Happy New Year! New Features and Twitter
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010Hey CardioTrainees,
Welcome to 2010! If you’ve been using CardioTrainer for the past two weeks, you will have noticed that we recently rolled out our first social feature, High Scores. High Scores lets you see how the rest of the world is working out, be it running, biking, horseback riding, or whatever else! Everyone gets to register with an optional nickname and comment, and then see their rank by both total distance and distance in the last 7 days. This gives you a glimpse of the amazing international diversity of CardioTrainer users. Please check it out by clicking on the “See High Scores” button on the first page.
And while CardioTrainer won’t automatically tweet these workouts (yet!), we would love for everyone to share their exercises via Twitter with a brief note about the what, where and when, and then include the #worksmart hashtag. It will be an easy way to see who else is exercising and what they’re doing!
As with every new version, we wanted to get this one to you quickly to gather your feedback. This is still a very simple version of the High Score feature, but we think it’s important because it’s the first time when you get to experience the excitement of the growing CardioTrainer community. From our research, we believe this kind of community can be an excellent motivator to exercise, and can add a lot of fun as well. But this is just a start! I am sure you have lots of ideas for improving this and other community features, and we would love to hear them!
In addition, we have also updated our website with some long-overdue fixes:
- Facebook integration now works much better, and posts your workouts immediately to your feed. It also updates your Facebook status, so more people can find out about your exercise. You can join the Facebook discussion about the feature to talk about it.
- To get the new status update feature, you have to grant CardioTrainer permission to post your status. Please go to the CardioTrainer application, and click on the “Allow” button above your tracks.
- When you do this, your tracks will also be listed in the units you chose for the track on your phone.
- Please note that in the near future, Facebook will be disallowing profile boxes (your short track list on Facebook), but you can now add a tab for CardioTrainer to show your tracks to your friends.
Those of you waiting for many essential tracking improvements: we have not forgotten you! We think that the high scores feature will make it even more critical to make CardioTrainer as accurate as possible, make it even more stable, and the data more secure. These are some of our top priorities in the next year.
In conclusion, it’s amazing how far we’ve come since a year ago, all with your never-ending support. Last year, CardioTrainer looked very different and we were just launching the voice output feature. As we go off on vacation, our entire company is in wonderful spirits, and we expect some truly amazing developments in 2010!
See you in the next year!
Warmest wishes and happy exercising,
The WorkSmart family