Sydney Cyclist

Cycling in Sydney Australia

Velocio - $2.99 on the App Store

Hey guys,

I'm Matt, I've been a long time lurker but only recently signed up. I'm a freelance iOS developer from Maroubra and I recently launched an app I thought might be of interest to the community - Velocio. I conceived Velocio as essentially providing all the functionality of a standalone GPS cycle computer such a a Garmin for the price of a coffee using the iPhone hardware. It's designed for those cyclists who wants to track their commute or weekend bunch ride, share their favourite rides with friends, or monitor their training performance with intricate detail and beautifully presented analytics without splurging on a full-blown GPS unit. Velocio extends the iPhone’s Location Services to provide instantaneous analysis and feedback of your ride, updating more than once every second, all while going easy on the battery. By filtering location information Velocio records accurate and detailed waypoints. Each waypoint is processed to determine metrics such as speed, distance, pace, gradient, power and more - all available instantly on the dashboard while riding.

It's currently on sale on the App Store here for $2.99, please check it out, any and all feedback you have will be greatly appreciated!


Key features:

Dashboard:
While riding you're presented with a beautiful heads up dashboard which provides instantaneous feedback of your performance. You can visualise your current speed on an underlaid direction aware map. Visit the site for an example video: http://veloc.io

Detailed Statistics:
Velocio captures over a dozen metrics every second of your ride. When you've finished drill down and analyse and explore your performance all within the app itself.

Racing:
Velocio allows you to 'ghost race' any previous ride you've completed - in realtime. The position of your 'opponent' is updated on the dashboard map relative to your current time so you can always race your PB - this is incredibly fun for repeatable rides like your commute where you take the same route and want some extra incentive to push a bit harder.

Battery Life:
Velocio is careful to manage iPhone's battery life. The use of Location Services is optimised to be as light on the battery as possible. Battery drain is constantly monitored, allowing GPS power to be adjusted when necessary. These considerations ensure Velocio achieves far greater battery performance than similar apps. Using an iPhone 4S you could expect 6½ - 7 hours of battery life when running in the background. ~4 hours when using application with the dashboard display and map downloads. Also, you don't need to worry about chewing up your data plan. Running the app in the background requires no cellular connection.

Sharing:
One touch upload to veloc.io - the site I built in conjunction with the app - as well as Facebook, Strava and Twitter. Other services are coming soon. Ping me if you have a specific service you would like included! Here's an example of a ride completed by a friend down in Hobart: http://veloc.io/r/VqPeD

If you have any questions or comments add them here, or email me at matt@wearevagabonds.com or shoot me a tweet: @mattieryan

Thanks a lot guys. Enjoy the amazing weather this Easter weekend!

Matt.

 

Tags: app, computer, cycling, maroubra, store, sydney, velocio

Views: 625

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kylie on April 7, 2012 at 9:33am

The android vs iphone argument being made here is kind of like saying "why make bike parts when there are more people with cars?" ;-)

Permalink Reply by Colin on April 7, 2012 at 10:08am
Goddamn, that's a good post to come out of exile with.
Permalink Reply by Kylie on April 7, 2012 at 3:06pm

Haha yeah ideally I'd have stepped forward with something brilliantly poignant, but hey, it was Saturday morning and it made me chuckle ;-)

Permalink Reply by Bill Parker on April 9, 2012 at 2:49pm

OK, so I have made my small contribution to apples's & your well being, happy to be able to support an Australian software developer (we are becoming a rarer species these days) and a fellow cyclist. The videos (clever use of the phone outline) looked good, seems like a nice well thought out user interface, often missing in software. interesting to see the accuracy of the elevation from the iphone GPS, I find the variation in various mapping sites (eg Bikely, MapMyRide, BikeRouteToaster) frustrating when you give them  the same track points and they come back with total climbs which vary by up to 300%, presumably from the same elevation database. Good Luck with the app.

Permalink Reply by Matthew Ryan on April 10, 2012 at 8:29pm

Thanks Bill.

The elevation data is provided by the Location Services framework (ie. GPS) and you're right, it's accuracy does vary - particularly in cities (tall buildings distort the accuracy).I have done some work on improving this, so I would hope that you see considerably more consistency using Velocio when compared to other similar apps. Please let me know how you go!

Permalink Reply by Donald Rintoule on April 9, 2012 at 8:07pm

Matt does it do cumulative climbs for a ride?

Permalink Reply by Matthew Ryan on April 10, 2012 at 8:30pm

Not right now, sorry Donald. The data is there, i will just need to pull that out. I plan to add it soon in an update.

Permalink Reply by Andrew K on April 10, 2012 at 6:07pm
Looks good, will give it a go.
Permalink Reply by Matthew Ryan on April 10, 2012 at 8:30pm

Thanks Andrew!

Permalink Reply by Kimberley on April 11, 2012 at 9:22am

Would love to check it out but I've invested a couple of years on using RunKeeper to track my rides. I'm being lazy in asking before Googling, but Matt, is it possible to upload data from another app to yours?

Permalink Reply by Matthew Ryan on April 11, 2012 at 11:48am

Hi Kimberley, unfortunately I haven't yet included this functionality into the application as Velocio gathers a considerable amount more data than most other apps provide and would result in some metrics of the ride to be missing. I will keep it in mind and work out a way to neatly implement it if a number of people want this functionality. Sorry!

Permalink Reply by Shaun Moran on April 11, 2012 at 2:23pm

Bought the app - nice interface Matthew.

Two quick suggestions / questions.

1) Is it possible to stop the map always being in 'compass mode' ie: where it changes the map orientation depending on which way the phone is pointing. I actually prefer to read the map with North always being 'up'

2) I started a new ride to play with it and then when I end a ride the only options were create track or save ride - no discard ride?

Look forward to giving a real test on the bike. Ta

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