Well, the inbox redesign mentioned a few weeks back turned out to take longer than planned, but the end result is a huge improvement in the way you manage your log files with GPSLog Labs and the "inbox" doesn't really exist anymore.

I'll post a quick tutorial soon to show the basic steps involved in uploading a log and processing it, but for now, a summary of some of the major changes are as follows:

• Activity is automatically extracted from uploaded log files and no longer needs to be "confirmed" before it shows up in the rest of the site.
• You get much more direct control over the editing of the extracted activity.
• Places will automatically be created based on your uploaded logs.

This last one is a biggy and results in a big change to the way you use GPSLog Labs. GPSLog Labs now "asks for forgiveness, not permission" and will create a new place whenever a log starts or stops in a location that can't be matched to an existing place. This means that you can get up and running with the site much more quickly.

When GPSLog Labs creates a place, you can either give it a name and keep it or if you don't want a place at that location, you can swap it for the correct place that should have matched.

Just a quick note to say that the first phase of the redesign of the GPSLog Labs Inbox is now live.

The tabs have been renamed and some of the less used tabs have been changed to links at the bottom of the main remaining tabs.

There'll be some more big changes soon, until then, the documentation is going to be a little out of date. Please contact me if you get stuck anywhere and need some assistance before then.

I've just changed the way that GPSLog Labs detects the local timezone for a log to make it more reliable.

Each place now has a timezone field and this is used to set the default timezone for any logs to or from that place (kind of obvious really...)

When you're adding a new place, you can choose the timezone or just click the "Auto-detect" button which will use the geonames.org web-service to determine the timezone.

I have been able to fill in most timezones for places that have been created to date. Have a look at the Places configuration page though as you may have one or two that you'll need to set yourself.

If a log doesn't match any places it will default to the timezone you've set in your Profile page, and the timezone for a log can always be edited if you want it to be something different.

This post outlines a few of the recent updates to GPSLog Labs:

• I've added a new menu to the uploaded log files in the Inbox confirmation stage. This allows you to quickly perform tasks on the uploaded log file should you need to by simply moving the mouse over the log file heading:
  
• Graphs now shade the middle two quartiles of the data, instead of showing +/- one standard deviation, where the distribution is not Gaussian. i.e. everywhere except distances along a single route. Blame Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• There's a Battery Cycle Duration vs Date graph on the device's Battery Life Graph tab as I was curious to see if my batteries might be deteriorating with age (they're not yet.)
• There's a new Total Stop Time vs Date graph on the route detail Stops tab. This can show you if your amount of stopped or resting time is changing over time.
• Goal graphs now have a dot showing the required amount to meet your target in the remaining time. The lines show the overall average so far (blue) and the average target required (orange), the dots reflect what you need to do per week/month to meet the target based on what you've done so far and how much time you have remaining:
  
• Goals are now shown on the week's activity "dashboard" on home page. This lets you see at a glance how you're tracking against the goals and plan what to do next:
  
  This shows: the goal title, the difference between your actual activity and the goal target to date, the total activity counting towards the goal this week, a percentage comparison to the weekly target.
  Under the total goal activity for the week are coloured indicators to show what day the activity occurred on. The most recent day is on the right in green, the oldest in orange on the left.

GPSLog Labs uses thumbnail icons to help you identify your logged activity at a glance, without having to load the full map.

These thumbnails indicate scale by showing 1km grid lines. The start point of the log is marked as a small green square, the stop point as a small red square.

For example, the following thumbnail shows a log of approximately 65km:

And one of 2km:

In the inbox, "junk" logs will be indicated by half-size thumbnails:

Routes also show thumbnails of their altitude profiles. In these icons, the grid represents 10km along the horizontal axis, and 100m in the vertical axis.

For example, below is of a 70km log that climbs a 600m hill:

And a 14km log with less than 100m altitude variation:

There are also "clock" thumbnail icons that indicate the duration of activity and sessions. These show a shaded segment on a 12 hour "clock", with a green marker for the start time, and a red marker for the stop time.

The icon below indicates a session that starts at 6:30 PM and goes for 3 hours until 9:30 PM:

If a log or session is longer than 12 hours, a thinner band indicates that it has "wrapped" around the clock. A session that starts at 6:30 PM and goes for 15 hours until 9:30 AM would have the following icon:

The GPSLog Labs inbox now has a "simple" confirmation mode for uploaded logs that appear to have been chopped "perfectly". e.g. for commutes between two places with no unrecognised or extra segments.

This means the inbox is less cluttered and there is less to think about to confirm those logs.

If you want to make a change, you can get back to the original view by clicking the "use the normal full confirmation mode" link:

I've change the way that sessions are displayed and processed in the Inbox.

For a while now they have been shown together with logged activity. This meant it was easy to tag sessions and add notes to them, but generally you will only be interested in doing that to sessions at some places, and having to "mark as done" all the others was tedious.

So, sessions how have their own inbox tab. This tab will show all sessions by default, but it will also show the "unread" count per place on the left hand side, and clicking a place name will show only sessions at that place. This means that you can still pay attention to every session if you like, but you can also ignore sessions at certain places that you're not interested in. For example, you may want to add notes to sessions at the "Pool", but ignore those at "Home".

Logs displayed in the inbox now have a "clock" that shows the start and stop times of the activity. This can be handy when trying to identify what the log was from by getting an idea of how the activity fitted into the rest of the day.

The confirm stage of the upload process has been simplified. Now when uploading a log, you no longer have the option to "remove segments", just to merge segments. This is because anything you could do with remove can be done with merge and there's one less scenario to worry about now.

1. Clicking the checkbox in the Merge segments column will merge the two segments into a single segment
   
2. The row will go red to indicate the cut will be removed
   
3. The change will be applied when you click the Save Log File button.
   

More details can be found on the Inbox help page.