I did some cleanup of the steep and cheap monitor and made the layout look a lot cleaner. It is now very similar to the windows version available on the SAC site. It updates every minute and will run on windows or the mac as long as you get the apollo runtime from adobe. I also added some options in case you don't like the sound or the auto popup when it finds new items and fixed a bug where it wasn't always showing the newest item.

You can download version 1.1 here.

- enjoy - Brad

Recently, someone showed me http://www.steepandcheap.com. If you know me well, then you know I love to shop and I really love to get good deals. After trying their plugin for firefox which seems to have a monster memory leak... and not liking that, I tried their desktop app on windows. It was ok, but they did not have a mac version. Well, after playing with Apollo recently, I knew I could write it in no time.

A few hours later, and I have a new program... It is based on Apollo, so you will need the apollo runtime. You can get it from Adobe here http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/apolloruntime.html. They currently have a runtime for winblows and the mac so it should work well on both platforms. After installing that, you can get my steep and cheap monitor here and install it.

Let me know if you like it (you can also paypal me at brad at getasp dot com if you really like it), and if you would like more features.

Brad

You can now export courses in a format compatible with Training Center 3.2.1. I added a smarter elevation correction and made some fixes to lessen timeouts and errors during saves.

Go to the Course Creator

ENJOY!

For your reading pleasure I ran across a patent application for a Portable apparatus with performance monitoring and audio entertainment features.

Garmin is handing out a version of Training Center for the Mac at MacWorld this week. I was really excited when I heard about the release as it has not been so easy to use their products on the mac thus far. Recently VMWare released fusion which allows me to run Windows XP on my Intel MacBook... It also supports the USB devices unlike parallels.... Well enough of the kludge I have had to go through in the past. I installed Training Center and plugged in my devices to get a sync. The Mac version of Training Center doesn't add another user profile for each device... That will save me some money on Tylenol for sure. At least Garmin won't spank me for buying multiple devices and using them on one mac.

The first syncs of my devices went well with my forerunners, but not my edge. When you plug in a device, it automatically syncs the data. I couldn't find a way to force it to happen again unless i unplugged it and plugged it back in. It looks like it continually updates the unit when I added courses... I found that to be a bit annoying as it was syncing all the time. The edge I had problems with is currently empty from a data reset so that may be messing it up. I need to get out and ride to see if it will be ok with data on it.

My first look was at the history. The maps look great, maybe better than on the PC. The screen layout also shows the summary data with the map and graphs which is nice than the tabs on the PC version. One HUGE negative is that they no longer give you the 4 options for lines on the charts. Check out the screen cap.

The courses look pretty similar to what we had on the PC... The tabs were removed from the interface here too and the charts can only do 2 lines of data... The course points aren't available under the course name in the tree like on the PC, but that isn't a big deal for me, they are at the top in the list instead. Here is a screen cap.

I did test export and that worked great as do the custom workouts. The user settings are a little messy compared to the PC.

I am really glad I can use my Garmin Forerunner and Edge on the Mac easier than before, but I was really hoping for a couple new features... Google Maps, Google Earth, Email activity/course to a friend, export single workouts, etc... and did expect a little better user interface for mac users. I will post more screen caps and reviews as I dig in a little deeper. If there is anything specific you want me to test let me know.