Some of you might have noticed a little change in the TrackRecord points system. We’ve decided to boost strength exercises and give them a more appropriate 30 points per hours. After all, you can get quite a tough training out of 1h, and we felt that 20 points per hour did not do justice compared to points vs. physical challenge of a 1h run or bike ride.

Also, stay tuned for a major update on Wear&Tear, the built-in tracking system of sports equipment. Be assured, we have noticed a few shortcomings of the current implementation and will release a re-worked management system in the next days or weeks. Until then, if you are new to TR and want to track your equipment, here is how you do it.

The TR Team

Opening up track-record.org to the public has kept us busy for a little bit. We won’t lie, occasional bugs did appear, but were exterminated in light speed. With the sudden onset of winter, some of us cut down on training and instead spent a few hours on pepping up the usability of TrackRecord. The visible results are:

• In the Calendar, you can now manage which of your friends are visible (so-called tracked users) in an easy and intuitive fashion. Change order by dragging and dropping rows, remove friends by clicking on the red X next to their photo, and add friends that are not yet in your Calendar by clicking on Add User at the bottom row.
  
  
  
  
• In your Profile, you can now set your maximum heart rate. If set, we will compute the average heart rate in exercises as a percentage of your maximum heart rate in addition to the absolute value.
  
  
   

We have made the move - track-record.org is now public! But that’s not all - we have made some major changes to the platform. Here are some of the bigger changes in a nutshell:

• We have changed the login in to email, and changed the routes. NOTE: you must now login with your email


• We have removed the old friendship model, and instead now only distinguish between followed and tracked users. Followed users will appear in your news where you can follow all their activity. Tracked users are your virtual training partners - they are the users you find in the Calendar view.


• In the tracking calendar, the order is now changed by drag and drop. To initiate, move the mouse over a user and click & hold the mouse. Now you can move this user in the calendar. Your user is displayed in the top of the calendar, and can not be moved.


• To add a new tracked user, go to Profile, Social and choose between “following” and “tracking”.


• A nifty new feature is to rollout within the week: Tracks. Using the tracks tool, you can save your favorite running and biking tracks. Go to tracking, and click on the second icon in the sub navigation on the right. To create a track click on ‘Record Track’ and position pointers by clicking on the map. Save your track under a name, with a comment. As a bonus, you also get an elevation chart under the map. You can move your mouse over the elevation chart to see the elevation at a given point on your route. Finally, when you add an exercise, you can associate it with a track making adding an exercise a breeze.

The careful eye will notice some other changes here and there - but we won’t bore you with the details. However, here is also a small word of caution: this was fairly large rollout with a number of structural changes to the app. You may encounter some bumps here and there. 

Just so you know: every time you see an error, we are notified and are all over it.

Please feel free to share you thoughts and ideas in the comment section.

The TR Team

Hi there.

I know we have been off the map a bit, but we have been busy in the mean time.

We are only a couple of days away from the first public beta release of TR. We have already invited a couple of fresh users, and are busy cleaning up the stage. Note that for the time being, only a couple of selected users can invite new users - but keep your eyes pealed, because some day in the nearer future you will notice a new invitation field (which you are heavily encouraged to make use of). And that’s not all: besides invites and bug extermination, we are already working on some useful new features, so be on the watch.

Happy tracking!

the TR team

After boosting the site’s performance, we’ve focused on improving accessibility to frequently used features in trackrecord.

• In News, it is now possible to filter for certain events: text messages (blog posts and comments), exercise submissions, or the addition of competitions. Moreover, we’ve noticed that some users like to do “mass submission” of exercises, adding all exercises of several days at once. Thus, we’ve now changed the way these events are shown, making these news post less obtrusive and more concise.
  
   
  
   
• If you track many of your friends, your calendar view can get muddled. We’ve reworked the presentation of users in the calendar, adding his or her avatar next to the name.
  
   
  
   
• The User Live Search has been changed logically as well as visually. We hope you can navigate to other users more easily now.
  
   

As you might have noticed, we have recently put application performance on our agenda. Profiling with the help of a great service, New Relic, revealed that some requests took 2 seconds or longer to complete.

It turns out we can do better than that. We’ve reworked our code behind the most frequently visited parts of the website, including News, Profile, Calendar, King of the Hill, and Interval Charts.

We hope you enjoy browsing trackrecord.

Today, we present changes to the Tracking Interface and Wear&Tear.

In Tracking, we replaced most of the text links with icons to make the interface more intuitive and visually accessible. Moreover, we have styled the popup windows to make them look really sexy!

As part of Tracking, Wear&Tear also profits from the revised interface. In addition, you now have full control over your gear: Two more functions, make parent and move child, were introduced which allow you to manipulate the parent/child status of your objects

• In the calendar, in order to add a new exercise, it is now possible to click at the corresponding spot in your row. The emerging form has pre-set date and discipline.
  
• To make the news less cluttered, we have condensed their appearance in the News and collapse exercises that were done on the same day.
  
• In the profile, we have added a new feature. It is still in alpha status, but the idea is to represent your training frequency and points per week. We’d like to smooth this out and extend it - please let us know what you think.
  
• Tear and wear has a new icon.
  
• In Blogs, it is now possible to embed videos from youtube and friends.
• In the profile, we replaced the home icon by the picture of the user. This was to make it more obvious whose profile you are currently viewing.
• Bug fix: You couldn’t add a comment on the exercise page.

Minutes ago we just rolled out a nifty new feature… get this: now you can track not only your personal athletic progress, but also your gear and sports equipment …!! 

For each discipline, you can add objects like your bike, running shoes, or swim goggles. By associating these with your exercises, you are then able to track their usage and replace outworn items in due time. Once you physically replaced items, you can retire them to save their stats for history.

Note that objects can have children, i.e. your bike might have children like a chain or bar tape. Objects that can be used in different contexts, such as your wheel set in different bikes, should not be added as a child to one of your bikes, since children are always associated with only one parent and are added to an exercise once the parent object has been linked to it.

To minimize the amount of input required to track your items, you can set your favorite equipment to AutoAdd. Items on AutoAdd will automatically be associated with any exercise of that discipline you create. If you add a new exercise and have AutoAdd items for a specific discipline, you will be informed in the exercise form with a tooltip.

If you want to edit the associated items, navigate to exercise show.

More cool new stuff in the queue… until then, Happy tracking!

We’ve added many small improvements to smooth out the user experience. These include, among other things:

• The calendar has been polished and an additional column has been added which sums up the performance of the week.
  

• On the News Site there is a new sidebar that shows your invites into groups and friend requests.
  
  

• We’ve put both heatmaps behind a new icon in the side navigation.
  
  

• Notifications are displayed on top of the website.
  
  

• The exercise form now accepts both comma (“,”) and dot (“.”) to indicate decimal numbers in the distance field, and duration in hours can be specified as a time stamp in the format of hours:minutes:seconds

• The list of upcoming friend’s birthdays has been cleaned and reduced to a relevant time frame of 2 months ahead

You may have noticed that TR was offline, or unusable, for roughly four hours yesterday. Sorry for that; we are currently implementing back-end routines for smoothly updating the application. The idea is that we can push bug-fixes, new features etc with minimal effort and minimize downtime. The result was downtime… go figure. While we are more then pleased that users actually noticed the downtime (and inquired via email), we are also a tad disappointed that users were able to notice (read: that updating the back-end was so bumpy). But keep in mind that TR is at an early beta stage: you may experience some bumbs here and there as we try to stabilize the setup. We promise, for the near future, to set up a notification system and schedule downtime. Until we are there, we will post scheduled downtime here. 

It’s been only 1.5 weeks since we have launched trackrecord, but it was enough time for us to work over some of the tracking features.

Interval and KingoftheHill Charts now display kilometers (or hours for strength exercises) in addition to the points to make these summaries more intuitive.

Changes in the Calendar and the Heatmaps are presented below.

Hi there.

This blog is to keep you up to date with newly added features and major revisions in TR. We would love to hear back from you, our users, and appreciate any comments. After all, we want to make TR into something fun that helps you boost your performance - any comments or suggestions that help us get there, and get there fast, are appreciated. So get right to it and drop us a message, be it within digital maze or outside in the real world. 

bye for now.

TR Development Team (hello@track-record.org)