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I am pleased to announce the launch of Cyclogz today. This is a free site to upload logs directly from Garmin GPS computers like Edge 205, Edge 305, Forerunner 201, Forerunner 301 etc, and then share those logs with everyone. I started developing this site about three months ago as I was not happy with the features and the user experience provided by some alternatives - most notably the desktop-based Garmin Training Center, and Garmin’s very own MotionBased.

Of these, Garmin Training Center is good enough for simply storing the logs on a Mac or a PC, and to take screenshots of the very primitive map and the charts it can generate. I wanted something better than that. I did try MotionBased for a short-while, and then discontinued, mainly for two reasons. First of all, it is a subscription based site, and I did not think I should pay Garmin indefinitely for this online service, after paying for a Garmin GPS. I would expect it to be free. Secondly, and more importantly, the user-experience of MotionBased is underwhelming. It has some good features, but in my view, the features were decided by product managers and not by cyclists. Since I can write code, and am a cyclist, why not write one? Thus the idea of Cyclogz was born.

Cyclogz is alpha, but is is fairly usable, and a friend of mine and I have been using it for about a month. There are some usability related bugs to fix, and lots of features to add. As of today, it can do some useful things to get started:

• Upload logs from Garmin GPS computers that are USB capable. I am using Garmin Communicator API for this purpose.
• Extract ride details, such as location(s), and ride statistics for each ride, as well as any laps within a ride, without requiring any user input. The user can, of course, change a few things, as well add some notes about each ride.

• Since this is a free site, all rides uploaded will be shared with everyone, under a Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States) license. This way, I can run some ads to offset the cost of hosting.
• Upload historical logs from .tcx files. Garmin Training Center uses this format, and I wrote an Adobe AIR based app to upload .tcx files directly to Cyclogz.

This is just the beginning. Along with bug fixing and code cleanup, I have lots of features under development:

• Generate a ride diary showing weekly, monthly and yearly views of distance, time, climbs, and so on.
• Widgets for sharing ride summary, maps, and charts on third-party sites.
• Searching. I have not focused on this so far, since search becomes more interesting when there are more logs to search for.
• Lap by lap maps and charts. The work is mostly complete, except for some UI organization.
• Exporting logs back to .tcx format
• Charts from HRM data.
• Comparing laps
• And more

Check out my logs since the I day bough my Garmin Edge 305. All these are shared at Cyclogz.