Few more months to catch up

Another year of running comes to a close. How did I do this year so far?

Year to Date

1443360891_thumb.pngThe Year to Date graph gives me a good incentive to keep the weekly running distance high. I have so far run 949km  this year, about 80km behind last year at the same date. I had a slow beginning of the year compared to the previous one, but since April, I did pretty well.

So if I keep the momentum of the last few months, I maybe able to catch up my running distance of 2014. The year 2012 is still quite a way ahead, though…

Monthly Totals

1443361239_full.pngTo better evaluate my chances, let’s look at how much I ran last year in the last few months. In the monthly stats over the last year, I can see that november and december in 2014 were on the low side with less than 90km each, so hopefully if I keep at it, I’ll catch up! I finish september close to 150km…

ConnectStats and iOS 9

ConnectStats will take advantage of a few new features of iOS 9 with version 2.2.

Spotlight Search

Activities you looked at will show up in spotlight searches. So if for example you type run london in the spotlight search, it should shows activities you ran in london. Note that it will not search your whole activities history, but only the activities you opened in the last few months. To do search on the whole history you can still do that with the search function in the activity list of ConnectStats

Dynamic Fonts

Ok, technically this was already available in iOS 8, but never got around to implement it. So now, ConnectStats will use the system font, the new San Francisco font on iOS 9 and the size will be adjusted with the Dynamic Type settings of your phone. Very personally I prefer the iOS 8 font, but I feel it’s the right thing to update ConnectStats to follow the system default font. There will still be an option in the settings to revert to the old font if you really prefer that.

Optimized Binary and Asset

ConnectStats asset have been reorganised to potentially benefit from the new app thinning for the app store that should result in smaller size binaries and download.

Website change

So today this website is hosted by a new service. The intention was that it would be transparent, but it took a bit of time to remap the domain name to the new host and it resulted in quite few temporary outage.

After many years as a loyal customer to yahoo for the hosting of this website, I switched away because the iOS 9 release is coming and Apple introduced a change to improve the security of interaction between apps and website. It will now require a site with a secure connection (https). Yahoo unfortunately didn’t support https in a way that enabled me to support some of the new features of iOS 9 I intend to leverage.

It is possible to continue to interact with an insecure website from an app by registering an exception, but two main reason led me to make the change:

  1. It’s just the right thing to do. There are a few informations sent from the app to the website when you send a bug report or use google earth, and it’s just better to secure it going forward.
  2. It will allow some interesting interaction between the web and the iOS9 version of the app, where by I could write an explanation of a screen and link it directly to opening the app on your device with the matching report or graph. Given some of the graphs and analysis are a bit involved and I didn’t figure out a nice way to integrate a help on a small screen like the phone, I am hoping this will be quite helpful for people to have more fun with the app.

Note that the secure uploads and the new features I mentioned above will not likely be included in the first version for iOS9, but hopefully shortly after.