Rubitrack Updates

The software that prompted me to upgrade to Mountain Lion had an update to it earlier in the week. Rubitrack is a training diary and fitness tracker for the mac that keeps track of all the training I do. I changed to it from Ascent when I upgraded to Mountain Lion mainly because it was still being actively developed whereas Ascent wasn’t.

That decision has paid off with the latest update to Rubitrack as some of the features I had requested have been implemented. None of them where huge, most where just little additions and simple UI changes but its good to see that the developers are listening to feedback from the customers and are acting on it. The application itself looks a little nicer than Ascent and is much more ‘Mac-like’, although it can be a little garish on the colour front at times! There are still a few things I prefer about Ascent but overall Rubitrack gets my vote these days and as it continues to develop it will easily become the best.

I’ve been particularly interested in its ability to calculate and track your Training Stress Levels and TRIMP scores. In theory it should be able to do this automatically for you as it knows what exercise sessions you have done, it knows how long you did them for and it knows your heart rate during these sessions (most of them at least). From this it can workout the intensity factor of each workout and the duration of each workout and therefore calculate a Training Stress Score for each workout. The system shows promise but as yet isn’t quite fully up to scratch. For a start it probably needs the ability for you to add a Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (LTHR) for each activity type so that the intensity factor for each activity can be calculated according to this figure. Secondly it needs to work for all activity types which at the moment it doesn’t seem to do. Hopefully as the software develops this feature will improve.

The full list of updates in version 3.1.1 are:

• Adds activity import from Garmin Connect.
• Adds activity and weight data import from RunKeeper.
• Adds support for syncing with o_synce navi2coach.
• Adds a new preference option for the first day of the week (rubiTrack > Preferences > General).
• Adds a new application preferences import option named “Cloud sync” which controls the number of days rubiTrack goes back when downloading items from RunKeeper and Garmin Connect.
• Adds a “Today” button in the calendar.
• Adds a new zones distribution legend option for printing absolute values of distance/time spent in the zones.
• rubiTrack now better fits small screens.
• The number of individual zones can now be adjusted from 3 to 10 via “Customize > Zones…”.
• When selecting multiple activities, rubiTrack now prints the status summary for the selection.
• When highlighting a lap, the map now automatically pans to the lap’s portion of the track.
• The calendar scroll button icons are now more intuitive.
• Improves the activity list view by only showing laps if there are more than one.
• Tweaks stop detection by auto-adjusting sensitivity for slow activities.
• Athlete logs entries imported from CSV files now import body water as decimal value.
• In the athlete log, rubiTrack now synchronizes the selection in the charts and list view.
• Map split markers are now displaying data for the lap instead of cumulative data from the start.
• Improves performance in the athlete log when updating multiple entries with heart rate and metabolism calculations.
• Adds columns in the athlete log for lactate threshold pace and lactate threshold power.
• Adds a new application preferences import option named “Prefer barometric elevation reading”. If an imported track contains both GPS and barometric elevation, rubiTrack will use barometric values if this option is turned on.
• If a track contains only barometric elevation readings and no GPS elevation readings, rubiTrack automatically uses barometric values.
• Better supports timezone in the list view and map quick stat popups.
• Now automatically updates power bests and activity intensity when turning on or off estimated power for activities.
• rubiTrack now dynamically switches basis for distance-based distribution charts to time-based if an activity doesn’t have any distance information.
• Reduces the memory footprint of equipment images and athlete log images stored in rubiTrack files.
• Improves CSV export which now includes all data fields available in the track data inspector.
• Now correctly remembers deleted athlete log entries and ignores those when syncing.

Along with a host of bug fixes.

Something that isn’t new but that I hadn’t played with before is the ‘Publish…’ feature. This allows you to publish an activity (or all of your activities) as a web page. Basically it simply creates an HTML file along with a few images and a css file so that the activity can be viewed standalone within a browser. Pretty simple and not a huge amount of use except for the fact that the images it exports are quite nice and could be used when I’m writing blog posts about my training. Here are a couple of the images created from a recent bike ride.

It also provides a summary of the activity like this:

Summary

• Date 20 Feb 2013
• Time 11:56
• Active Distance 27.13 mi.
• Active Duration 1:23:38
• Total Distance 27.14 mi.
• Total Duration 1:24:35
• Ascent 347 m
• Descent -347 m
• Average Speed 19.5 mph
• Minimum Speed 1.1 mph
• Maximum Speed 33.6 mph
• Average Pace 3:05 min/mi.
• Minimum Pace 53:39 min/mi.
• Maximum Pace 1:47 min/mi.
• Average Heart Rate 142 bpm
• Calories 1122 kcal
• Weather Conditions Haze
• Temperature 3.3 ℃

And generates a nice Google Map of the ride too, all of which may come in handy one day.