This link arrived in my inbox this morning
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mytracks-dev/qcOWjmAfGi0
It basically means that the My Tracks export to Dailymile capability will stop working with the next version of My Tracks.
You will still be able to manually post workouts just not with GPS data.
I’ve been working on a near complete re-write of Tracks2Miles over the last couple of weekends months. It’s taken so long for a couple of reasons, when the weather was good I just wanted to be outside running/cycling and for the (larger) period when it was grim out just not wanting to spend any more time writing code after doing it all day at work.
A number of major changes have been made, but the one that is likely to be most noticeable is the move to using Fragments for the layout of the GUI. This means that I’ve been able to create some layouts for devices. There are now 3 layouts:
I know that a tablet layout for Tracks2Miles may seam a little strange since it started out as just a way to upload routes recorded by My Tracks and the image of a guy out jogging with a 10.1″ Galaxy tab strapped to their arm is a little stupid. But since adding the ability to view the timeline of workouts and to manually enter workouts it has started to make some more sense. That and the stats* says there are at least 31 tablet (running Android 3.1/3.2, there may be more on 4.x+) users already out there. Hopefully this new layout will pull in some more tablet users as (IMHO) looks a lot better than the phone view scaled up.
The other big change is the move to using the built in sync mechanism to drive the collection of new timeline entries. This means you can now have Tracks2Miles pull in new workouts, comments and routes on a regular basis in the background. A side effect of this is that I’m going to have to drop support for Andriod 2.1 as the syncing API had some improvements that make this a lot easier at 2.2. The same stats that showed the total number tablet users show there are only 39 users left on 2.1. The older releases should continue to work for them.
This use of the syncing API means that I the timeline can be updated at regular intervals in the background so you will always have the latest workouts when you open the all and allows me to add alerts for when there are new entries.
A feature requested by Brian O’Donovan was the ability to sanity check speeds for different workout types, I think this mainly came about because of the distance conversion feature when the units are changed. I’ve added some options to the beta settings menu that allows you to set a min and max speed for a few of the workout types. If you enable this checking a toast message will pop up if the average speed for a workout is outside these ranges. You can access the limits under the beta section of the preferences screen.
At this point I think I’ve pretty much exhausted the capabilities of the current Dailymile API but hopefully there should be a improved version due soon. In the mean time I suppose the next step would be to look at translating Tracks2Miles to some other languages. The Google Play stats suggest that Germany might be a good first choice.
I cut what I hope to be the final beta today and after hearing back from the testers I’ll push it to Google Play as an update.
* Up until v2.0 I’ve been using the built in stats that come with the Google Play, but for this release going forward I have also included the Google Analytics library so I should get a much clearer picture of what the spread of devices running the app are.
Now I’m back from my amazing holiday in Yellowstone it’s time to put in a final push to get Tracks2Miles V2 out the door.
I have all the core functionality working now and I just need to finish off some of the new value add features.
So with that in mind, if you would like to beta test v2 leave a comment here and I’ll send you an email with where you can grab the apk
I’ve been working away on a new version of Tracks2Miles over the last few weekends. It’s getting close to being ready but in the mean time here is a quick look at the new tablet layout.
I pushed a new update to the market at the weekend.
It should hopefully fix a problem where Tracks2Miles would complain it could not access My Tracks data even when sharing was allowed. This looks to be down to a change in the My Tracks API with the My Tracks 1.1.15.
I’ve also tweaked the “Like” handling a little to only work for posts that are videos or pictures as this seams to be the only type of posts this works.
Recently a college has been having a look at the code to see if there are some things he wants to add. Hopefully I should have something from him soon.
Finally got round to spending some more time on Tracks2Miles.
This release is an attempt to make use of a lot of what is left of the API.
New features:
All that plus a couple of bugs I spotted along the way.
There is a new introduction video with a walk through of all the features
As always you can get the very latest version from the Android Market here: https://market.android.com/details?id=uk.me.hardill.dailymile
The next version should have better support for tablets and ICS devices that support Activity Fragments to make better use of large screens. I’ve also managed to arrange to borrow a Sony Ericsson X10 mini to see about trying to improve the UI for those of you with really small screen devices.
So the My Tracks guys released version 1.1.10 last week. This normally would be a good thing as they have been adding lots of nice new features and generally improving things.
Unfortunately in this release they also included a feature that stops 3rd party apps using their database without the user having to go into the their settings and allowing it.
I don’t agree with what the change is looking to achieve, My Tracks already has a set of Permissions that need to be requested by an application before it can access the data. If the user does not want to grant access then they should not install the 3rd party apps. I know nobody really reads closely the list of Permissions apps ask for at install time, but this is a problem for the Market application to solve by better high lighting the Permissions being asked for and explaining the consequences of accepting them.
On top of that there is no easy way to check if the “Allow access” option is set before you try and access the data. I will be raising a issue about this shortly as well as submitting another change to mean that I don’t have to try and guess the name of the track being exported.
It also would have been nice to get more than a couple of hours notice that the this new “feature” was about to ship. While I know it has been discussed on the site, I have a not been following the updates recently because the day job has been particularly busy. It would have at least been courteous to send the email that notified the owners of those with apps about the change a little sooner. So we had time to make the required changes rather than just get a whole slew of bug reports.
Anyway that’s the bitching out of the way. There is now a new version of Tracks2Miles that will show a dialog box if it can not access the data and return you to My Tracks to enable the access to the data.
You can grad the latest version from the Market here