What’s coming in Version 3 of VeloViewer

The Strava web services which are the backbone of VeloViewer are set to be replaced in the very near future with a much improved set. These new API’s will open up a huge amount of additional data to what I’ve had to play with previously and I’ll finally know who is actually visiting the site and display or hide data appropriately, First up though is a video I’ve put together of the new Activities page I’ve been working on that shows the new, very interactive cross-filtering functionality integrated with a new activity summary map. Sorry for the very poor narration skills:

Hopefully you’ll understand how these filters will work and how powerful they’ll be for you.

A quick list of the key additions in VeoViewer V3 are:

  • ALL activity types Hooray! No longer just your bike rides, now you’ll have the stats (and segment details/placings) for all of these different types e.g. run, swim, hike, ski etc.
  • OAuth – to access the site you will need to give VeloViewer access to your Strava data though a simple button press when logged into Strava. The same as you get allowing websites access to your Facebook or Twitter data. This means that VeloViewer will finally know who you are and not let you see anyone else’s data unless they allow it. By default all your VeloViewer data will then only be visible to you but you will have the option to make it publically available if you so wish. Your private rides will always only be visible to yourself. If your friends are also and VeloViewer and they have made their data available then I should be able to provide comparisons between yourself and them.
  • QOM – Following on from the OAuth I will also finally know if you are male or female and provide the QOM rather than the KOM.
  • Update – I’ve completely reworked the update page and logic to provide a single click to upload all your data and another single click to check all your places. I’ve also reworked it to ensure it will be much more resilient than the current version. You can now stop the update process at any point and it’ll pick it up from where you left off next time you try, even if from a different device or browser.
  • Hosting – moving to Amazon EC2. The current shared hosting setup has been increasingly plagued with downtime. It was fine when it was just myself and my club-mates using the site but its user base seems to be growing pretty quickly!
  • Filtering – this was asked for many months ago and this code refresh is the perfect opportunity to introduce it. My personal interests are in data visualisations and combining this with the filtering was always a key thing for me to implement.
  • More data – e.g. heart rate, power and hopefully cadence.
  • Increased configurability and saving of settings – not quite sure of the extent of this as yet but hope to allow you to choose which columns you see and potentially allow you to save different column/filter/order configurations to switch between your favorite views of the data (e.g. bike view, run view).
  • VeloFlow is saved! Yep, word on the street is that the Strava API necessary to keep VeloFlow alive will be created. Thank you Strava (and all you folks for supporting the request)!

Downsides/Restrictions in VeloViewer V3

  • Unfortunately you will have to reload all your data into the new site. In order to get the new fields available in the new Strava API’s then everything will need to be reprocessed anyway so it is far easier to make a clean start. My initial testing has had an athlete with 600 activities and 2000 segments all being loaded up in 10 minutes with a single button press.
  • The segments listed will just be “popular” segments. If a segment isn’t shown in VeloViewer then you’ll have to go and “unhide” it in Strava and then it will be pulled through on your next update.
  • You will no longer be able to upload other peoples’ data, but that’s a good thing really.
  • You will no longer be able to view other peoples’ data unless they have made it publicly available, once again, a good restriction.
  • IE8 and below will not be directly supported. The JavaScript library (d3) that is fundamental to the majority of the new site is only supported on standards compliant browsers. This just means that the few of you still using (through choice or not) IE6-8 will not be able to use VeloViewer without installing an add on. The add on that will allow you to user VeloViewer on IE6-8 is called Google Chrome Frame and if you visit the site on one of those browsers then it’ll take you through the install process.

When can we use it?

I’ve put together a V3 page that is available from the top menu where you can see the latest on the version 3 development.

 

0 thoughts on “What’s coming in Version 3 of VeloViewer

      • Average pace and max pace (min/mi or min/km) would be essential for my runs. Too many columns would be a problem!

        • I’ve added 1km/ml and 100m/yrd columns for average and max. Now need to look into how to easily let people show/hide columns they are not interested in and save different views. That was always on my list of things to do.

  • Very impressive, you have been busy – the cross-filtering looks powerful and fast. If you need a beta tester, I’d be happy to have a play around with it.

  • Sounds promissing.
    Regarding the authorization limitation, do you mean we will be able to view rides from people we already follow in Strava (assuming they also use veloviewer)?

    • I’m thinking of giving different levels of sharing.

      1. all private, nobody other than your authenticated self can view you data on VeloViewer
      2. let your followers view your data on VeloViewer (should this people people you follow or people that follow you or potentially only reciprocating followers?)
      3. let anyone see your data

      In both 1 and 2 then your activities marked as private will never be shown to anyone but yourself.
      Also, any privacy zones you have set up will hide your routes in those areas on all non-private activities.
      I could potentially add a page that lists your followers who are also on VeloViewer and have shared their data with you in whichever way to give you a quick route to their pages.

  • John Bytheway says:

    Cant wait to see all the changes, i really hope Strava are paying you or at the very least paying for your hosting/server costs, considering you are single handedly keeping me and no doubt others from leaving strava and doing what they should be doing.

    Admittedly the one thing i will miss will be the ability to look up anyones rides which i will often do with riders whos times i may target on various segments.

  • matt mccluskey says:

    Ben,

    This looks AWESOME so far!

    Looks like the main theme is “filter”. Which I personally love when it comes to loads of data like Strava. I always love to see how many ways I can parse/filter/cut/trim my data, and just how to show (or not) what I want.

    Great job!

  • Attila Antal says:

    As it’s VELOviewer, why would runs & hikes be imported?
    The new API is a good way to filter them straight away and save database space, time and hassle.

    • The site actually started out as STRAVAviewer but I was asked to change the name 😉 Should be easy enough to do though although it is extra work to implement so might not be there at the start of V3.

  • Keep up the great work mate. It is much appreciated. I’ve been off the bike for a couple of months due to injury and subsequent surgery, sporadic segment updates have been an absolute treat. The other day there were more than a dozen new segments and it was almost as good as updating a new ride. Thanks, looking forward to V3.

  • Ben-seriously fella, you have a good future ahead of you. This stuff is a perfect compliment to Strava

    • I’ll still link out to RaceShape once I’ve got my segment details page sorted. I’m not sure if Paul is going to migrate RaceShape across to the new Strava API’s though. He already has with his HeatMap but not sure what his plans are for the segment comparison page.

  • Hi Ben, found a couple of small bugs. Athlete ID 1641159

    1) In the “Position” filter (which I found a bit hard to use at first, because the “move left or right edge independently” function didn’t seem to work until after a “click and drag” operation on the graph) when I got it to say “1 to 10” I found there were some other positions displayed as well like 11, 12, 16.

    2) One thing, recently in Strava I did a small edit on the segments “Old Shaftesbury Drove East” and “Old Shaftesbury Drove West”. The new versions seem to have a new ID number. But the old versions of them have not disappeared from VeloViewer. It seems the link from VeloViewer to the old version gets redirected by Strava to the new version. But in the meantime both versions appear in the list of segments.

    Not massive problems, but thought I’d let you know. Thanks! 🙂

    • Just checked out the new Strava API for #2 and it doesn’t currently tell me that a segment has been edited. The original API would return an error message when asking for the leaderboard for the original segment. I’ve raised this with Strava and will sort out my end if/when they update their new API to fix this.

  • Lizanne (aka Night Fury) says:

    I’ve been in the UK and away from work for a while so haven’t been able to see the updates. I’m so excited, and as a female this site will become far more relevant! can’t wait!!! thank you so much for the programs

  • Just found VeloViewer and love it. Really good job.
    One question/request on the map filter. Currently the map filter works if the whole ride is in the map. As 95% of my rides (and I expect most peoples) centre around where we live we have a lot of rides in a very small area. There are some rides I do that only use a certain road. Therefore it would be neat to have an additional filter option to display the ride if part of it was visible. That way I could zoom into a very small section of the map and pick up any rides that passed through it. Not sure how easy this would be or how useful others would find it.
    Again, good work

    • Hmmm, it would be easy enough to filter if the start OR finish is on the map (rather than start AND finish as it is now) but trying to work out if any part of a ride is in there will require some very fast processing in your browser. I’ll have a go as it sounds like an interesting challenge but I’m not sure how well it will work, especially for those people with 1000’s or activities.

      • Ah so it’s not the whole route it’s looking for rather if the start AND stop are in the frame…. I see the dilemma then. Don’t break a leg over it. Of course if the grunt work is being done in browser you could display a warning for people. “use at your own peril”

      • Could you eliminate some rides based on ride distance? If the ride is only 10 miles long and the start or end are more than 10 miles from the map then they couldn’t qualify?

        • I’m sure I could filter out the rides I need to check like you say. I’ll give it a go and see. That is one of the annoying things with Strava’s segment explorer as you only get to see segments that both start and finish in the map, which really bugs me, so this is something I’ve been meaning to look into anyway.

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