Today the Crickles Navigator moves from an alpha to a beta status. This is a version of the Navigator that is functionally close to the forthcoming formal release and is available now for anyone who is prepared to accept the caveats described below. The three things you need to know about this version are listed at the end of this post.
There are several important, positive improvements in this version compared to classic Crickles, notably:
- Your activities are now sourced from intervals.icu, which is an open platform that is positively supportive of apps like Crickles. More information is available over the intervals API and intervals does not have a policy of prohibiting value-adding analysis.
- The management of user credentials and cacheing is much improved and I hope that the initial sign-up process is easier too.
- Data and analysis in Crickles now updates in real time as you add and update your activities on your Garmin, Wahoo and other devices.
- There is a new Route maps page that shows you where you exceeded your sustainable heart rate on an activity (subject to your heart rate being captured).
- There is a new Cardiac Stress vs Peers page that does what it says. This can be thought of a much improved version of the old CSS Factors page.
- Much more information about your activities can be seen on the Activities page.
There are, however, some features of classic Crickles that are not yet in the new version. Most or all of these will be re-introduced. These include:
- The Fit-Fat page. Here, I want to reconsider how the Fitness and Fatigue figures can be validated before re-introducing them.
- Fitness Trend. This is a popular page that I like myself; see point above.
- The Irregularity page. While the Regularity status of each activity is now encoded on the Timeline page, as well as still being shown on the Activities page, the peer comparison is not yet available pending consideration of how more intuitively to present it.
- X Factors. This was perhaps the most sophisticated of the pages in Crickles classic – or at least the one that juggled the most models – but it’s less central to Crickles and so hasn’t made the first cut.
Why is this version a beta and not a release version? There are three primary reasons:
- The way that Crickles both manages new users and processes information have fundamentally changed and we need to monitor how this holds up under increasing volumes of users who will push the load on the system and uncover unanticipated edge cases. Until we see how it goes things may be unstable now and then. There may be short periods of unavailability during the beta period, though hopefully not an annoying number of them.
- Before declaring a formal release I want to re-validate all of the models in the new context. Also, I have not yet rolled out the final models, some of which are improvements on those in Crickles classic. It’s probably hard to detect this as an individual user but during the beta phase you may occasionally see that a large number of your metrics are recalculated in the event that a model upgrade has been made. This is very rare in the live system but will certainly happen at least once in March, and probably a few times.
- In reconsidering what Crickles can be like in its far more open incarnation, I’ve come to think that this particular website, which is created using wordpress, is the wrong platform. I intend to move onto one that is simpler and more supportive of extended model descriptions and open source software. If things go well, a first version of the new site, replacing this wordpress site, may be available upon the release.
Here are the three things you need to know:
- The Navigator has now moved. Its new home, where it will remain, is at https://navigator.crickles.org.
- To use it you will first need to create an account at intervals.icu. When doing so connect to all of your relevant sports devices directly instead of through Strava as activities that come from Strava cannot be read into apps like Crickles because Strava has prohibited that use of their API.
- You can try the beta version now – the release version is expected later this month.
Ian