We finally got a new version of Golden Cheetah out the door….it’s been only like, almost a year. Whew! Pressure is off.

I had been making personal builds since the summer to give out to folks who wanted to take advantage off several new features introduced since the march build. Sean gave Justin and I write access to the svn code this past December and we’ve been playing catch up on a backlog of patches, and i’ve been remembering c++ and Qt.

Several new features have been added in this release: Critical Power calculator, find best intervals utility, Pedal Force / Pedal Velocity chart, iBike and Ergomo CSV import, GUI power zones creator, separate vertical axes for Power / HR / Cadence and Speed in the Ride plot, sorting rides with the most recent at the top of the list, and many bug fixes courtesy of JT Conklin. This version is also using FTDI D2xx drivers rather than VCP.

We’ve also switched to a numbered versioning system which will serve to better indicate which svn revision the releases were built from and perhaps will mask our slow release cycle.

The new release is available on the Golden Cheetah download page.

In conducting research for the CycleSense bicycle traffic proximity system I gathered data about the amount of space behind a bicycle rider traveling through typical New York City traffic at various times and locations. The initial visualization of this data was to graph the distances over time to look for specific events that the system would need to detect in order to be useful. I cross-referenced the space data with video taken on the same rides

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I finally built my first bicycle wheel. I’ve wanted to do it for a long while, but never got around to doing it. The opportunity presented itself after the Zipp 404 clincher rim laced to my PowerTap hub cracked, again. This has happened more than a few times to me, so I requested that Zipp replace the wheel without my PowerTap hub. Zipp came through for me, replacing the rim under warranty and providing a new Zipp hub at no cost. Thank you Zipp Speed Weaponry.

Anyway, I had the PT hub anxiously looking for a good rim. Our sponsor shop, Breakaway Bikes, hooked me up with a DT Swiss RR 1.2 rim, and I opted to use 2.0/1.8 Paul spokes and brass nipples. It was really nice to hand pick the components for the new wheel.

I used the procedure outlined by Gerd Schraner in “The Art of Wheelbuilding”. It wasn’t as difficult as I had always imagined it to be, and really methodical, almost therapeutic. I did overtighten the right side spokes, which caused me to round some of the nipples that had to be replaced, but nothing catastrophic. So far, the wheel has held up well. I’m looking forward to building another wheel…

Finally, the new work is public. Download available at http://www.goldencheetah.org/download.html.

The biggest change is that the application now includes BikeScore. A metric developed by Dr. Phil Skiba based on TRIMPS and Andy Coggan’s TSS. These metrics aim to provide a way to quantify training load. It’s useful to help getting an appropriate amount of work done while avoiding overtraining .

We already have the next version of Golden Cheetah’s features in the hopper. I’m personally interested in adding long-term analysis of training data so we can track fitness trends over time. I’d also like to overhaul the interface.

For now, I hope that people will find the new version useful.