Tie a yellow ribbon round the containing form

I've been looking at alternate controls for rendering the ribbon.  The first alternative seems ok, but there's a bit of a functionality gap to do with the merging of ribbon items on child (MDI) forms.  On reflection I may have avoided the MDI model and tried to adopt the MVC/MVP model but this started as a fix for my problem and there's a lot of heavy lifting to go that route if you don't want to use the stock Microsoft control set.

Anyway, the behaviour of current set means that ribbon items are defined within the context of the form that implements the functionality - that is, the items for the summary functions are defined on a summary form, calendar ribbon items on the calendar form and so on.

Changing this behaviour means writing signaling code from the container figuratively "push the buttons".  In absolute terms this isn't a huge exercise but it's one extra handler for each button and I've got some further evaluation to do before heading down this route.

Apart from anything else, I may just end up substituting one problem for another.  I think what I may to is knock up a tiny interface with none of the features just to see if the same problems are experienced. 

Given the day job at the moment, I'm looking at the 3 week mark.

Have a good weekend.

Web app data management?

This is all speculative at this stage but assuming I opted for a web application rather than a traditional desktop approach, does anyone have any thoughts on data management?

Copying the training.mdb and the (new) log files each time isn't very efficient but it would add a degree of security to the user - assuming that they were recoverable.  You could download to any PC if you were away from home or re-instate your data without needing a dedicated backup strategy.  You could improve performance and reduce transmission costs by sending deltas.

From my perspective, the downsides cover a couple of areas.  There's data segregation - ok, this isn't SSN's or credit card info but there's some danger of data leakage and building robust web applications isn't as easy as all that (my day job is IT security focused in the banking industry, so I've seen some absolute horrors over the years!).  There's the effort of a direction change.

Finally, there's cost - storage costs, there's no two ways around it.  Services like trainingpeaks are operated on a commercial basis, and one assumes, makes a modest profit - or at least plans to.  There's performance, scalability, database infrastructure etc.  Some of this you can mitigate by good design - caching, data normalisation etc, but some things you just have to pony up with the cash and pay to have it done properly.

Ultimately I started this effort because I was dissatisfied with the Suunto software but as the phrase in IT circles goes, "it works on my machine" and I need to consider both the time spent fixing 'public' issues and the costs associated.

Right now, this line of thought isn't really going anywhere, but I'd be interested in hearing thoughts on the commercialisation of such a product - either as a desktop application, or a web app (probably with some kind of sync agent).  I appreciate that it's not all that easy when most of you get a poor UI experience at this stage, but mostly the graphs render and although you can't change the display period you should get some idea how it looks.  The blog postings to date show some evolution too.

Random musings at the moment, probably because I'm annoyed with this UI problem, it's a cold, wet February and I work in an industry where large chucks are going down the toilet and dragging the rest of the economy with it. 

Apart from that though, it's fine!

How I learned to ignore X and concentrate on pies!

So red X's are popping up like mushrooms in spring and it's all a bit depressing but I'm pressing on irrespective.  I'm kind of at the point where I may choose to dump the ribbon altogether and go back to a traditional menu structure, or investigate alternate controls.  Not sure yet.

Moving on, I found myself curious about comparative distances, so the next feature to be added will be a pie chart of activities where distance > 0

Right now the only way to get this information is from the summary pivot and they say a picture is worth a thousand words.  They also say pies are nice.  I like pies :-)

I'm also experimenting with web app prototypes.  It's not actually all that hard as the graph routines, data handling and so on are very portable.  My CSS and web-fu however is somewhat lacking.  Interesting experience though.

Hmm

Ok, two emails so far indicating that the problem is still there.  Perhaps I should convert the whole lot to a web app?

T6 Analytics 0.5 download

I've just uploaded version 0.5 for public testing which will hopefully confirm that I've killed off the dreaded Red X!

I don't have access to hundreds of machines for testing but of the 4 that I do, where 3 exhibited the problem previously, rendering is now successful.

There's aren't many other bug fixes in this but you should now get the option to locate the Suunto data on the first run.  There's no fix for you folks that have data distributed all over the place, the application still expects all the Suunto data files and the training.mdb in the same location.  I don't really expect to address other scenarios.

There may still be issues for those of you with non-English versions of Windows.  Further reports of import issues will be investigated once I've some confirmation that the major UI problem is resolved.

There's still no help, but I did add shortcuts for navigation in the summary (try Ctrl+1 thru Ctrl+5 and combinations of the left and right cursors and modifiers (ctrl/shift/ alt))

Printing, clipboard operations still very patchy, no data export yet and for the moment, assume that all distances, speeds etc are metric.  I started to try and fix that up today but it was a bigger job that I wanted to do right now.

As before, backup your data.  This version will create a new runtime database.  You might get a error during installation regarding an SQL dll if it's all ready present.  It should be safe to ignore this - I've just not figured out the details of the registration process for the the database driver yet.

Bug reports welcome - and at least this time the support@t6analytics .com email address is working!

http://www.t6analytics.com/downloads/T6Analytics-0.5.exe

 

 

Cheers

Red x and T6c logs

I've been doing a little more testing with the resolution to the red x problem and so far so good.  I'm going to try it on another machine today, so fingers crossed.

Additionally, I've spent some time looking at the new log formats for the T6c.  Right now I don't have a working parser for them but I suspect that there's a problem handling the lap data.  Again, this is a guess but I think that lap record lengths may have changed to accommodate summary information for cadence measurements.

I'm going to spend a couple of days on this and one way or another do another release.

Cheers

Red x update

This might be a bit premature but I think that I've resolved the red X problem - at least, it works on a couple of machines that exhibited the issue before.

More news in a couple of days after a little bit more testing.