Posts from — August 2009

Clearly there’s a big difference between simply checking a box to meet a specification (i.e., phone with a 3megapixel camera), and making the complete user experience drop dead seamless and fun.

iPhone is now the most popular camera on Flickr… Flickr for god sakes. And it absoultely blows away other camera phones that have been around for ages.

When I picked up my Forerunner 301 a few years ago, Garmin’s support for the Mac left much to be desired. MotionBased was clunky, the connection required some finagling, and on it went.

When I really picked up running last year I tried out a few different tools for syncing my training progress to my Mac. Ascent is very powerful. You can literally relive your runs and rides and dissect your performance by the minute. It’s handy for exporting routes but it really was more than I wanted. I ended up going with Runner’s Log which I loved for its simplicity and fun little progress awards to keep you motivated. Although it’s specifically for running and doesn’t handle routes or mapping, it was perfectly what I needed last year.

With our first triathlon coming up, I’ve been back in the market for an easy way to track progress, and share/discover great routes both on foot and the bike. I tried MapMyRun.com at a buddy’s suggestion, but for me, it was overkill. There were ads all over the site, offers to upgrade to premium, and a never ending set of details to enter about each and every training session. The UI was, very much, out-of-control. After using it once or twice it was quickly taking the fun out of any training progress I was making.

…

Enter Garmin Connect. Somehow I came back to Garmin’s site to see how they were getting on with the Mac support they promised oh so long. After downloading my entire GPS history and using the site the last few days I have to say that Garmin Connect is fabulous!

Syncing my GPS was fast and easy after installing one simple plugin in Safari 4. The interface is clean and appealing, and the feature set is focused. You can view routes in Google Maps, playback your route, chart speed, elevation, heart rate, and cadence, set goals, export in various formats, and post to social networking. Searching for routes in my area led to some really good finds: enough to motivate me to get out on the bike for 47 miles today! Now I can’t wait to explore some more.

It’s been a long time in coming, but Garmin, I like what I see so thanks!
Link to my Garmin Connect profile.

Screenshots

As a general rule, if you need a 6×11 grid to communicate the upgrade path for your product… it might be excessively complicated.

As usual, Microsoft wants to cover off every single possibility, rather than focusing on the core. After ending up with 7 ways to press the ‘off’ button in Vista I thought they might have streamlined things a bit.

[Via the Mossblog]