Getting started, refreshing data, and fewer Irregular activities
Clearer messages when something isn’t working, and fewer Irregular readings
Over the past fortnight three things have changed, none of which alters any of the Crickles metrics themselves, but all of which should make the Navigator a little easier to use.
Getting started
When you first connect your intervals.icu account, Crickles has to read your activity history before it can show you anything, and until that finishes the Navigator holds you on the Profile page. The messages that you see during that time could be misleading, especially if something went wrong. Crickles now gives better status information - whether your data is waiting in the queue, being worked on at this moment, finished, or if it stopped before it completed. In some failure scenarios Crickles could repeatedly re-try many times while showing confusing messages.
Two problematic situations merit an explanation. The first is an intervals.icu account whose activities all come from Strava: Crickles isn’t permitted to analyse Strava data, so an account fed that way yields nothing we can work with; when this happens the Profile page now explains the problem. If you can set your devices to upload to intervals.icu directly rather than going through Strava, everything recorded from that point on will come through to Crickles normally.
The second problematic situation is when a connection to intervals.icu has lapsed. Intervals.icu withdraws an app’s access to a free account after roughly three months without a visit to the intervals.icu site itself, which is easy to run into if your devices sync automatically and Crickles is all you actually look at. There is now a Reconnect Intervals.icu button on the Profile page, enabling you to restore the connection yourself, where previously you would have had to write and ask us to clear it for you.
Refreshing your data
The Refresh My Data button on Profile queues a full re-read of your history, which can take anything from a few seconds to several minutes depending on how much history Crickles collects for you. Previously, while the refresh was underway the button did not change and was still pressable. Also, the message underneath it did not update to confirm that the processing had completed.
The button now greys out while the refresh is queued or running and the message underneath reports completion. If the refresh stops before it finishes, the message tells you and suggests reconnecting intervals.icu, which is the usual solution.
Regularity test refinement
Regularity is the field that records what Crickles makes of the heart rate trace, where one is available. One of the diagnostics - OHM_jump - is indicative of an Optical Heartrate Monitor misreading. This test was improved recently and we made a related change to the detection of an Irregular pattern. Upon review, this change was generating more values of Irregular or Unclear than we think warranted so that part of the change has been reverted. If this affects you, you may notice fewer such values going forward, and if you refresh your data you may well see some recent past values of Unclear or Irregular revert to Regular. The improvement in OHM_jump detection remains.
New activities pick this up automatically. To bring your history up to date, refresh your data as described here and hit Confirm.
Ian