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.

• Florian is doing a great job translating the site into German, danke schön!
  
• The Summary tab on a tag detail page will show a table breaking down the activity for that tag by other tags where appropriate:
  
• The Distance vs Time graph on a tag detail page now shows a line through the mouse position that let's you see at a glance which logs are faster, slower or the same speed:
  
• Table rows are now highlighted as you hover the mouse over them.
• GPS Data Filter editing has been improved to make it more obvious that the items can be dragged to re-arrange the order that they are applied:
  

You can choose what kind of map you want to display on the GPSLog Labs maps as they now support the OpenStreetMap and OpenStreetMap bicycle map tiles.

This should help those of you in parts of the world not covered very well by the Google Maps, and with OpenStreetMap, if there's something not quite right, you can upload your GPS file and make the map better.

The bicycle maps include lots of features to help you out if your a cyclist, including parking, bike lanes and contour lines and colouring to indicate hills.

• Selection of whether speeds are displayed as speed (km/h or mph) or as pace (minutes per km or mile) is now done on the tag page:
  

  There was a good reason for it being on the Settings page previously, but I've forgotten what it was...

• There's a list of some of the most common GPS logging devices to choose from when you add a new device. Many more that aren't on the list work with GPSLog Labs, so you can still enter your own device name if you need to.
  
• The algorithm used to determine the amount of ascending and descending distance/duration for your activity has been fine tuned. It is more accurate now, using a line of best fit through 7 samples and considers anything greater than a 2.5% grade to be a hill. The grade histograms have also been extended to show up to a 40% grade, have fun climbing that!

Support for heart rate logging in GPSLog Labs has been added for Garmin devices that use the Garmin Training Center format (i.e. .TCX files).

You can see graphs of your Heart Rate vs Time and a histogram of your heart rate on the activity detail page:

Heart rates will be repeated to fill in gaps if the readings occur less than once per second, up to a maximum of 5 minutes.

If you have a device that logs heart rates, and the graphs aren't showing up in GPSLog Labs, please let me know and I'll add support for it.

Note that this will only work for logs out doors where a latitude and longitude is recorded with the heart rate, so if you're using something like a Garmin EDGE705 in indoor mode, you won't be able to view your activity or heart rates.

If you don't have a GPS logger that records your heart rate at each point, you can still record average and maximum heart rates against your activity manually (i.e. based on a non-logging heart rate monitor strap.)

To switch heart rates on manually:

1. Go to tags, and select a tag you want to record heart rates for (e.g. Running or Bike)
2. Edit the tag, click the "Edit heart rates" checkbox.
3. Now, when you go to activity tagged with that tag, you'll see the "heart rate" tab (this usually only shows up if your logger supports heart rates.)
4. On that tab, the average and maximum heart rate values will show "edit", click that, type in the heart rate and click the save button.
   

Once the system has heart rates recorded against your activity (either automatically or entered manually) they will show up in summary and comparison tables and graphs for routes and tags.

This series of GPSLog Labs updates focused on reducing the amount of clutter on the pages and providing a single place for each function.

Home page

• The "This Week's Activity" totals have been moved to the Reports | Trends page.
• Goal progress for the week has been moved to the Goals page.

Uploaded Log Files page

• The list of uploaded log files has been pared down to two columns and now indicates whether places have been matched successfully with an icon next to the file-name.
  

  The icon will go green to indicate that the log has been chopped cleanly:

  

  The old "quick edit" functionality will reappear in another incarnation sometime in the future.

Editing Processed Activity for a Log File

• The Activity column now incorporates a summary of the activity and the Route, Tag and Notes editing have been moved out of main interface. You can still add Routes and Tags, but editing is now done on the Activity detail page.
  

Activity Detail page

• The drop-down menu has been removed and the page heading and "bread crumbs" simplified:
  
• To replace the menu, a new information display and editing panel has been added to right hand side of the page:
  
• On this new panel, you can see all the details of the log and also directly edit notes about the activity, add the activity to Tags and Selections.
• There is a summary of the Route, Filters and Sharing status and you can click the links to go to a page to edit them. These pages now also have a more consistent layout including "bread crumbs".

As always, I welcome feedback on these changes and would love to hear any suggestions you may have to make the site better.

There are lots of little changes going on to the layout of the GPSLog Labs site, some you might notice include:

• The blog panel is now at the bottom of the home page, not on the side. This gives it some more space and hopefully it looks less like a panel of ads.
• The Upload Log button is now present on every page.
• I've added some "bread crumbs" to make it easier to get back to the Uploaded Log Files page and the Log File page from activity detail pages.
• There are links from the Uploaded Log Files page directly through to the log activity, and the thumbnail maps now link to the activity page directly rather than popping up a preview map.
• The Log File page has been rearranged with the maps and graphs on a separate tab if you really want to see them, but you're better off just going through to the activity detail page.

There'll be plenty more changes along these lines as I figure out ways to make the site easier to understand and use, if you've got any feedback or suggestions, please let me know.

In addition to sharing GPSLog Labs content via Twitter, Facebook, email and IM, another option is to embed maps and graphs of your activity in your own website.

To do this, you'll need to enable sharing for the content and then you'll be provided with a snippet of HTML you can cut and paste into your own website.

For example, to embed a map, you'll see the following on the Share Log page:

You can customize the size of your map and the whether you want stop icons to be drawn or not. You'll see a preview on the right and when you're happy with it you can cut the generated HTML code and paste it into your website. To embed a graph of your activity, follow the same steps.

Tip: It is possible to customize the size of the embedded map if the standard sizes are not appropriate by editing the HTML and adding &width=1234&height=1234 to the iframe src url, and also updating it's width and height attributes to match.

Note that if you Disable sharing for your activity, it will no longer be visible on your site, even if you re-enable sharing again as the secret URL will be different.