New notables

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We added a few new notables with the release this morning. These are mostly just to support badges we have planned for the future, but are kind of interesting in and of themselves.

New notables for all users

Before sunrise – started and finish your run before the sun comes up

During sunrise – started your run before sunrise and finish after

After sunset – started your run after the sun has set.

During sunset – start your run before sunset and finish after

Full moon run – ran during or after sunset when the moon was full

Winter solstice – ran on the Winter solstice

Summer solstice – ran on the Summer solstice

New notables for Pro users only

Warmest run in [1m/3m/6m/1y/ever]

Coldest run in [1m/3m/6m/1y/ever]

Other Pro Notables: Fast Start, Fast Finish, Highest elevation, Greatest hill difficulty, Most elevation gained/lost, Highest/lowest speed variability, Best performance, Highest max cadence, Highest average cadence, Most negative splits.

Progress Towards Goal

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Setting a goal has always been the first step towards better training, but tracking your progress towards it provides the guidepost that will lead you through your toughest training days.

The challenge with goal setting is that even the most conservative training plan can fall through, but knowing how far you have to run to stay on track means you’re more likely to reach your goal(s). Even more importantly, knowing how much distance you can run per week to catch up by any future date makes it much easier for you to adapt. This is why we built Progress Towards Goal.

This feature helps you answer the questions:

  • “How much do I have to run every week to be on target with my 2014 goal?”
  • “How much do I have to run per day this month to be on track by November 30th?”
  • “How do I stay on target even when I take a couple of rest days?”

To view Progress Towards Goal, Smashrun Pro users can now mouse over the bar graph of a current month or year-long goal and click on ‘Show Progress’.

Show Progress

This will take you to the Goals section, which you can also access by clicking on Analyze from Overview.

Progress Towards Goals

Your list of current goals will show up on the top left with your past goals underneath it, and you can view all of your historical goals with its corresponding details.

The yellow line graph indicates your current progress, whereas the grey line graph shows the most direct path to your goal.

The x-axis shows the days you ran. The color gradient indicates how far you ran – the darker it is, the shorter the total distance you ran that day relative to other runs for that month. The brighter it is, the longer the total distance for that day. You can mouse over the individual runs to see how much distance you covered that day and clicking on it will take you to the corresponding By Run page.

Mouse-over x-axis

When you mouse over the line graphs, you’ll see how far ahead or behind you are from the most direct path to your goal, as of that date. So think of the grey line as your guidepost. You can be above or below that line at any point in time, but staying close to it means you’re more likely to reach your goal.

If you’re behind, you can mouse over any date in the future to see how much distance you have to run per week/per day to get back on track by that date.

Catch up by today Catch up by tomorrowProgress towards goal on track

Naturally, you’re not expected to run everyday. The great thing about Progress Towards Goal is that it will automatically recalculate your different paths to help you reach your goal, regardless of how many miles or how many days you run each week.

So rest when you need to, run when you can. Progress Towards Goal can always tell you what you need to know to stay on track, so you don’t have to do the math in your head.

With the holidays approaching we’re all going to need all the help we can get sticking to our goals. Hopefully this and the other Smashrun Pro features will help keep you on track.

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