Why people hate Adobe (and have now headache with sports-tracker.com)?

sportstracker.nokia.com was a GPS based sports tracking service for Nokia phones. Around a year ago it spun off as independent company, which was a good move if you really want to develop your service business. Now sports-tracker.com has launched a new website. You can upload your runs and photos there and share your sports results through social media.

It was delightful to see the new site opened and having the features been missing so long time ago. However, I was not totally happy with what I saw.

The whole new site is built on top of Adobe Flash run-time technologies. There are no traditional web pages per se.

The problem is that full page Flash is resource hog. In the picture above you see that opening this web site in my Safari web browser spikes CPU to 100% usage – and it actually stays there indefinitely (note: on front page, see remarks below). This means that my computer is working to barely survive under the stress caused by this one web site – and my computer is powerful iMac. This means that if I have this site open background in my web browser my laptop battery would die very very fast. This means that all programs I try to simultaneously use on my computer become sluggish.

I assume that when sports-tracker.com was spun off from Nokia they contracted some digital advertisiment agency to built the new site for them. Digital advertisement agencies are often, not always, companies focused on the brand and visual appearance. They love to work with Flash because it gives good authoring tools to build nice looking, bling bling filled, animations.  Flash is a great tool for animations. Flash is a great tool for building browser based games. However, it is not good for building the whole web site where the user experience criteria could include 1) the site actually to responds to clicks 2) the site does not bring down to the whole computer. The decision makers probably drink cool-aid “hey let’s built the site with the Adobe’s latest tools – have you seen the demos how coooooool they look like”.

The thing is, I want to just see my sports tracking results. I don’t care whether the diagrams have blurred drop shadows with state of the art Web 3.0 mouse over effects. Now I can enjoy the effects, points for the artistic leader for that, but doing the actual task, accessing my sports results, have become irritating task to do. Things respond sloooow – that’s the main reason. In-flash scrolls bars have noticeable lag.

There exists an uncanny valley how normal web sites behave and how 100% Flash site behave. My right click does not work. I cannot right click a link and open it in new tab. I cannot right click a link to copy it to my friend. I cannot access the site on my N900 web browser (which even has Flash). I coudn’t even send feedback to sports-tracker.com team without first installing a desktop email client, as the email address cannot be copied from Flash to web mail. Text boxes are little different.

I cannot hold my horses to see Adobe conquering mobile phones with Flash and doing the same thing for mobile browsing experience it has now done for sports-tracker.com.

The site is not bad. Usability guidelines have been followed carefully when building the site. The developers seem to have gone into great details to make the operations smooth as possible. For example, URL fragment identifies are used to make sure bookmarking works even though Flash is present on the site. Social media features, not present in old sport tracker, are finally there. The results of design decision to built the whole site on Flash, instead of using Flash for some components only, might not have been seen by the time this decision was taken.

When Nokia Sports Tracker was first introduced 3-4 years ago with the first Series 60 GPS phones it was ahead of the competition. Wow effect had no limits – can you really do that with your mobile phone – in real-time and live?

It is funny how time passes.

It is definitely possible to build a sports tracking site, which looks cool, but does not have issues mentioned here.

Note: With little more research it seems that CPU usage stays 100% is specific to front page only and it has issues of not winding down action when you move away from your browser. However, rendering of other pages still uses vast amount of CPU, causing lag you do not see when opening web pages. The background CPU consumption on sports-tracker.com page is aroud 8% per tab when should be 0%.

Note 2: I am using the latest 10.1  Flash Player.

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Peek-a-boo – Python logo spotted in outdoor advertisement!

This caught my eye when coming home from the work.

The finger points straight to the snake…

Kudos to Nokia for this. Nokia’s phones are the best platform if you wish to have pleasant rapid mobile application development in Python – just stay away from Symbian and Series 40 models.

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Nokia N900, sports tracking and geotagging

This blog contains some tips how to use your Nokia N900 smart phone as a “augmented reality” sports device.

Sports tracking

Sport tracking is about collecting your sports activity data using GPS and other equipment. After running/cycling/skiing/whatever you see where you have been, how much time it took and how fast you are. In same cases you are able to calculate burnt calories and estimated heart rate.

N900 has at least one sports tracking application out there, eCoach.  eCoach is also suitable for professionals as it has heart rate monitor integration.

eCoach allows you record and  store sport activities. During the activity it uses Open Street Map based map viewer to show your current location. At least Helsinki area has very detailed maps available there, showing even the smallest trails, so you can safely venture to unknown neighbourhoods.

eCoach exports its tracks as GPX gps data file format. eCoach does not have any service integration yet, but you can upload this file to Nokia Sports Tracker and Map My Tracks. The recommend the latter as it has better social media integration and seems to be under active development. On the otherhand I have been using Nokia Sportstracker since 2007 and it has not really development during the whole this time and seems to lack will to go forward. Also Nokia has disabled track profile for imported GPX files which gives a message “we really don’t care about this service”.

There is also a service called mapmyrun.com with various domain names like “maymysomething.com”. Steer away from this service as I tested it and it didn’t live up to my expections (too much advertising, horrible user interface).

Some sport tracks I have made

• Run in Map My Tracks
• Another run in Map My Tracks
• The same run in Nokia Sportstracker
• All my runs in Nokia Sporstracker

Geotagging

Geotagging is about having GPS  coordinates on your photos. This way photos can be put on the map autotically in photo sharing services like Yahoo Flick or Google Picasa. When you known location, capture time and sharing license of the photo, all kind of fantastic services can be created, like Microsoft Photosynth.

Technically geotagging works by embedded GPS coordiates into the EXIF metadata of JPEG files.

N900 has geotagging as out of the box feature – no additional software needed. Just turn on it on in Camera application settings.

Also, you can retrofit your photos with geotagging information afterwards. You can do this by hand using labels and drag and drop in the most of photo sharing applications, like Google Picasa. Also there exist automated tools if you have relates GPS records available as GPX or KML file: checkout GPicSync. This is handy if you record your sports in eCoach and forgot to turn on geotagging in N900 camera. GPicSync also has a Google Maps export feature if you want to create custom maps for your friends or customers.

• An example map created with N900, eCoach,  GPicSync and Google Maps from one of the runs above

Sports tracking + geotagging = ?

I am still trying to figure out how to combine sports tracking and geotagging to something cool. Maybe something along the lines of urban exploration.

But in any case here are some of cities I have “collected” from my travels

• Budapest
• London
• Copenhagen
• New York (GPS was not exactly working well…)
• Oulu