Lap+ data field

“Still love it, and use it both on my Fenix 6X and my Enduro. I have a fear that when I retire these watches and buy some new, I will have to forget this beauty. By the way until now I have not found any other ciq datafield where one can define the length of a non-conventional track/loop.
So 5 stars is the minimum.”

This would have been my review if garmin connect iq app had let me post it, but for some mysterious reason it said I had already rated it or I had to update to the latest version.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

. I have a fear that when I retire these watches and buy some new, I will have to forget this beauty.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

I have a fear that when I retire these watches and buy some new, I will have to forget this beauty.

By the way will you be planning to publish its source code after you will have finally decided to not complile it for newer watches? You know as Joop Verdoorn did with his Datarun and Datarun datafields.

I'll be honest and state (as I did before) that the code really isn't in a good state for publishing, especially for my data fields where I optimized a ton of stuff by hand.

There's already visual issues on certain existing devices as it is.

No! L'État, c'est moi! :-)

Yes,you are honest and straight, indeed. Understood.

I'm not lying when I say the code is just plain bad. Certainly not anything I'd want to associate with myself online (especially under my real name) or distribute to others. Some of my apps have automated build scripts which only work on Eclipse (which I loathe.) Definitely not up to the standards of anything I'd produce for my day job.

If I really wanted to open-source my code in a way that I'd be proud of, I'd have to put in a ton of work to make it fit my own standards.

And again, there's already bugs on existing devices, so I'd want to fix all of those as well.

And yeah, maybe I just don't want to at this point, either, especially when posters try to shame me into doing so.

If you think this is such a valuable app with features that nobody can live without, then surely there should be many clones of it on the store by now, right?

It's not like anything I do is literally magic which nobody else can replicate. More like nobody wants to.

Counter-example: when the author of the original DIY watch face stopped working on his app, someone else stepped in to fill the void (albeit with a slightly different product.) That's an example of an idea that has value beyond any one developer or app.

If Lap+ only has value because I happened to make it, maybe it's not very valuable at all. There's certainly a lot of things I would do differently in an ideal world, with unlimited time.

I'm also not happy with the various hacks required to switch pages (especially since they don't work exactly the same on older and newer devices.) I would've liked to put the lap list in CIQ data field "app settings", but Garmin was smart enough to put enough restrictions on that mode where it isn't feasible to use it for anything but actual settings.

You want to work with code like this, with a custom layout engine where every data point was set by hand (and bits were OR'd by hand in order to save as much memory as possible)? Completely unmaintainable and unreadable.

I hate looking at this code and I wrote it. Yeah I should've written something to auto generate that kind of stuff, but that's also work.

You know how I gauge real interest in an app? Number of reviews period. Lap+ (the main clone) has 22 reviews in 5 years.

Are you going to argue that a community which can't even be bothered to review an app that they "like" is entitled to the source code for the app? Or maybe you could concede there just isn't that much actual interest.

I also put features in the app that various people *said* they wanted, such as:

- lap list which can be viewed during an activity (DC Rainmaker used to talk about this all the time, for people who were switching from Polar to Garmin, I think.) Garmin still doesn't really have this except for Track Mode

- separate manual laps vs auto splits. People in these forums complained about not having this feature, and it's also something various DCR commenters complained was missing from Polar (or whatever)

I don't see any of those people caring about Lap+ and why should they? Obviously a hobbled, user-unfriendly 3rd party app will never hold a candle to native functionality, since Garmin has decided to limit CIQ in the first place (for reasons that I definitely understand.)

So either way, to please maybe TWENTY TWO people in the whole world, I have to either:
- update Lap+ for new devices (including fixing all the bugs)

or

- improve the Lap+ source code so it's a state suitable for open sourcing (which also includes fixing all the bugs I know about.)

Luckily my time and effort isn't valuable, especially not to you.

Thanks for this long and detailed answer. I love kong answers. Not just to writr them, but to read them, too.

I hope I did not offence you with teasing you due to your typo.

Simply speaking, why the heck I would want somebody to do something which would be not comfortable for him or her, if I am grateful for this person for his earlier efforts? And I am so.

I realized so many times how behaves a typical person, in this case a Garmin device owner. He is typically lazy to make lots of searches to find something which will likely be a fun for him in the end. Since he saves his efforts for something available more easily.

I am just on the opposite site spending long long hours to search for, to test (many times just to understand something without a real chance to fix or make it fix), or sometimes to create something.

Due to this obsessive approach I am way too pushy, but try to limit it, not to hurt others.

So I now peacefully wish a Happy New Year to you.

FlowState said:

You know how I gauge real interest in an app? Number of reviews period. Lap+ (the main clone) has 22 reviews in 5 years.

Just out of curiosity I checked the ratio of number of reviews to number of downloads. I checked appr. 15 “most popular” items in order to minimize the distortion coming from small samples. It is typically between 0.05%-0.3%. I continued it and I checked other, not so popular ciq products, sometimes I found a ratio of over 1%. 

People are lazy and sometimes lousy. The most evident example is https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/18b4e2cd-fadd-4ab0-bead-1a62987b9065 where one can see 69 reviews compared to over 2.1 million downloads, that is 0.003%

It wasn’t a typo. I said “I’ll be honest and state…” meaning “I will be honest and say…”

Perhaps I misunderstood your intention when you quoted Louis XIV, but it doesn’t matter, I said what I said.

Yep, it was mentioned just as a kinda harmless pun and was founded by my misread of “I as did before”, which I saw “as I was before”.