Golden Cheetah is about to release a new version. There have been extensive updates…some great, unique new features for analyzing cycling power training data. The full feature list will be announced with the official release. In brief:

• direct SRM download
• colorized power zones in plots
• altitude (from supported files)
• WKO file support (including bulk import)
• Critical Power (CP60) computation from aggregate CP data.
• weekly plot of time/distance and BikeScore/Intensity
• calendar view of workouts

There has also been significant work done under the hood in preparation for a pretty big announcement coming in the next few weeks. Exciting times.

Mac release candidate is available here. Linux and windows versions will be announced on the Golden Cheetah mailing list.

—

For posterity, I’ve upgraded my dev system to OS 10.6, Snow Leopard, and had to rebuild Qt and QWT. Since we want Golden Cheetah to continue to support PPC/Intel and 10.4+, here is the configure command I needed to use for building Qt 4.5.2.

./configure -static -prefix /usr/local/Qt4.5.2 -make libs -opensource -qt-sql-sqlite -LD="gcc -mmacosx-version-min=10.4" -confirm-license -universal -sdk /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk

In preparation of submitting Pinwheel to the App Store I’ve gone and released a beta version via ad hoc distribution. Seems like it should be a straightforward prospect, however the various device provisioning, code signing profiles and entitlements made it a bit of a process for a first-timer.

iTunes also seems to be entirely unhelpful when something goes wrong with the “unknown error” message. What could it be? Code sign error? Unprovisioned device? Incorrect OS target? Mismatch in the app and mobileprovision file? It’s all a mystery in the iTunes universe.

Despite the inconvenience involved with having to generate a new ad hoc mobileprovision profile each time I add a new beta tester device, requiring a recompile of the beta app, it’s nice to finally get an app out to other non-development devices.

The ad hoc distribution process is documented well (enough) on Apple’s dev portal and on several other blogs, but my real stumbling block was navigating the Xcode interface to ensure that the proper code signing profile was being included in the binary (hint, look at the verbose build output for “embedded.mobileprovision” and ensure that the mobileprovision ID matches the correct version.)

I’ve also been getting trouble with Xcode not building using the correct provisioning, despite updating the target info and cleaning out the build folder. A restart of the program usually gets it sorted.

The next step will be to set up a Distribution build for the App Store submission. We’ll see how that goes in the end…