble logging into Smashrun with their Facebook credentials. We’re working on a fix and should have one in place shortly. In the meantime, you should be able to login with either your Nike password or your Smashrun password. If this doesn’t work shoot us an email at hi@smashrun.com and we’ll sort you out.

Really sorry for the inconvenience.

Goodbye Brooklyn. Hola Chile.

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Building a website like Smashrun on nights and weekends, is to put it mildly, exceedingly challenging. There’s a huge gap between what we want Smashrun to be, and what I’ve had time to code, and it’s been a daily struggle to come up with ways to bridge that gap.

A couple of months ago we heard about a program called Start-Up Chile. It’s a pretty incredible premise. The Chilean government is offering entrepreneurs a 40k USD grant to move their start-up to Chile for a period of at least 6 months. In return they ask for no equity, but only that you actively engage the tech community in Chile and share what you know. And, of course, if you find the environment their suitable to your business you are welcome, but by no means required, to keep your business based there as you grow.

Well, that sounded like a pretty good deal to us, so we applied, got in, and yesterday Jacklyn and I arrived in Santiago, Chile.  In a few days, Steve is set to arrive to help us get up and running, and then the real excitement begins — working one job. We’ll be throwing some serious man hours at Smashrun, and maybe if we’re lucky we might even be able to find some money for a bright spark junior coder to chip in.

Sure, things will be a little tight but, this is hugely exciting stuff for the Smashrun team!  With a little luck, in the next few months we’ll be enabling more devices and creating exciting new charts, badges, and social features.

Now… if only I can make a little time to get a run in.

Anyone got any good recommendations for running routes in Santiago? Those hills in the distance seem fairly manageable…

New badges in the making…

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After reading 87 beta surveys, 24 emails, and too many tweets to count in the past 72 hours…it’s pretty unanimous: the badges are cool and Smashrun needs more of them!

Luckily, we’ve been working with an awesome designer/ illustrator who’s been knocking out some newly minted badges. We’re not yet sure about the release date, but the next set will focus on cumulative times, cumulative distances, variations in pacing, and periodization. Here are just a few examples of what we’re currently working on…

As always, feel free to comment and let us know if you’ve got some milestone ideas and we’ll jot them down as we create more!

1:00am Saturday night – release time!

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Another exciting weekend here at SmashrunHQ. We’ve been rushing to fix a host of registration, ranking and Nike sync related issues that have materialized recently. If you had trouble importing your runs, you’ll want to go ahead and give it a try again.

We’ve fixed at least a half-dozen edge cases. Some of them were really painfully esoteric.

  • Who knew Nike runs from early 2010 in Australia have invalid time zone signatures? -21 hours GMT is not a valid time zone guys. It’s +/-14 hours only.
  • And how about trying to parse a time string like “9:08”. It seems JavaScript treats 08 as an octal value – an invalid octal value. So that meant you could book a run that was 9:06 minutes long or 9:07,  but try 9:08 or 9:09 and you were out of luck. That’s fixed (we hope!).

While that’s all well and good. It’s not very exciting if you haven’t been having trouble. So we threw in at least one solid improvement. The bottom of the run overview section used to contain “Best times for most commonly run distances.” That was a bit silly. It’s now called “Personal Records” and it contains links to your best 1mi/5k/10/half marathon/marathon times. And we threw in a nice little sparkline to boot.

 

If you run into any problems, please shoot us a line at hi@smashrun.com. We’ll be doing really frequent releases until all these issues are sorted out. And then it’ll be time to work on some more exciting things, like: new badges and community features, and charts, and additional device imports, oh my!

 

Goodbye closed beta

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I’m looking out my window at the brownstones of Fort Greene thinking how beautiful the weather is today, and how great it’d be to take a run up to Prospect Park, but before that I’ve got a few really exciting items on my to do list.

The view out my window

1) Write Smashrun’s inaugural blog post –  Introduce yourself, describe our new release and what’s in the works.

This one shouldn’t take too long to take care of…

Hi, I’m Chris, and I’m a designer, developer, and part of the small team responsible for Smashrun.  This blog is part of our latest release, which brings our closed beta to an end, and clears the decks for our official launch. Our new home page has some shiny new features:  a snazzy video (nice job Jacklyn!), some quotes we solicited from users (thanks for the compliments!), and an about section with a new FAQ and some info about why and how Smashrun came to be, and some details about the team (Jacklyn, Steve, and I).

None of that is terribly exciting for you if you’re already a regular user, but it’ll help make sure you’re in good company. What’s more exciting is that we’ve knocked out a bunch of bugs, and improved the reliability of the Nike import. We’ve also been working on creating another 40 badges. There’s a nice mix of easy and challenging ones, we’re going to shoot for having these out to you sometime next month.

2) Submit finished application to Startup Chile

We’re applying to Startup Chile. The Chilean government is sponsoring a unique program whereby select startups will be given a $40,000 grant to participate in a 6 month entrepreneurial exchange in Santiago, Chile. The opportunity is pretty incredible so we’re going to give it a shot.

3) Launch new homepage

If you’re reading this then that one’s done.

3) Go for my 18th consecutive run day in a row.

I’m shooting to be the first to earn the 50/50 badge.  Last time I was in the 30s when I got the flu and threw off my schedule, but this time I’m going strong. You can track my progress on my run page. And sometime in the near future we’ll add some social features, so you can encourage me/give me a hard time when I miss a day.