Yet another long gap between posts, but there have been lots of updates to GPSLog Labs in the interim. Here's a brief summary:

• Keyboard shortcuts

  • f View fullscreen maps/graphs
  • q Open quickfind
  • escape Close full screen map/graphs and quickfind popup

  The keyboard shortcuts make all these features much more useful as they're only a keypress away.

  A neat feature is if there is more than one possible graph/map to view in fullscreen, an overlay is added and you can press a number to select the one you're after.

  

• Tag, place and route lifetimes

  A new visualisation attempts to indicate which tags, places and routes are still in use and those that are "retired".

  

  This information is also used to hide suggestions for tags and places you are probably no longer using and gray out the retired tags from the add tag popup and quick find popup.

  

• Distance and speed vs heading graphs

  These graphs have been made prettier and easier to read with the graph now rendered as a circle with ticks for the compass points.

  

• I've added axis labels to all the graphs, which will make all the grade 6 maths teachers out there happy, as well as making the graphs much easier to understand.

• The goal, route and split detail trend graphs tabs have speed and heart rate histograms on them too now, which helps spot the trends better at a glance.

• The embedded graphs you can share on your own sites now support speed and heart rate zones backgrounds as options, and also let you specify the text for the axis labels.

  

• Laps graph

  There's a new Laps tab on route split detail page that compares performance across sessions on activities with multiple laps, e.g. hill intervals or laps around an oval.

  

Checkpoints are a powerful GPSLog Labsfeature for analysing your activity, they can:

• Split activity into segments for comparison, without affecting the other statistics such as overall mileage and duration.
  This would not be the case if additional places were created as extra activity records would be created.
• Compare your performance on a segment (such as a hill climb) for different routes.
• Checkpoints are assigned on a route by route basis so they only cut the activity of interest.

The easiest way to explain how checkpoints work is to run though a few examples: Once you've uploaded some activity to GPSLog Labs, you next need to assign a route to the activity. Once that's done, you can go to the Splits tab of the route detail page and click the Add Checkpoint link.

Then, create a new checkpoint by clicking on a point on the map or a stop on the log file.

Checkpoints work just like places. The activity inside the circle will be ignored, and the circle has to be big enough for all the logs to pass through it, otherwise they won't be recognised.

After saving checkpoints at the beginning and end of the climbs, the route map now looks like this:

On the route detail Splits tab, a summary of the splits is displayed.

You may need to click the "Regenerate Splits" button, which will reprocess all the activity with the new checkpoints. This may take some time, so there's an equivalent button on the activity detail page's Splits tab that will reprocess only a single activity.

Clicking on the From or To checkpoint will bring up the split detail page. This page combines activity in both directions along the segment and lets you see maps, altitude profiles, trend graphs and other stats.

Checkpoints can be used to analyse short segments too, such as laps around an oval, or runs up and down a mountain (skiing or mountain biking, for example.)

Another use is chopping off the ragged ends of a run, like in the following example where, when entering the city, the GPS signal becomes unreliable. By adding a checkpoint at the end of the path I can avoid the messy log file and also the disruption to my times caused by traffic lights and pedestrians.

This is a tricky area of the site to describe, but it's really useful, so have a play with it and if you have any questions, please let me know.