• There's another new button on the edit Log File tab exposing a feature that was previously a little too well hidden, this time to select which segments should be marked as "junk":
  

  That brings up a popup where you can quickly choose which segments are junk (and therefore shouldn't be displayed in the rest of the site) and which have the activity you're interested in:

  
• The colour of the junk segments on that page has been changed subtly from red/orange to a more neutral gray too.
• The GPS Data Filters page has been completely overhauled too so it should hopefully be a bit easier to use and faster to add certain type of filters too.

  Click on the Filters side panel of an activity you want to filter:

  
  The GPS Data Filters page now has clearer menu options and a bigger preview maps and graphs to show the results of the filters you have applied:
  
  And the individual filter pages now have more space to show their options and view the maps and graphs:
  
• The Time filter now has a preview map to show you the segment that is being discarded.
• Most filters now have a "Copy to tag" menu option that will let you copy the filter and it's parameters to a tag. This means that once you find a good combination of filters to clean up your activity, you can have them automatically applied to all data you upload from now on tagged with that tag.

GPSLog Labs now has a new Feedback forum, hosted on Idea.Informer.com.

You'll see a new button on the right hand side of the page where you can quickly leave feedback.

On the forum, you can see feature requests and bug reports other people have made and vote for them or add your comments.

Recent changes in GPSLog Labs have focused on improving the log file editing process:

• The Add a Place, Remove stops and Manually create segments commands on the Log File edit page have been changed from menu options to more prominent buttons:
  
• Remove stops is a new command that allows you to quickly and easily remove unwanted stops from a Log File. Multiple stops can be removed in one step which is easier than removing each stop or cut in turn.
  
• When specifying an unmatched place, previous activity is now used to provide a suggestion of likely places it could be from those in the neighbourhood of the start location:
  
• The Reprocess confirmation page has also been redesigned and the page sequence after queuing a file for reprocessing has been improved.
• The Speed/Pace vs Distance graphs on the activity detail page (Graphs vs Distance tab) now have a new "scaling" algorithm that isn't as extreme and should make pace graphs easier to read.
• There's also a new link at the bottom of the route Altitude Profile tab to show all altitude profile thumbnails for all logs. This is useful for circuits so you can easily check they are all correctly marked as forward or reversed direction.

Updates on the updates to GPSLog Labs are lagging a bit, but here's some of what's been happening lately:

• The log file chopping logic has been tweaked a little to hopefully avoid creating as many unwanted "unnamed places":
  - Auto created places must now be further away from known places before they'll be created.
  - Auto created places won't be used to chop logs between known places. If you do want the auto created place, after you name it, if you reprocess the log then it will be cut properly.
  - There were also a few bug fixes that should make detection of places more accurate.
• There's better support for editing and filtering of large log files.
• The little milestone markers now have a small arrow attached to indicate the approximate direction of travel at that point:
  
• There's now a filter on the logs tab for a place that lets you narrow down the activity by tag:
  
• The log file editing page has been tweaked to make finding some of the commands easier, the menu now includes the "Add a Place" and "Manually create segments" commands that were previously a little hard for some users to find:
  

  It's now possible to change the Route or Tags directly from the edit page for an activity after they have been set:

  
• The "Select tags" popup now allows quick selection of sets of tags from those used previously on other activity on the same route:
  
• Speed vs time graphs when you're editing and filtering log files now have a "scale" selection, that will allow you to see detail in log files which was previously hidden by large speed spikes caused by GPS errors:
  
  In this example, the actual activity is completely obscured by the 5,000 km/h errors... Selecting a maximum of 50 km/h on the scale means you can see the activity properly and edit it as required:
  
• There's a new "Inverse position filter" available, that is the opposite of the Position filter. i.e. it will discard points outside the given circle.

• Activity maps now have milestone markers:
  

  These are displayed every 1 km or 1 mile depending on your units setting and will automatically be hidden as you zoom out.

  Note that the milestone markers are displayed by default on shared maps you have embedded into your own site, if you don't want them displayed regenerate the embed code or edit the <iframe> src attribute and add &show_milestones=false to the end of the URL.

• Split times are computed for the first 5km, 10km, etc. of your activity so you can compare performances regardless of the tags, routes or final distance. These are displayed on the activity "comparisons" tab and on the new splits tab for tags. This will let you find for example, the log with the fastest 10km time you have run by going to the Run tag, and sorting the splits by 10km.

  These distances are probably only useful for runners, if you have any suggestions on how this should behave for other sports please let me know.

• Activity split tables now show the cumulative distance/elapsed time:
  
• Graphs throughout the site now have a filter that lets you display only one year at a time once you have been logging your activity for more than a year:
  
• I've also done a general tidy up of forms on the site, giving them a layout and improving the way they display for smaller browser windows.

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.

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.

• 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.