New Crickles releases

Starting today, there will be a stream of preview releases of the Intervals-based version of Crickles, leading incrementally to a full new release in due course. These will come in three phases:

Alpha releases

Since Strava became a non-viable source of data in November, Crickles has been re-engineered to get data from Intervals.icu instead. The need to overhaul the account creation process presented a natural opportunity to improve the sign-up process and also to address long-standing issues affecting the management of user credentials. This has now been done: those of you who have reported that some browsers on some platforms don’t cache your log-in details properly should hopefully now find such problems to be resolved. The purpose of the alpha preview versions is to test that:

1. Crickles user data is correctly retrieved from Intervals and the interaction between the two platforms is smooth;
2. The sign-in experience remains flawless thereafter.

Please note that only a very limited subset of Crickles functionality is available during the alpha preview cycle – the bare minimum needed to test the above. In particular, none of Crickles’ unique models, for example for deriving Cardiac Stress Scores, will be available during the alpha phase. Also, the analysis available in alpha releases is based on your activities since Crickles was taken offline in mid December. This date is arbitrary and further releases will make more historical data flexibly available.

Given these limitations, the alpha phase is aimed at existing Crickles users who already had, or have recently created, Intervals accounts and want to check that their data flows through. For people unfamiliar with Crickles, I would strongly advise sitting out the alpha phase as it will not give you a good indication of what Crickles is all about. I ask again that you all please use Intervals to connect directly to your devices rather than via Strava as apps like Crickles are prohibited by Strava from producing any analysis based on data that has passed through their API.

Be aware that, while data security is already now production-grade, the Crickles’ alpha environment may from time to time be taken down (I’ll try not to do that too often) and that updates, which may interrupt your session, may be made at any time without warning.

If you are interested, given these caveats, in trialling the alpha releases please let me know and I’ll send you a link. This is available now. These are formally “pre-releases” and are not available in the normal way from this website.

Beta releases

Alpha releases will continue to be made to re-introduce familiar Crickles functionality. Adding back many advanced features requires another step change where modelling of current activities depends upon analysis of historical activities. As many of you will know, this was previously done by partially processing new activities in near-real-time and then running a daily deep consolidation. The purpose of the beta phase is to re-implement this in the Intervals context. This needs to be done in order to bring many Crickles pages back on-line; during the beta phase the full set of Crickles pages will be incrementally re-introduced (although the target feature set may shrink or grow at this time).

It will therefore be possible to get an increasing sense of Crickles’ functional capability as this progresses.

Like the alpha releases, the beta releases are “pre-production”.

Return to production

Once the alpha and beta releases have re-introduced all of the Crickles functionality and this has been tested enough to prove that everything works well on the new platform, a “production” release will be made. What this amounts to is essentially –

1. Making the Navigator available from this website, as before.
2. Increasing the server capacity and boosting resilience measures.
3. Establishing a staging environment to avoid disruptive releases.
4. Completing documentation and details such as graceful error-handling.

Even after the first production release, you can expect several more throughout the year to extend what Crickles could previously do.

I’m not sure of the exact timelines – I expect to get to production grade some time during this quarter.

Ian