Those who use cadence sensors have probably had their fair share of pedal magnets fall off. Between accidents and just minor wear, I go through 1-2 of my Garmin magnets per year, partly due to how poorly they are designed to attach to the pedal.

I was at Gregg's Cycle up near the Alderwood Mall (Lynnwood, WA) and noticed a cheap replacement Cat Eye cadence pedal magnet and decided to give it a try. The way it attaches is much more secure than the Garmin magnet and it works perfectly with the Garmin wheel sensor.

You can grab it directly from Cat Eye for less than $2.00 USD (hit that page and search for "169-9766") or from Gregg's for just a bit more (but, it's local if you happen to be in the greater Seattle area).

Jobs' keynote may have been the center of attention at Macworld 2008, but Garmin took the wraps off of Bobcat, an OS X-only application that will no doubt be the center of all things Garmin GPS-related on your Mac.

It's a beta (sigh) and Universal application for OS X 10.4+. There is no word on whether they will be charging for the 1.0 release, but I suspect the app will remain free since they make the big bucks on the map$.

Bobcat has the following features:

• allows you to transfer waypoints, tracks, and routes between your Mac and Garmin device and manage your data using your Garmin maps
• provides the ability to search for points of interest from the convenience of your Mac and then send the locations to your Garmin GPS
• serves as a backup tool for your Garmin GPS. You can receive all your waypoints, routes, and tracks from your GPS and Bobcat will save them automatically

If you want to get your Garmin maps from your PC to your Mac, they've put together a guide [PDF] to help you along (you'll need MapConverter for your PC).

Here's a look at the Bobcat main screen:

I'll post a full review of Bobcat once I put it through its paces (loading my PC maps, importing from my various Garmin GPS devices and testing out the general functionality).

You can entertain yourself until then by perusing the new Mac section on Garmin's site and loading some of their Mac software. If you're at Macworld definitely stop by their booth and cheer them up (Steve can't have all the attention there).

I've said it before, Garmin Is Evil. Not evil in the bad, serial killer way, just evil in the enticing-folks-to-part-with-their-hard-earned-money-by-introducing-new-gadgets-with-killer-features way.

Their latest incarnations of evil are the Edge 605 and the Edge 705, two new cycling computers that have GPS capabilities. The first noticeable difference from the Edge 305 (which I own, along with the ForeRunner 305) is the gorgeous color screen reminiscent of their eTrex series. Both units are also bigger – 2" x 4.3" x 1" vs 1.75" x 3.7" x 0.9" – and have a higher resolution display – 176 x 220 vs 128 x 160. Battery life is also better – 15 hrs vs 12 hrs (and I've been very happy with the battery life of the 305), plus the new models sport a microSD card slot to hold map/route data (similar to the eTrex) – this would have been handy on some of my Seattle exploring rides this summer (I would up carrying both my ForeRunner 305 and eTrex.

However, you'll want to focus your investment on the 705 since that's where the major new mojo lies (the 605 doesn't even work with Garmin's heart rate and speed/cadence sensors).

The Edge 705 will interface with 3^rd-party power meters, which hardcore cyclists will appreciate since that's the best way to accurately measure training effort. The other killer feature is the ability to share courses, workouts and saved rideswirelessly with other 705 units in range (3 meters). It will make shop rides much more efficient since you won't need to ensure folks have cue sheets (just these expensive bike toys).

All units (even my old school 305) will work with Garmin's forthcoming Connect service (which will be a combination of their MotionBased site plus new features).

If I manage to sell enough old tech to get one of the new models (both available in time for Christmas for ~$430.75 USD and $541.65-$709.07 USD) I'll write up a review.

(You can review the full technical comparison here.)

Garmin announced the launch of their new developer web site which provides information on and access to "free and licensed Garmin resources and a library of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), toolkits and web services broken into 4 main categories":

Device Communications

Start connecting with Garmin devices today — whether you want to send and receive location data directly from your website using the Garmin Communicator Plugin or whether you want to create custom POIs that can be sent to Garmin navigation systems using our Content Toolkit.

Web Services

Access data and utilize core features provided by MotionBased — Garmin’s web-based activity portal. Enable your website to store, manipulate and display Garmin GPS data with little or no development.

Smartphone/PDA Services

Provide mobile applications running on Windows Mobile or Palm OS with access to GPS information, interactive maps and intelligent routing including SMS-based messaging that can be used to transmit position information to supported devices.

Location Based Services

Get Garmin to work for your business solution. Add location-based services to any Java-based mobile phone application and enable fleet tracking, messaging, dispatch and navigation directly on Garmin’s portable navigation devices.

When I get some time to poke around the site, I'll report back on what you can/cannot do with this new offering from Garmin. On a surface scan, tho, it looks very promising and is a welcome surprise from Garmin.

Garmin released version 2.0.3 of their Training Center for OS X on May 4 (I signed up for notifications but never received one). Changes include:

• Implemented length restrictions to workout name, workout step name, course name, course point name, and speed zone name for compatibility with fitness devices. Using this version of application could cause existing names that exceed the length restriction to be truncated.
• Fixed an update issue with course point name.
• Fixed some XML export issues.
• Fixed a transfer issue with speed and heart rate values.

More info here.

Direct download.

A reader (yes, a reader of at least one of these blog posts...hard to believe it, eh?) pointed out in a comment today that Montebello Software makes an interesting app called Ascent which seems to fill in many of the gaps Garmin left with it's new OS X Training Center, and provides some extra functionality to boot.

Alas, you'll have to wait for a review since I won't be able to play with Ascent until tonight or tomorrow. It's nice to have options, tho, and it's great to see another GPS-enabled OS X app out there.

Turns out that Garmin Training Center schema wasn't all that difficult to figure out. I still don't know how they have the timestamps encoded - doing a conversion results in a date that is ~30 years off and, if post-February, ~30 years and 1 day offf. Also, I don't know how the longitude/latitude is encoded either. Any pointers would be most appreciated.

If you've got python and it's sqlite library installed, then this script will be a half-decent example of how to pull data from ".gtc" database for each entry in the stored history. If not, have no fear, I hope to release a small app to let you extract the data on your own and I'm still thinking about that widget.

Pretty source after the jump.

My interest in learning the secrets of the Garmin Training Center for OS X user data file was renewed upon learning that the author of TrailRunner added the ability to import GTC data directly into that app. After a cursory search for clues on the format of the "Training Center.gtc" data file, I managed to find the needed bit of knowledge after digging through one of the forums over at MotionBased. One of the posters - saeedi - suggested it was a sqlite database. After making a copy of the file, I opened it up with sqlite3, tried a ".schema" command and was greeted with the following:

It certainly looks like it's a sqlite database. Just to verify, I tried a few SQL commands:

sqlite> select zproductname from zcddevice ;
ZPRODUCTNAME
--------------------
EDGE305
Forerunner305

sqlite>.output gtc-tree.html
sqlite>select * from zcdtreeitem

While not the prettiest schema, it's workable. Once I get more time to dissect it a bit, I'll post some code to extract runs/routes and maybe even take a shot at a widget.

Managed to play with the app a bit more today and jotted some notes.

Device Import

The OS X Training Center software reads from the Edge 305 and ForeRunner 305 fine, though the PC version has a nice progress indicator that the OS X version lacks. There were some issues with Parallels (need to do more investigation), but doing some USB settings reconfiguration on the Parallels side cleared things up.

Activities

The PC version will also auto-categorize your activities (running, cycling, etc) upon import. The OS X version does not even have pre-made categories (you can make "folders") and you cannot shift- or command-click to do multiple activity selections in order to perform a bulk move. This is frustrating, but workable after the initial device import is complete since you are just moving individual activities at that point (or very few, at least).

The PC version also allows you to move your cursor along the graphs and see the associated data (speed, pace, heart rate, etc). There is no provision in the OS X version for this functionality yet.

You can also get a more detailed breakdown of each activity and compare activities with the PC version. Again, this functionality is lacking in the OS X version.

"Macness"

Any app developed for OS X gets held to a higher standard than those for the PC since folks expect Apple developers to do the right thing whenever possible. This means conforming to standards and having the app behave like other Mac apps.

Many things, such as user profile information (even multiple profiles) and unit display preferences definitely belong in a "Preferences..." menu. Garmin needs to do this at a minimum. Garmin's application help is not integrated with the Help Viewer (how difficult can it be?!), and has interesting viewing requirements:

NOTE: The graphics in this Help system are optimized for monitor displays set at 1680 x 1050 screen resolution. Viewing this Help system at resolution settings other than 1680 x 1050 can result in reduced image quality.

1680x1050!!! So, we need to own a big, honkin' wide screen monitor, eh? (BTW: the help looks fine in any Safari view, so I think the Q/A team missed this error)

It has no AppleScript elements, leaving you no choice but to resort to UI scripting - which is a pain. Many Mac folks are going to want to do "stuff" with the data in this app and having a simple, programmatic way to export/convert from the main database format to something usable should have been an out-of-the-box feature (I'm thinkin' Dashboard Widget displaying last activity with basic stats).

UPDATE: Full review in this post

Here are some screen captures of the application (below). The OS X Training Center application read from my Edge 305 (I'll try it with the ForeRunner later) without any hiccups and the app behaved almost exactly like the PC version.

It's not a perfect port to OS X - it just doesn't "feel" like a Mac app - but at least it's not written in Java and it has the ability to export to XML.

There are no app-specific AppleScript elements, so you'll need to enable GUI-scripting to automate any apps that want to make use of the exported data. There were no obvious options to the "export" command to limit the number historical activities being saved. Here's a sample that is over 7 MB when expanded: export.tcx.zip.

Application Info

First Startup Health Warning

First Startup Main Window

First Download

Selection From History

HTML Help File

UPDATE: Full review in this post
UPDATE: Screenshots and a mini-review in this follow-up post

After over a year of unkept promises, Garmin pulls through and makes their Training Center app available for Mac OS X! It's even a Universal Binary!

To run it, you'll need:

• Intel-based or PowerPC G3 or later Mac
• OS 10.4 or later
• 256 MB RAM
• 1024x768 display
• 150 MB free disk space
• USB port

and a Garmin Forerunner 301, Forerunner 205, Forerunner 305, Edge 205 or Edge 305.

I'll post more details and screen shots once the download finishes (a whopping 27 KB/sec...guess a ton of folks are grabbing it).