BlackBerry version beta is available!

A beta of the BlackBerry version of SportyPal is now available for download on the website. This version has been tested on devices with the following screen resolutions: 320×240, 480×360 and 480×320.

The following devices are officially supported:

• BlackBerry Bold 9000
• BlackBerry Curve 8310
• BlackBerry 8820
• BlackBerry 8800
• BlackBerry 8830 World Edition
• BlackBerry Curve 8900

Important note: If you’re having problems registering to the website or uploading workouts, try connecting the phone to the Internet using a Wi-Fi connection. Please let us know if you’re able to register or upload without using a Wi-Fi connection.

If you signed up to be notified when a BlackBerry version becomes available and haven’t received a notification yet, don’t worry. We’ll still notify you when the BlackBerry version goes out of beta.

You can download the BlackBerry beta from the download page, and you can view the BlackBerry page at SportyPal.com here.

Default privacy options

You may not have noticed, but a few days ago we added the much needed “Privacy options” tab in the profile section of the website.

Before we had this, all workouts were uploaded with a sharing level of “Everyone” (public) by default. “Everyone” means that everyone that comes to the site, regardless of their being a registered user, can view the workout. Here’s how to change the privacy level of a workout that has already been uploaded: go to the “My Workouts” page while logged in and click on your workouts to select them. Click the “Share” button below the workout list and you’ll get a dialog asking you to set a privacy level for the selected workouts.

Now you can set a default privacy level for the new workouts that you upload. Go to your profile and click the “Privacy options” tab. Here you can set your sharing preference for new workouts, as well as your records and results pages.

Privacy options

Don’t forget to click the “Save Preferences” button before leaving the page!

Problems starting the new version

Some of you have reported problems starting the new version of SportyPal for Windows Mobile after overwriting the previous one.  We had some similiar problems when we uploaded the latest version, but we thought we’d corrected them. So, even though we don’t know exactly what’s wrong, we have some suggestions:

First, try running SportyPal again. Sometimes the first run fails, but subsequent runs are OK.

If that doesn’t work, go to the SportyPal folder (typically /Program Files/SportyPal/), and select “Show All Files” from the right side or context menu. Select all of the files (but not the folders) and delete them. Now try installing and running SportyPal again.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

We received several inquiries from Nokia 5800 users who have been unable to get a GPS signal. The 5800 not being one of the devices officially supported by SportyPal, we replied that we don’t know if and when we’ll have a Nokia 5800-compatible version ready, and that we’d notify them if we did.

However, Matt, one of the users that tried using the Java version of SportyPal with his 5800, didn’t give up when we told him that it probably wouldn’t work, and managed to get it working. We checked the workout that he uploaded, and sure enough, he uploaded from a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and we also found another user that had been using SportyPal with the same device.

Here’s what Matt had to say when we asked him how he succeeded in getting a signal:

I just ran the phone GPS positioning tool first, cancelled that, turned phone off/on and tried Sportypal again and it connected no problems.

And here’s what David, another Nokia 5800 user, says:

I found that I needed to use the setting ‘Assisted GPS’ rather than ‘Integrated GPS’ in the Nokia 5800 settings.

So, there you have it. SportyPal apparently works on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and we didn’t even know it. The screen resolution is a bit off, making some parts unreadable and strange-looking, but you can record and upload workouts.

Windows Mobile SportyPal 1.0.2

A new update is now online for Windows Mobile users. It is highly recommended that you upgrade to 1.0.2.

Here are the changes in this version:

• Fixed a bug which would allow you to record a workout correctly, but it would upload a weird version of it with weird lines all over and a starting point in the middle. If you’ve had one of these, once you’ve installed 1.0.2, you can delete the workout on the site, and upload a correct version from your device with the re-upload trick.
• You can now make the taskbar appear in SportyPal by clicking near the top of the screen.
• Attempted to fix the auto-sleep bug. We can’t test this, so tell us if it works for you. If it doesn’t, don’t worry, we have some more ideas to try out by the next version.
• Fixed a bug where the final coordinate of a workout would not get filtered correctly and therefore end up halfway across the world.
• Changed the distance display to always show miles if you’re using imperial units, also updated the main workout display to autoswitch to kilometers after 1000 m.
• Made the record type visible when viewing records for a specific type. This is what it was supposed to look like all along, we just never noticed it was wrong until a while ago.
• Patched up a bug that would cause SportyPal to crash on startup, thanks to Adam Stein. This seems to be limited to WM Standard, which isn’t supported at the moment anyway, but better safe than sorry.
  There is now no reason why SportyPal shouldn’t start on a 320×240 WM Standard device, although it’s not very usable. Smartphone support is not on the top of our list right now, but we’re moving a little closer with each update.
• Added version numbers and device names to local error logs (this should’ve been obvious, but Adam Stein had to point it out before we did it). Hopefully, SportyPal won’t crash anymore and you’ll never get to see them.
• Sped a few things up slightly. You probably won’t even notice, really, but it’s good to know it’s there.
• Cleared the landscape view on the “My profile” screen up a bit. This screen will be split into more screens as more features are added, so hopefully it’ll become even less messy in the future.

Users upgrading directly from version 1.0 should read this note.

This is an old version and is no longer available for download. However, if you still wish to download it, you can do so here.

Top 10 users

A new feature has been added to the Community page of the SportyPal website: top 10 users. The users featured on the list are ranked using a point system which uses the data from the workouts that they’ve uploaded from their devices using SportyPal (GPX uploads don’t count).

Top 10 users for 17.06.2009

Some of you have been asking what the profile pictures you’ve uploaded are for. Well, this is one place where you’ll see them.

Expect more features on the Community page soon.

Re-uploading workouts

Sometimes, you need to upload a workout that’s already been marked as uploaded. Some of you that have been having trouble with the WM 1.0.1 update will want to re-upload some of your problematic workouts once they’ve installed 1.0.2.

There is a way to do this in the Windows Mobile version. Open the workout from “My Workouts”, and go to the workout graph. You’ll see the “Upload” button there, and if you’ve uploaded your workout, it should be gray and non-clickable.

Hold the upload button for several seconds until it turns white. When you release it, you will get a dialog box asking you if you want to upload your workout again.

The upload button

Note that if you do upload the workout again, nothing will happen on the site unless you deleted the old one first.

UPDATE: As of version 1.1.1, you no longer need to do this. The “Options” menu always be present in the workout details screen and the “Upload” option will always be available, though you will have to confirm if you want to re-upload a workout.

Sleep mode in Windows Mobile

Early into the developement of the Windows Mobile version of SportyPal, we noticed an interesting feature of the operating system that bugs us to this day: even if there is work actively being done by an application (such as, for example, recording the coordinates of a GPS-tracked workout), the device will go to sleep mode if it’s set to do so and you don’t press any keys in the meantime. Unfortunately for us, sleep mode also kills the GPS signal, and we don’t want this to happen during a workout. To work around this without having to tell the users to change their power settings for every workout, SportyPal disables sleep mode during workouts (where having a constant GPS fix is obviously pretty important) and handles the screen state itself. So far, so good. But there are two problems that remain:

First, if you press the power button to turn the screen off, the device goes to sleep and your signal is lost. Don’t do this during a workout, the screen will turn itself off pretty soon, and you can turn it back on by pushing any button on your device.

Second, unlike the devices that we tested on, some devices completely ignore our attempts to disable sleep mode and sleep anyway. Over the next few CAB updates, we’ll be looking for a way to disable sleep mode for all Windows Mobile devices. However, since we can’t test if this works (we haven’t had any problems with this on our devices to begin with), we’ll need your input to tell us if what we’re doing is any good.

Until we sort this out, users with the auto-sleep problem are going to have to set their power settings manually. To do this, go to Start -> Settings -> System -> Power -> Advanced and uncheck the “turn off device if not used for…” option.

Power Settings

Using the date filter

You may have noticed that there’s a display showing a range of dates in the “My Results” and “My Workouts” parts of the website. This is the date filter.

The date filter

Click the date filter to show a slider with two knobs. Moving the left knob adjusts the left date, and the right knob adjusts the right date. Now, when you click the date filter again, the graphs (if you’re viewing your results) or workouts (if you’re viewing your workouts) will be updated to show only data from the period between those two dates.

You can click the “Last Month” button to show only data from the last month. The date range display will not be changed to show this, but you’ll still be viewing last month’s data.

The default setting for the filter is to show the data for the last year. So, if you’ve just started uploading workouts from the past few days, and the graphs in “My Results” are empty, try moving the date filter’s left knob to get a smaller time range.

A note to users upgrading from WM 1.0

If you’re upgrading from version 1.0 of SportyPal for Windows Mobile, you may have noticed that during the installation you weren’t warned that the previous version would be uninstalled. You also may have noticed that SportyPal is now listed twice in the Remove Programs menu (Settings -> System -> Remove Programs).

This is somewhat of an anomaly, but it causes absolutely no harm to anything. The program is not actually doubled in memory, and everything is in the same place.  Removing either of these will uninstall SportyPal, but not the other entry. Nothing bad will happen if you remove the other entry after that.