Progress

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We just did a release tonight with a couple dozen bug fixes and a few UI improvements.

For example, you can now navigate back and forth between the Run Overview and By Run page by using the calendar. When you click a month or a year from the By Run page, it’ll take you back to the Overview for that month or year. There’s also about a dozen improvements to the run import routines, and some minor UI improvements like being able to close dialogs by pressing the escape key.

Meanwhile there’s 2 big projects underway at Smashrun HQ.

The first and foremost is the Smashrun API. This has been a huge development effort, but is finally nearing completion (likely in the next few weeks). In the long run, this is going to make it easier for you to get your data in and out of Smashrun. And, eventually, it’s going make it easier to embed, share, and make use of your running data wherever and however you want.

The second project is the translations of the site into any language that we can find people willing to help us translate. This has been a massive job but, thanks to the generous efforts of some multi-lingual runners, Smashrun is starting to look pretty international. With tonight’s release, we just pushed all of the latest translated copy, so please let us know if you notice any problems and we’ll make sure they get sorted out.

Once the decks clear, there’s so much cool stuff in the works. Shoe tracker (finally), progress towards goal, dynamic run list, and of course more badges!

Lost in translation

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The translation of Smashrun to 18 new languages is off to a great start. Thanks to the efforts of a core group of Smashrunners, we’ve translated the badge award messages into French, Dutch and Chinese. And Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian and German are not far behind.

That said, we’ve really only just scratched the surface of the work that needs to be done. We’ve gotten a bit ahead of ourselves and added a new language selection drop down to the settings page. But, to be honest, it’s really just a way for you to help us spot bugs at this point. We’ve made an initial pass at localizing some values: timestamps and colors for example, but we’ll need a lot of help to see this project through. We’re ripping out the guts of Smashrun’s UI, mixing it up to support different languages, and then putting it back together again.

We’ve had a lot of long days and late nights this past week and changed a ton of code. And, if everything went well, then nothing should change. So, if you see something that went wrong, please let us know and we’ll sort it out as quickly as we can.

If you want to help make Smashrun available in your favorite language. Shoot us an email at hi@smashrun.com.. We still need all the help we can get.

Friends’ weekly scorecard

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Improving the friends drop-down

We’ve had several users in the past request that we add their total weekly distance on the friends drop-down. We’ve also had a few users request the ability to compare their weekly distance with the Smashrunners they follow. We added both. They might seem like minor additions, but both changes will hopefully encourage you to keep running!

Revised friends' drop-down

If you currently follow other Smashrun users, you’ll get a tooltip the next time you login telling you about the new and improved friends drop-down. If you’re running solo, here’s how it works:

  • Friends appear in the order of the most recent run.
  • The intensity of the color bar indicates how many more or fewer miles they ran than you did so far this week.

So, if your name is first on the list, then that means that you’ve run more recently than any of your friends have. And, if all of your friends have green bars next to their cards, then you’ve run more miles than any of your friends have so far this week. The total distance is calculated on a trailing 7-day period (so that includes today and 6 days back).

If any of your friends have not run at least once in the last 7 days, their stats will appear faded so you can focus more on those who ran recently.

A patch for a few Garmin users

We also included a patch for the Garmin importer. Summary stats should now match what you see on Garmin Connect. If not, please let us know so we can take a look at it!

New badge, beacon and weather

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A badge for the polyglots

For those who missed our post on Facebook and Twitter, Smashrun is currently working on translating the badges to multiple languages! It’s the first big step towards internationalizing the site and, soon after, we’ll tackle the trickier task of translating the main interface.

Translator Badge To acknowledge those who are helping us, we’ve created the Translator badge. The languages we’re currently translating include: Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese(Brazil), Serbian, and Spanish.

We can add more but, at the moment, we’re only adding the ones where we’ve got translators. If you’d like to contribute to a language, please send an email to hi@smashrun.com – we’ll have you set up and ready to go!

A new tool for diagnosing your imports

Our code base for evaluating the data integrity of different apps and devices is a beast. It looks for every possible way that your data can get messed up based on what we’ve seen in the past: time traveling imports, GPS teleportation, multiple dupes of the same trackpoint, large data gaps that just went walkabout – we mean everything. We’ve also been using those tools to diagnose problems when users report data issues. We’re giving you those exact same tools.

If something is wrong with your import, you’ll see a little beacon show up in your toolbox. Click on it and it will let you know what adjustments we’ve made to clean up the data. And, like the rest of the toolbox components, the beacon is hidden from anyone viewing your runs.

Beacon

Weather data migration

We’ve given it some thought. Err… lots of thought, and we decided we’re moving everyone to the paid weather service provider that we had previously used only for our Pro users. We discovered that there were just too many gaps in the free weather service. So, we’re moving everyone to Forecast.io which is far more comprehensive. We’ll now import weather for runs within the past 3 days, so if you ran within that timeframe we should be able to get your weather (pro users will continue to have weather for their runs backfilled for their entire run history).

More fixes! Because we love fixing stuff!

– Tweaks to the pause detection

– GPX import failures due to erroneous values within trackpoints should now import

– Fixes for the “In it” badges and the Ultramarathon badge (fixed after your next import)

– FB auto-publish for imports via email should now work

– Actually, import via email notification should also dismiss on first try (let us know if not!)

Editing weather

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Edit weather

You can now edit your weather for your run.

And a few fixes:

  • Improved our pause detection algorithm for apps that don’t mark off pauses in files
  • Pro user goal target now shows the target for end of day today, not yesterday (which was really silly)
  • Added several additional calculated values to the Pro section of the run info modal: purdy points, METS, overall average hill grade, average grade of just uphill sections, percent of the run that was flat/uphill/downhill, maximum hill grade.

New shortcuts on the by run page

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No more flipping back between the run list and the by run page. Woohoo!

Run toolbox

We’ve added some new shortcuts just under the calendar so that you can now easily do all of the following directly from the run view:

  • Publish a run to Facebook or Twitter
  • Edit a run’s details
  • Delete a run
  • View extra details about a run

Weather Updates

Weather on newly imported data should be a bit more accurate now. We’ve fixed some timezone related bugs and we’re also now interpolating the temperature if it falls between 2 readings. So if, for example, you start your ran at 7:15am and finish at 7:45am we’ll take the midpoint of your run (7:30) and get the 2 nearest available readings. These are usually by the hour, but may be much longer depending on where you are. So, we’d grab the 7am temperature and the 8am temperature and since 7:30 is 50% of the way between the two we’d split the difference. If the available weather readings are few and far between or if there’s a sudden change in temperature this can actually make a pretty big difference.

Once we’re sure these changes are working we’ll rerun them historically. There’s definitely some limitations of the weather services we’re using, but hoping this iteration should be much closer to matching reality.

Introducing Smashweather

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Weather icons

Weather is a part of every run. You may slog through a long, midday run on a steamy August day and wonder why you even bothered. Or perhaps, on the first day of spring after a long winter, that same sun might inspire you to turn a long slow distance into a joyous fartlek. Or an approaching storm, may force you to run it out, only to get caught up in it, soaked through to the bone, leaving you overwhelmed with a glorious joie de vivre, suddenly aware of the natural world and your own glorious track star in training place in it all.

So it seems like we should put it somewhere on your By Run page. For now, we’re using free data sources for the last 30 days of history, and a paid data source for our pro user’s for the last 5 years. It’s actually a pretty mean feat, figuring out if it happened to rain on the particular patch of the planet that you were running across, on the particular hour you were running across it, four and half years ago. If you look at it that way, the data is really not bad. However, I think we might have to build some sort of edit weather functionality at some point so you can correct it when it’s wrong.

The global standards for weather types are super comprehensive. Sure 99% of the weather you might ever run in will fall neatly in the sunny to rainy spectrum you see on your local TV weather report, but what if you find yourself running in (or more likely away from, at top speed) an approaching sandstorm? Fear not! We’ve got you covered! (Well, at least, the reporting-after-the-fact bit. As far as the escaping-getting-sandblasted bit goes, I’m afraid you’re on your own.)

Also, if your run has a significant heat index (usually humidity over 50% and temp > 80F/27C) or a significant wind chill, a small triangle will appear next to the temperature that you can use to cycle your weather to view that effect.

Almost everyone should now be getting their runs updated with new data as you import them (provided they’re not more than 30 days old). And we’ve got a process running now, slowly slogging through all the back data of our pro users over the last 5 or so years, and updating the weather where it’s available. It’s looking like some locations might be having trouble. It just depends on if you’re near a supported weather station or not. We’ll be on the lookout for new data sources, and see if we can improve the data quality for everyone.

To provide the weather data, we’re currently using a combination of weather sources including: ForecastIO and OpenWeatherMap

Also, in this release we fixed the following issues:

  • Safari browser edit run bug
  • Issues with streaks on the one year view
  • Fixes for some extra pause issues with Garmin runs

June Patch

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Last night’s patch should address all of the Nike import issues that some users have been having recently. If your initial sync doesn’t work, please try setting a new minimum import date within settings > synced devices > then sync again.

Email us at hi@smashrun.com if you are still getting an error.

Other fixes included in this patch are listed below:

  • Restored the ability to view split data for HR, cadence, & elevation in the Pro Map
  • Negative average pace due to corrupt Garmin data is fixed
  • Editing a run should no longer take you to a run other than the one you just edited
  • Improved tracking for user referrals
  • Pro users can view the colorpicker photo as well (and there’s a new one!) > to view the default pro colorpicker, just exit the colorpicker photo and open it again

For iSmoothRun users: TCX exports that were not importing previously should now work. Some exports from iSmoothRun were missing GPS coordinates early in the run, which triggered an error when Smashrun tried to parse it.

If you’re using iSmoothRun and are still getting an error while trying to import a TCX file into Smashrun, you should give these troubleshooting steps a try (courtesy of iSmoothRun):

  1. Phone’s settings > General > Background refresh > ON and ON for iSmoothRun
  2. Phone’s settings > Privacy > Location services > iSmoothRun > ON
  3. iSmoothRun Settings > Advanced settings > GPS threshold should be 120-150 meters

Nike import error

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The latest changes on Nike’s site have recently affected certain user accounts, which is causing Nike imports to fail on Smashrun. For those who are affected, we have been informed that Nike Support is currently doing manual fixes on an account-by-account basis.

From what we can tell, the cause appears to be one of three things: (1) the user is unable to log in to Nike’s website with correct credentials, (2) the user gets an error page when trying to view run activities or upon logging in, or (3) the user is unable to load their All Time activity view of their runs on Nike.

If you’re unable to view your stats on Nike’s site because your profile is broken or your activities are not loading, neither can we.

Here’s how to check if your import error is related: log in to Nike’s site > click on Activity > click ALL.

2014-06-11_1844 2014-06-11_1845

If it loads the map with all your runs, send us an email – we’ll need to investigate further.

If the loading screen just keeps trying to load, then it’s probably failing.

  • Tweet @NikeSupport and, apparently, they can fix it within the hour
    (thanks, Cecilia!)
  • Or call Nike Support at 800-379-6453 and they can fix it as well
    (thanks, Jonathan!)

Laps and Improved Segment Selection

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We’ve made a couple of recent changes to Smashrun’s Pro Map!

  • You can now view laps within the Pro Map if you upload a run from a TCX file*
  • Switching between map filters no longer resets pace buckets/ HR zones etc
  • Mouse over filter will only show the overlay for the selected segment
  • Selecting segments, splits, or laps can be reset
*This is really the first step towards broader support for lap data. Two things to note: (1) laps will not be retroactively added to previous runs imported as a TCX file and (2) if you’ve got more than 28 laps, it’ll overflow from the container so… we’ll fix that.
Retain selection between filters Reset splits, laps, and segments

We also included a small section at the bottom of the settings > sync page where you can tweet at some of your favorite apps/devices to help us convince them to integrate with Smashrun!