Plenty of things on GPSLog Labs have been slowly improving and it's about time that I mentioned a few of them:

• The device format detection process has been made much more robust and accurate and now has a new layout:
  
  Once the file(s) has been analysed, a summary of the results is displayed:
  

  Maps and graphs can be displayed if this isn't enough:

  

  Once a working format has been found, you can continue using the site:

  
• Once a log is processed, there are now some illustrations on the forms to indicate the purpose of the actions:

  Merge two adjacent log segments by removing the "cut" between them

  

  Remove a stop at a place and merge the adjacent segments into a single segment

  
• The /uploads/ pages have had their urls redesigned to make the "next log file", "previous log file" and "mark as done" links work much more reliably on the different tabs. This means you can stay on the "unedited uploads only" view as you edit and tag your uploads.
• You can now see a list of your shared activity using the mobile version of the site, also, map thumbnails have been added to the mobile view pages and there is a more obvious "view activity on map" button.
• Goals now support planning of your future activity. You can create tasks to plan out your training program and export these in iCalendar format so you can keep track of what your plans are from MS Exchange, Google Calendar, iCal or your phone.
• In addition to tasks, I've also added in a couple of training program templates that you can use to get started training for a marathon, half-marathon or a long distance cycling event such as the Around the Bay in a Day.

As always, I'd love to know what you think and hope you enjoy the site.

• Support for the Nav N Go iGO 8 track format has been added. This looks like a pretty good app, but has a terrible name, not that I can talk...
• Behind the scenes there's a new storage engine which will be able to handle a lot more growth in uploads. Let me know if you notice anything odd.
• There's a new "smoother" design on the forms throughout the site:
  
• The goal detail page now has a map tab.
• The activity "Comparisons" tab has a new statistic: The split for the first and second halves of the activity. The theory is that if you've paced yourself properly and haven't slowed as you got tired this should be 0 or even negative.
  
• The Distance vs Time graphs on the tag detail and goal detail pages now have options to show the logs group by route (the default, and previous behaviour) or by "age". This will let you see how your performance has changed over time:
  
• And, finally, it's now possible to upload a heart rate data file from a separate heart rate logger and have it stored together with the appropriate activity.

  On the activity detail page, there's a little link in the right hand side panel to "Upload Heart rate data file":

  

  Clicking that will give you a form where you can upload one or more heart rate log files in either Polar HRM or CSV formats:

  

  The original files aren't stored on the GPSLog Labs server though, so if you reprocess the log file (add a place, merge segments etc.) then you'll have to re-upload them.

Note that if you have enabled editing of heart rates for a tag, then the "Upload heart rate data file" link will be found on the Heart Rate tab of the activity detail page.

I've just added an experimental feature to GPSLog Labs to provide estimates of the finish times for different distances based on the activity you've logged. For example, this can take your pace from a 10km run and tell you how long it would take to do a half marathon, or take a target pace for a long distance and tell you how fast you should be aiming to do shorter training runs.

This is based on formulas developed many years ago by Peter Riegel and Dave Cameron by fitting a curve to the world record times for various distances. How well these apply to non-elite athletes is something I'm curious about, but the theory is that if you put 100% into running 10km, you'll do it in a certain time. If you put 100% into running 5km, you'll be able to go a certain amount faster as you only have to last half as long and vice versa for 20km. The ratio of speeds at different distances should be roughly right even if you're not breaking world records.

There are two places where this now appears in GPSLog Labs, the first is on an activity detail page's Comparisons tab and it extrapolates the pace (with and without stop time taken into account) to other distances:

The estimates using the two formulas are quite close until you get to very large distances, but you will hopefully be able to judge which is more appropriate for your activity.

The second version is found on the Distance vs Time Graph tabs of the Tag detail and Goal detail pages. Move the mouse to set the speed to be extrapolated and the prediction curves will be overlayed on your actual recorded activity to see how they compare. The thin gray line is a linear prediction assuming your speed/pace won't vary as the distance increases or decreases. The red line uses Peter Riegel's model and the green line uses Dave Cameron's model. These estimates are often very similar and overlap simply appearing gray.

As far as I know, these formulas were developed for running, but the curves may be useful for other activity as well.

I'm very interested in knowing how this works for people, there are many other sites on the internet that will perform the same extrapolations if you manually key in your distance and time, so it's not just me interested in playing with this stuff!

There have been a few changes to GPSLog Labs since the last update, but it's been a little quiet as I was traveling and moving house.

• The activity detail page now has a Comparisons tab that includes various stats and computations such as providing the information in different units and comparing the distance and speed to other activity tagged with the same tags and on the same route.
  

  There is also a Distance Finish Time Predictions graph, which will be covered in the next post.

• The Goal Detail page now has a few new tabs to analyse the activity towards the goal.

  The Log Breakdown tab contains a summary of activity broken down by distance (into 10km "buckets") similar to that on the Tag Detail page.

  

  The breakdown by tags will only be shown if the activity towards the goal has more than one tag associated with it.

  The Trend Graphs tab shows the average speed or pace of the activity towards the goal.

  

  The Distance vs Time Graph is similar to that on the Tag Detail page, but the distances and times are shown on a linear, not logarithmic, scale. This assumes that activity towards a single goal is likely to be within a fairly consistent distance/time range. This graph will be discussed in a little more detail in the next post as it contains a distance finish time prediction component.

• There's a new option on the Distance vs Time Graph tab on the Tag detail page to "Show active time only (ignore stops)"
• It's now possible to manually edit a log file's timezone by clicking the timezone on the Log File Summary tab. Normally timezones are detected automatically for a log file based on the timezone of the places in the activity, but this may not always work so you can set it to what is appropriate.
  
• The server that hosts GPSLog Labs has also had an upgrade and has more memory now, meaning larger log files should be handled more reliably than before.
• I've also added a donation button to the About page, and if you're a frequent user and enjoy the site, a small donation to help cover bandwidth and storage costs would be greatly appreciated.

You can upload logs directly to GPSLog Labs from your iPhone or similar mobile device using your unique email upload address.

Click on your device icon on the home page to find your device's unique address. It will look something like upload+abcdef123456zyxwvu987654@gpsloglabs.com.

Simply send the log file or files as attachments (zipped if you like, it'll be faster that way) and then you will receive an email containing links to the activity in GPSLog Labs once it is processed.

You can add tags to your activity by entering them in the subject line like: ((tags: Bike)) The tags will be matched as smartly as possible, you only need to put enough of the tag in to make it unambiguously match one of your existing tags and the text case doesn't matter.

The rest of your email title will be added as a note on the activity.

• The shared log detail page now has a mobile (iPhone) optimized version:
  
• A list of stops is displayed when manually creating log segments. You can click on the stop times to start stop the segment at that point. The interface is a little rough, any suggestions on how to make it easier to use are welcome.
  
• Merging log segments is a little smarter, and it is now easy to remove a little "junk" other segment from the start or end of a log.
• You can now add an icon to distinguish your devices:
  

I've just enhanced the GPSLog Labs goal overall progress graph so that it now shows a prediction of the likely result based on what you've achieved so far (hopefully that's motivating, not depressing!)

It feeds your past past weekly totals into a Monte Carlo simulator to come up with a range of possible outcomes which are added to the graph. The fainter gray lines show the upper and lower estimates, while the darkest gray lines are along the 1st and 3rd quartiles (i.e. 50% of the predicted outcomes will fall between those lines.)

This will work best for longer term goals, since it's using weeks as the unit of time, please let me know if it's not working well for your goals and I'll see what I can do.

The maps have been improved throughout GPSLog Labs and now use a drop-down menu to choose the map type. This means there is room for more types of maps including the "Terrain" map:

I've also added support for the Yandex maps which will help those of you in Russia (thanks Vitaly) and the map type will also be remembered now, so you won't need to select it every time if you want to use something other than the Google maps.

"Hint" maps have been added to the place selection pop-ups when you're editing a log file to help identify where the log finishes:

There is now a preview map when you are manually creating a segment:

I've fixed a bug in GPSLog Labs that was preventing binary files from MTK based loggers from being processed properly.

The MTK chipset is used by the Transystem i-Blue 747, Qstarz BT-Q1000 and others (see http://bt747.org/compatible_gps for a list.)

This will hopefully streamline the workflow for a lot of people as it will no longer be necessary to convert to GPX format before uploading and the .bin files are much smaller than the equivalent .gpx.

GPSLog Labs has a new "Organize" tab, this is a page that will show your most important and relevant tags, places, routes and selections for quick and easy access.

You can get to all of the information that was on the old Tags, Places, Routes and Selections tabs from the new tab so they've been removed.

The "importance" algorithm tries to weigh up the number of times the item has been used, the total distance and how recent the last activity was. This won't work perfectly, so you can choose to "pin" your favourite items to the top of the list for quick access.