How did you push yourself over time?

I mentioned many time the best rolling plots are my favorite feature of ConnectStats. After adding a new ability to visually see when you reached specific best, I have now a first version of a feature I have been planning to do for a while now: time analysis of specific slice of your best achievement.

So today, I submitted to Apple for release a first version of this feature in ConnectStats 6.1. The best rolling curve shows you what best power, heart rate or pace you reached for a given time or distance. You could previously see what that curve looked like for a month or year. Now you can see how specific point evolved over time.

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Improved Analysis of Power Curves

First a quick note as I write this, since the new ConnectStats service was introduced, the new service has now passed the 1 million activities threshold out of 14,000 users who used the new service rolled out in January! It is small compared to the big players, but nice nonetheless.

After working on improving the calculation of the best rolling curves, I have now implemented a first version of an improved summary analysis.

In the new version 6.0 of ConnectStats you can now explore your power curves or best rolling plot and study when you reached you best and compare in detail how you are improving over time.

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Chasing Complex Bugs: Power Curves and Best Rolling Curves

The harder category of bugs are when it is related to bad numbers generated from the more complex algorithms in ConnectStats. This is what is now happening with the best rolling plots.

The rolling best curve are one of my favorite feature in ConnectStats, they provide insight I don’t see in many other services. It’s quite common to see a power curve, but I feel the concept extended to heart rate or speed help give people a good sense of the characteristic of a workout. While the concept is simple, it actually can be a bit tricky to implement (at least for me it was). The current version of the app shows quite a few quirks that are obviously wrong, like the below.

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ConnectStats Winter Sports Edition

I spent over a week in the Swiss alps, so it was clearly the time to update ConnectStats with better support for winter sports…

Garmin had made some changes to their API for winter sports, and reorganised a bit the types of activities available. I have a Fenix 6 and it has a nice new activity for backcountry skiing with climbing mode (at least I wasn’t aware before). So I updated ConnectStats to properly recognise it and added a new icon for it. I also made sure it display the elevation gain in the summary as this is more relevant for these type of activities.

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Getting the weather for an activity in ConnectStats

As of version 5.1 you can obtain weather information for Connectstats activities if you use the new service I implemented using Garmin Health API and DarkSky. But in order to access it there are a few things to know and do.

The weather will only be added to new activities, once you have started using the new service, which is not currently the default in the app.

To enable the new service, you should go to your config page in Service and accounts and change the Source for the Garmin information to be All as below.

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