My cycle route from the other day.
In a little under a month’s time I’m going to be cycling from London to Paris. It’ll be a tough ride, with the first day seeing me clocking in a whopping 90 miles within a time limit so that I can jump on the ferry before it departs for Calais.
The event itself is very well organised, with all luggage and other bits and pieces being carried for us in the back of a van. I’ll be taking just a few essentials with me on the bike during the ride, such as drinks, energy bars, a camera and – most importantly – my iPhone (though some may argue as to whether carrying my phone or keeping myself hydrated is more vital).
And the most important thing I’ll have on my iPhone during the trip will be Cyclemeter by Abvio.
As the name suggests, Cyclemeter is a tool for tracking your ride. Take a look through iTunes and you’ll find a myriad of other apps which do pretty much the same thing. So what sets Cyclemeter apart from the rest of the pack?
First is its ease of use. Unlike many apps, there’s no need to sign up to a particular service in order to use it. You’re ready to go as soon as you’ve downloaded the app. Simply press the Start button and get moving. Obviously, as with all these things, the app will only work if you’re in the right sorts of conditions, as it’s dependent on your phone receiving a satellite signal. But it really is as simple as download-and-go. And once you do, the app will track your speed, distance, elevation, ride time, stopped time (using the in-built Stop Detection), split times, route and a whole bunch of other things that you never realised you wanted to know. You’ll also get a Google Map plotted for you, with distance markers included.
All of that stuff is a available simply by turning on the app. But those are the sorts of things that you get with every tracking app. It’s only once you start to play around with the options that you get to see just how powerful Cyclemeter is.
Let’s start with the Calendar Sync. Once you’ve finished your ride, the app will create a new event in your iPhone calendar containing your start and finish times, various other stats and a link to a map so you can easily keep track of what you’ve done without having to go back into the app. If you sync your calendar with your PC or Mac, this information will be available on there too. A very handy tool which enables you to keep track of what you’ve been up to, wherever you happen to be.
Another very handy feature is the way the app stores each route you’ve taken, enabling you to select the same one in the future and compete against yourself to improve your time. And it’s not just cycling. You can choose from a wide-range of other sports for you to track, including walking, running, hiking, skiing, skating, swimming etc. This will allow you to keep track of your various activities without them becoming confused.
Once you’ve finished, you’ll also be able to export the tracking data in a variety of ways. These range from a simple Google Map link, to GPX, KML and CSV files. These will come in very handy if, like me, you plan on stopping during the ride to take photographs and wish to geotag them later on.
Some of the great stats you'll get from the app.
All of these features are absolutely superb and implemented extremely well, and once you’ve got used to where everything is you’ll find that you can get some extremely interesting and useful stats out of it. But these things aren’t the reason I love Cyclemeter. No, the reason I love Cyclemeter is because of the sharing options, and that’s the reason I’ll be using it to track my progress on my cycle to Paris.
Cyclemeter can be set up to share absolutely everything automatically with your friends and family. The app can be connected to Facebook, Twitter and Dailymile, allowing you to have the app let your friends know when you start, stop, continue, finish and when you’ve reached certain distances or achieved certain times. You can also include any number of email addresses to send the same messages to throughout the trip. These updates will include a map link which is updated with your current location every five minutes, so that even if you’re abroad you can keep your loved ones informed of your progress (and so they can be sure you’ve not fallen underneath a French lorry!).
All of these are customisable, and you can set which aspects of your trip will trigger a message (per service too, so that you could potentially update Twitter more often than Facebook if you so wished), and you can choose the time and distance intervals as well. Each message is also editable, so if you don’t like the defaults, you can state what you’d like your posts to say.
It doesn’t end there though. If one of your Twitter followers, Facebook friends or Dailymile contacts happens to post a reply, the app will read it out to you using one of the voices available using in-app purchasing. Of course, they all sound a little bit like Stephen Hawking, but I’ve never heard a synthesised voice getting everything correct.
The only real issue I’ve been able to find at all with using the app is nothing to do with the app at all, but rather to do with data roaming issues. As I’ll be wanting to use it abroad, it’s going to cost me a bit of money to connect to the Internet. Of course, I could turn the Internet element off within the app, but that defeats the whole point of being able to keep people informed of where I am.
As I wasn’t sure of how much data Cyclemeter would use whilst tweeting / Facebooking / Dailymiling / emailing, I sent a support message to Abvio to find out. They were extremely useful and supplied me with a detailed message within 24 hours, suggesting that they would estimate an average of 1MB per hour if the app was allowed to send all of the messages I would want it to and update the map every five minutes. Which I think is fairly reasonable. So I shall be keeping the app on through France and have my fingers crossed that my data doesn’t run out before the end.
Of course, the other issue I’ll have will be keeping the phone charged enough with the constant use of GPS. So I’ve invested in a solar charger to sit on my backpack which should hopefully keep me topped up throughout the day.
In conclusion then, I really can’t fault Cyclemeter at all for its usefulness, implementation, design, ease-of-use, features and just all-around greatness. If you’re already using a similar app, you could probably do a whole lot better by switching over to this. Abvio are also constantly updating it to bring new improvements and features. A definite win.
| Rating |
|---|
| Abvio Cyclemeter |  |
|---|
| A superb app for tracking your cycling, offering more stats than you ever thought you needed, and with unsurpassed sharing options. |
If, like me, you’ve just signed up to the iTunes Match service in the UK, you may have a number of niggling little questions which you’d like answering. I’ve had a scout around myself and found a couple of sites which may be of interest.
Secondly it doesn’t clog the screen with any options whatsoever, though these are only a mouse-movement away. Give the mouse a tap and the menus appear to the side of what you’re writing, with just the right amount of choice; a couple of fonts (serif, sans serif and handwriting) and a few different sizes to choose from for those who need the larger text.