Apps WorkOutDoors: New workout features

[cfc]

The buttons work but the view doesn't refresh when a button is pressed. If you go into the app switching view and back into the app then the view refreshes.

It isn't ideal, but obviously this is the first dev beta, so things like this are expected.

Sorry, I don’t investigate issues with the watchOS betas until at least the 4th or 5th beta. I have wasted too much time in the past looking into bugs that Apple fix in a future beta.

In addition this year I have completely rewritten the user interface and that new version should hopefully be released before watchOS 10, so there is no point investigating issues with the current version on watchOS 10.

 

[leescottdavis]

Has anyone gotten workoutdoors to work correctly with watchOS 10? I still have the bug where the long press screen during workouts doesn’t actually let you click the buttons…

There are definitely some issues. The buttons do click, but navigating between screens has a huge delay. I put it down to being a Developer Beta so issues like this are expected. I have a couple of other apps crashing. It’ll probably stabilise around Public beta 2.

 

[Akrapovic]

Sorry, I don’t investigate issues with the watchOS betas until at least the 4th or 5th beta. I have wasted too much time in the past looking into bugs that Apple fix in a future beta.

In addition this year I have completely rewritten the user interface and that new version should hopefully be released before watchOS 10, so there is no point investigating issues with the current version on watchOS 10.

Yeah totally. I'm the same with my iPhone app. It's very broken on iOS17 at the moment, but it's basic menu display issues and I'm not going to try and fix those.

 

[Otto Pilot]

I cannot wait for Always-On to hit WOD. This is not intended as rushing or pressuring you, but damn…for swimming especially, the gymnastics needed to see the right metrics is annoying.

Also, and this is both possibly technically impossible if you rely on apple workout types, and most certainly extremely niche, but a request I would love to have is a ”swim tether” or ”swim spa” mode that just doesn’t try to track distance. It’s aways weird to finish a hard 30-45 minute swim and have the distance show as something like 270 yards. I’d rather have it not try. Again…I recognize the extreme niche use-case of this.

 

[Hvc5ik]

Has anyone gotten workoutdoors to work correctly with watchOS 10? I still have the bug where the long press screen during workouts doesn’t actually let you click the buttons…

It works. You need to long press, use for example the Stop button and then long press the most top side of watch screen which will pull the watch notification bar over any full screen app. Then you release it (you don’t need to pull the notifications fully, just make it pop a little) and then the WorkOutDoors button press is fired.

 

[cfc]

I cannot wait for Always-On to hit WOD. This is not intended as rushing or pressuring you, but damn…for swimming especially, the gymnastics needed to see the right metrics is annoying.

Also, and this is both possibly technically impossible if you rely on apple workout types, and most certainly extremely niche, but a request I would love to have is a ”swim tether” or ”swim spa” mode that just doesn’t try to track distance. It’s aways weird to finish a hard 30-45 minute swim and have the distance show as something like 270 yards. I’d rather have it not try. Again…I recognize the extreme niche use-case of this.

I suspect that is impossible because Apple's workout system either uses the pool length when indoors or the GPS when outdoors. My guess is that it probably cannot calculate the distance without either of those. I don't know for sure though.

 

[Otto Pilot]

I suspect that is impossible because Apple's workout system either uses the pool length when indoors or the GPS when outdoors. My guess is that it probably cannot calculate the distance without either of those. I don't know for sure though.

The Form Swim goggles app does have a swim spa mode that ignores distance, but that app seems to not even send workout time to strava or health. Which…if it doesn’t count toward a leaderboard, did you really exercise?

 

[Duffman19]

A very small critique: features like roads and trails (specifically dashed lines for trails) don’t seem to scale appropriately when zooming. When zooming in closer than the 100 m scale, the dashes marking trails are too large and begin to look awkward.

I do a bit of editing for OSM and often zoom in closely to see fine details for trails. It’s nearly impossible to discern tight switchbacks and turns using the WoD map as the dashes are too large. The large dashes also sometimes run together creating a solid looking line, and other times are spread far apart, often on the same trail.

Most mapping programs will scale the styling to match the zoom level. Is there a possible fix for this? Again, this is a tiny niggle for an excellent app.

 

[cfc]

A very small critique: features like roads and trails (specifically dashed lines for trails) don’t seem to scale appropriately when zooming. When zooming in closer than the 100 m scale, the dashes marking trails are too large and begin to look awkward.

I do a bit of editing for OSM and often zoom in closely to see fine details for trails. It’s nearly impossible to discern tight switchbacks and turns using the WoD map as the dashes are too large. The large dashes also sometimes run together creating a solid looking line, and other times are spread far apart, often on the same trail.

Most mapping programs will scale the styling to match the zoom level. Is there a possible fix for this? Again, this is a tiny niggle for an excellent app.

That has bugged me for a while but you are the first person to mention it in ages so I haven't looked into it. I seem to remember that I left it like that for a reason, but it is so long ago that I wrote the map renderer that I can't remember why. I will probably fix it eventually but at the moment there are higher priorities. Sorry about that.

 

[alexblanck]

Unfortunately, the fact that the device name does not show up in Strava may now be having a real impact on activities. For some activities, I’ve noticed my Strava elevation gain is significantly more than the one shown by WorkOutDoors (over 1,000 feet more).

It appears that Strava is now automatically adjusting elevation when the device type isn’t recognized to have an altimeter:

If your device doesn't have a barometric altimeter or the file is from our mobile app, the activity page will display a "corrected elevation". This process involves cross-referencing the GPS data in the file to our database of barometric data.

I know there’s already been some discussion on the difficulty of getting Strava to recognize the device name, but I wanted to flag this again since I believe the previous complaints were based on aesthetics not functionality.

 

[leescottdavis]

I use Rungap to upload activities to Strava. It changes the device to a Garmin 945 to fool Strava so it leaves elevation alone.

 

[Mauki]

In addition this year I have completely rewritten the user interface and that new version should hopefully be released before watchOS 10, so there is no point investigating issues with the current version on watchOS 10.

Does this version include the new navigation features?

 

[cfc]

Does this version include the new navigation features?

No, Sorry. This version is focussed on the always on display. Navigation features will be top of my list after it is released.

 

[d3vp0ll]

Not sure what Garmin Connect Mobile app syncs to Apple Health, but with a tool like RunGap you should be able to pull the workouts out of Garmin and sync to Apple Health with all data.

Could you provide some more detail on how to accomplish this? I switched from Garmin to AW but I want to keep my training schedule from Garmin Connect for a HM and incorporate it into my Apple Watch for training, and I have Garmin, Apple Health and RunGap installed. But I can’t for the life of me figure this out.

 

[NME42]

Could you provide some more detail on how to accomplish this? I switched from Garmin to AW but I want to keep my training schedule from Garmin Connect for a HM and incorporate it into my Apple Watch for training, and I have Garmin, Apple Health and RunGap installed. But I can’t for the life of me figure this out.

Using Garmin Connect with RunGap

Connecting your Garmin Connect Account To connect your Garmin Connect account, select "Accounts & Settings" from the upper left menu and then "Garmin Connect." Next, enter y...

rungap.zendesk.com

 

[cubodado]

Do you need the swag bag (purchase) for the syncronisation with Rungap or is it on the free version of the app? Does Healthfit work for this too? I already have Healthfit and I would like to limit a bit the number of apps on my phone and watch.
About what Garmin writes to Health, can’t tell precisely since I disabled it as well as Strava for deduplication of activities. But I read there is some data like overall calories and average HR, total length and time, but no detailed HR data and no GPS data.

 

[NME42]

Do you need the swag bag (purchase) for the syncronisation with Rungap or is it on the free version of the app? Does Healthfit work for this too? I already have Healthfit and I would like to limit a bit the number of apps on my phone and watch.

Yes, you need the SwagBag.
And HealthFit can’t sync from/to Garmin Connect.

 

[d3vp0ll]

This may be a dumb question, but, how exactly does one go about creating a structured workout in the app? I attempt this on the phone and says to do it on the watch, but I want to create a workout ahead of time on the watch so that when I ready for an outdoor run I just tap and go.

 

[NME42]

This may be a dumb question, but, how exactly does one go about creating a structured workout in the app?

http://www.workoutdoors.net/Intervals.html

 

[oboe5150]

Hi Ian, I have an alert set for Max pace when i go out for a run.
I noticed last night that if I have intervals with max-min times defined less than the alert set for running. This would trigger the max pace alert even though it was irrelevant to the interval.
I'm assuming that the reason is because its seen as a global pace threshold, however it makes sense to me that if you choose intervals that are speed/pace based, they would supersede that global value for that session.

Does this make sense or am i missing something?

cheers
OW

 

[cfc]

Hi Ian, I have an alert set for Max pace when i go out for a run.
I noticed last night that if I have intervals with max-min times defined less than the alert set for running. This would trigger the max pace alert even though it was irrelevant to the interval.
I'm assuming that the reason is because its seen as a global pace threshold, however it makes sense to me that if you choose intervals that are speed/pace based, they would supersede that global value for that session.

Does this make sense or am i missing something?

cheers
OW

No-one has ever reported that before. The app doesn't do any intelligent comparison of interval targets with the regular alerts, but you can control whether regular alerts are given during an interval. So you could configure regular alerts to be disabled during intervals where they might confuse things.

This would mean that you wouldn't get any of the regular alerts, which could be annoying if you still want the distance notifications, but it may help.

 

[keeper]

‘Back at Start’ very small point but can this not pop up unless you have moved an x amount of distance from the start?
Quite often on a bike ride I start WOD while i’m still have my glasses on and i’m still walking round the garage and drive getting ready to go and WOD pings me.

 

[Lars34]

Are you going to hand off Bluetooth cycling sensors to watchOS, like the heart rate chest strap, or will you keep your own implementation? (Not even sure if it's possible)

I'm also a software engineer, so I'm just curious about the implementation

 

[cfc]

‘Back at Start’ very small point but can this not pop up unless you have moved an x amount of distance from the start?
Quite often on a bike ride I start WOD while i’m still have my glasses on and i’m still walking round the garage and drive getting ready to go and WOD pings me.

The back at start alert requires you to have been at least 500m from the starting position before it is activated. Do you wait for a good GPS signal before starting a workout? If you start whilst indoors then the GPS signal could be awful and think you have moved 500m. This seems unlikely because it would need to be a very bad signal, but it is the only explanation I can think of.

 

[cfc]

Are you going to hand off Bluetooth cycling sensors to watchOS, like the heart rate chest strap, or will you keep your own implementation? (Not even sure if it's possible)

I'm also a software engineer, so I'm just curious about the implementation

I will probably give the user the choice, like they have with heart rate sensors. However it isn't high priority because I spoke with Apple and they won't be supporting any more sensors than WOD already does.

I had hoped they may handle some of the models with proprietary Bluetooth protocols, or the Fitness Machine protocol used by some stationary bikes. But it looks as if, like WOD, they are also only connecting to sensors that provide the standard protocol.

Part of the reason I didn't handle any other protocols was the cost of buying all the different (usually expensive) models of bikes/pedals. However this wouldn't be an issue to a $3T company, so maybe they are starting simple and will support them in the future.

One possible benefit of connecting via watchOS instead of WOD is that when Apple connect to a Bluetooth device then it doesn't count towards the 2 device limit on the watch, so it would help there. However it is very rare that people use more than two non-HR sensors.