#bikcon

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1.91 is to be released next week. Here is a quick look at how things work in Bikcon.

It’s code, sweat and bruises! What you see here is testing of an app that detects when you have an incident such as falling off a bike. If you don’t respond to cancel it, it sends an SMS to a friend or spouse.

As I posted before, Bikcon 1.9 is about a security feature that tries to detect a fall in your sports activity that triggers an SMS and live tracking alert.

Progress has been made but the math is proving more difficult than initially thought. I've been simulating falls left and right and it's frustrating because it hurts and often doesn't work correctly!

The problem is complex. Even something like Fitbit - that operates with the same kind of sensors - gets it wrong sometimes. For instance, holding a shopping cart often triggers the sleep mode or riding a bicycle will also count a lot of steps.

The combination of vectors, standard deviations, GPS data and clever assumptions are in the mix, along with the fact that you might fall or get hit while running or riding a bicycle, with your iPhone strapped on your arm or on a back pocket.

To further delay things, in app purchases are needed to buy SMS credits and more web services are required which just takes time.

But there's more:

Weather information is now pulled from Open Weather Map and spoken when the activity starts - This might seem strange but the key element is temperature. I've had one occasion where I was over dressed for an hour worth of exercise when I was expecting 10 degrees C and the actual temperature was over 18. I could have asked Siri of course but the context is unfavourable.

iPad version is in the works - That's because the screen size is perfect to see your activities in detail - But this is for version 2.0 because it also involves sync, which BTW will be done with iCloud but in a more conservative way.

As always, refinements and bug corrections where needed.

Thanks to all the unknown users who bought the app!

Bikcon 1.8

Bikcon 1.8 from Emidio Cunha on Vimeo.

Bikcon 1.8 is out the door and available on the AppStore. The description “Bug corrections and Improvements” is just short for:

New M7 co-processor detection of pauses during an activity. If more than 2 minutes are detected, there’s the option to subtract that from the activity duration

Battery consumption improvements. Your mileage may vary, depending on using the Live Update and the interval set but the code responsible for handling the location changes has been reduced to 1/2 of its previous size. Meaning it will consume less CPU and therefore less battery

There was a bug regarding really long activities, that was slowing down maps and in some cases, not working at all when trying to view the detailed graphics. It has been corrected so that it works, the bad news is that not all data points are plotted due to memory constraints

Also in the bug bag, there was the possibility of not being able to return to the activity detail after locking the phone in the graphs screen (when you rotate the phone), also resolved

UI has been also reworked, removing the switch for “start/stop” and opting for using the same button that morphs into the previous switch location.

Also on the home screen, the map stack image is now cached

On the settings screen, some text fields could be obscured by the keyboard, and has been corrected as well

1.81 is expected shortly after to address some important issues.

Text fields such as notes don’t get saved after finishing an activity. Only from the History menu. Has been fixed for 1.81