Connect 3.19

Why Garmin Why?

Why is it whenever you release a new software version of anything nothing ever works properly again? Don't you test these things before release or do you expect us, the users, to validate and fault find for you? Grrrr!!!

Worst. Update. Ever.

It's actually a regression.

Nothing loads correctly, it looks poor compared to the previous version, and data is not showing up in my mobile app now. Wahoo is looking better and better....

How do i set event type?

Other settings on activities are missing.
Way worse than old version!!!!

I was gonna write a long diatribe about how all of the useful advanced functionality of the Activities list is gone. (Advanced search/filtering, selection of columns, sorting by columns, etc.)

Now I see that most of the functionality is still there, but hidden by default unless you choose a sport.

This is just my 2 cents. Feel free to disregard. I will say that when I look at activities, I use the GC website for only for the advanced features and the advanced metrics that Strava doesn't give me. If all the hidden functionality had been truly gone, I might've never returned to the GC activity list ever again. I think it also says a lot that a site like Strava seems preferable while providing much less data.

Here's my likes:
- Yes it looks more modern and cleaner. Goodbye 1999! Not everyone will agree, but I def like it better than the previous incarnation, just from an aesthetical pov. (Unfortunately looks aren't everything.)
- Activities list finally fills the entire width of screen
- Collapsible left menu is great
- Activities list column sorting is initially very fast, and a great improvement over the previous version...until the user scrolls a bit and then sorts a column. See below. I hate to say it, but this is literally the only functional improvement I have noticed so far.

Dislikes:
- Advanced activity list functionality is hidden until you select a sport.
- Activities list now fills the entire width of the screen yet there's so much less information. GC is clearly not for mobile users and I'm not sure desktop/laptop users really need that much white space between columns
- Activities list only supports 5 metrics. There are so many ways you could fit more without making it look bad:
* Get rid of the units (add them to headers)
* less whitespace between columns
* allow horizontal scrolling (the metrics could scroll while keeping the date and activity name in view)
-infinite scrolling on activities list is terribad. This isn't insta, twitter or fb, where nothing older than 2 days ago is relevant. Yes, the (hidden) filtering options sorta mitigates this problem, but I would still like to see the activities list split into pages, where I can jump to any page I want. It can still look good, it can still be responsive and it can still use ajax without forcing the user to scroll endlessly to find something in the middle or end of a list of many pages.

Seriously, infinite scrolling is useless when you have lots of data that (ironically) people want to scroll through. I read a great metaphor about this somewhere, which used scrolls vs. books. Separating books into pages was seen as a great advancement, because you could instantly skip to any part of the document you wanted to. Imagine if textbooks were sold as gigantic scrolls? It's weird how most of the web has gone in the other direction. Sure in theory it's more intuitive and usable. In practice it just means nobody scrolls past the first couple of pages. You may as well limit the results to two pages.

- The "right pane" of the activities page (with notes, comment, device) is still not collapsible/hideable, which means it just takes up a huge amount of horizontal space (despite the relatively small amount of vertical space it actually uses) and forces us to scroll to see all our metrics in the splits table. That's a lot of wasted white space which is mostly used to display a huge render of your watch. I'll admit I can't think of a better place to put it, so it would be cool if you could hide it
- Dragging of dashboard widgets still doesn't work so hot; when I drag a widget to a certain spot near the bottom of the page where it looks like it should fit and let go, it goes flying and maximizes itself.
- No way to directly select a specific month/year in the date picker -- you have to go back/forward one month at a time, or type in the associated text field (this is basic stuff)

Bugs:
- Activity list: If you scroll a few pages and then sort a column, the column sort takes much longer to finally return the correct data. I looked in my Chrome debugger and one column sort would take 5 requests (spanning 100 activities), even though I could never even see 100 activities without having infinite scrolling kick in (again).

Wishlist:
- It would be great if you could filter the activities list on an arbitrary metric
- would be great if the activity map could be zoomed

Edit: For comparison, the activities list in Strava is just as bad, but the training log is amazing. Even though it uses infinite scrolling, when I try to scroll to a certain part of the list (like the middle) the results load instantly. On a decent computer it's almost hard to tell that infinite scrolling is happening at all.

And there is a sidebar which lets me jump to a specific year/race instantly. The reason it works so well is probably because instead of showing hundreds of pages for 4 years worth of activities, it's organized by week, so it isn't an impossible amount of data to scroll through. The other important thing is that scrollbar represents my true position in the list, even if the entire list hasn't been loaded, unlike the activities list in GC. So I have multiple ways to jump to where I want to be. Some of the problems with infinite scrolling could be mitigated with:
- Scrollbar that represents true position in list and allows you to jump to (roughly) wherever you want
- Fast loading of list results, no matter where you jump to in the list

Activity Steps

Hmm, I'm a bit undecided on it so far. I've only used it on my work Windows machine, with a nice big monitor attached and its ok. I'm hoping it looks as good on the iPad.

The dashboard looks better than before, its cleaner and easier on the eye and I like the search by activity name being back a lot. But the activity page is pants. Previously I could see a loads of stats at a glance, now I can only see 4 and I've had to edit the layout for different activities to get them uniform. I also cant see a way of seeing the number of steps per activity which I could before. Does anyone know how to get this information?? Its an important metric for some of the things I do.

You can see steps for activities in the "Steps" page. It has it split out into daily steps and activity steps - this is how is was several versions ago too.

ETA - I was mistaken. It is split, but doesn't tell you numbers anymore. Ugh. I'll be doing some digging.

I can not edit my goals as they are wrong. With the old GC they had the right distance, now they show the wrong goal just on the swimming and rowing
It might be good once they fix the bugs, but lately Garmin has lost a lot of respect from me.
If anyone else has this problem and solved it please let me know how. I have tried to edit it but after I save it , it still is wrong.

Have you tried zooming the browser? Zoom out and you'll get more columns.

Nah it doesn't have anything to do with the zoom, which is already all the way out. I can get 3 columns, just that when i open then close the left sidebar it goes back to 2.

Missing some things

Can't search on course, can't select course in activity, can't go back to classic
Can't open activity pages as before, now you have to scroll the page down and wait till older activities are build up

Activity Configuration doesn't give enough items to choose, what is important for me isn't important for anyone else and vise versa, I whish there are more items to choose in the future
For now I'm not very happy with the new Connect

Goals seems warped

I have no problem with the new look.

I do however find it annoying that the goal widgets no longer functions. I have set a number of goals for 2017, among these calories burned and duration of training. On the calendar full page view, the goals are shown correctly, with the current summation of calories and time spent training. But on the main page the calorie goal is shown as completed, although I, in reality, and as shown elsewhere, only have reached 52% of the goal I have set. And the Time goal i suddenly shown with 14 digits after the decimalpoint.