Great to hold your hand up and admit the mistake. For future releases might be worth thinking about how to enlist some of the community to help with the testing in the final stages before it gets released.
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Yes, we did have the beta group test but our use case was not correct.
We’ve got plans to add a TrainerRoad “Labs” feature where users could turn new features on/off. This will allow us to have a longer testing process and if we mess up users can roll back quickly.
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Hi @Nate_Pearson. Just wondering if there’s any more news about when the MacOS version of the app will get the full calendar. Thanks.
You should now have a list based calendar in the app. What you can’t do is edit that calendar (that’s still online). For a FULL calendar (just like the web) it will take us more time.
Yes, thanks, I have the list. I was just curious about when the fuller features might come. I must say that I doubted whether I’d use the calendar much (haven’t bothered in the past with the offerings from TP or Garmin) but I like it. I’ve never been so organised for the year ahead; my TR plans, winter/spring running plans, even some swimming plans are on it. It’s a great addition to the service.
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Thanks Nate. It doesn’t drive me wild but it’s definitely not a great user experience. I’d also say that since Calendar was launched the whole application is a bit buggy. I need to force quit it to close it, and there are some UI issues of parts of the workout screen (usually power and cadence) freezing in the background with the live number on top of an old one.
Anyway, cool to see that you’ve got a good development cycle in place!
FYI, we’re focusing 100% of our engineering on making Mac/PC as good as our mobile apps starting in 3 weeks.
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Curious as to why so many people are using the Mac app at all. I just use it to do the actual workout and use the web based for everything else.
Anything that I am missing?
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I guess it’s years of habit and being used to doing what you needed in the app. It used to be that you’d choose your plan in the app and it would add it to your account within the app ready to start immediately. Now, on a Mac at least, you choose your plan and you’re taken to the website to add it to your calendar to choose a start/end date (choosing a date is obviously an improvement). I use the Mac app as you do now. The TR service was much simpler even only a few months ago, so the app was fine for managing it. Since the launch of Performance Analytics I’ve been using the website more and more (for the good tools we’ve now been given). It’s just a change in the way I’m used to doing things (e.g. adding a plan) that I thought might be temporary. But it’s a change that I’m happy to make if that’s the way it’s heading for the extra features.
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Thanks Nate - it’s unusual to hear people describe that they got it wrong - with such honesty.
You deserve a lot of credit for this.
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I 100% agree with this.
One of our 2019 goals is to do everything in the app that you can do on the website (within reason, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to have web desktop features go to mobile).
Thank you, but I shouldn’t have messed up in the first place, then I wouldn’t need to write this!!
I guess it depends on how structured you want to be,
For me, I’m a road cyclist only, I race in club leagues and some open cat 4 events at the weekend. I don’t specifically train for a targeted event. So if I race twice a week, then I prefer to just enjoy my other rides during the week.
I only use a turbo trainer as the dark evenings have set in, but the weather is mild enough here (Ireland) to still cycle outdoors at the weekend.
So when I bought a turbo, I figured it would be better and mainly less boring to have some structure to it, so that is why I chose TR after using the free trial.
So everything I needed was in the app, I would start a training plan, then every time I go into the app, the next workout was there ready to go, if I missed a day it was no big deal or I felt I was outside on the weekend instead of doing a planned workout then it wasn’t an issue.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who uses TR in this way. As a result there was never any need to go to the online site so I can see why a lot of people like the old way. I hope that makes sense.
I should point out that I’ve taken a 2 week break since the clock change and only plan to start into a training plan next week, so I don’t have any really experience of using a plan in the app since the calendar feature came in, I have only done an odd workout when the weather didn’t suit before that but I do like the idea of the calendar feature
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Just remember @Nate_Pearson not everyone thinks you got it wrong - I honestly don’t feel I’ve been compromised one bit in my training and have had no issue using the browser for tasks outside of actual workouts.
Just bring back the plan progress indicator 
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I think in this context it’s not just the calendar on the Mac that is deficient… it’s the lack of hotkeys, the lack of extended cooldown, it’s more cumbersome to switch to a workout variant (+1/-1, etc.), those sorts of missing features.
And I use the Mac app instead of the mobile app for pretty much only one reason: headphones. If I’m playing music or watching a movie, I still want to hear the app cues, and I still don’t want to make noise that can be heard over the fan.
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@deepakvrao This is a key component. As a Mac user, I’ve been following the Mac threads pretty closely. A lot depends on what type of user you are:
- Follow the Plan User: When the Calendar feature was initially released, the Mac version stopped showing you what your forthcoming workout was. So, technically you could use the Mac app to do your workout, but you had to go to the web version, find which ride you were supposed to be doing, search for it in the Mac app and then start riding. Your comments of “I just use it to do the workout” is accurate and the initial release broke the workflow of being able to just open the app, click on the next ride and ride. A lot of people were upset (me included) that the Mac app had regressed so much. TR worked really hard to quickly fix this and provide what we have now, which is a chronological list of your next workouts based on what’s in your calendar. This allowed the plan followers to stay in the app ecosystem for just riding. You still had to put things in your calendar to populate the app, but I think that makes sense to do on the web anyway. For the Follow the Plan User, this update made the core functionality whole again. Yay!
- Not Follow the Plan User: The release above only works if you’re following the plan, doing the rides on the day you said (in your Calendar) you were going to do them. There are users who don’t train this way. That’s why I’m calling them the Not Follow the Plan User type. There’s lots of reasons for it, maybe they ride just for casual exercise, or they have unpredictable lives that mean they find it impossible to know exactly what days they can and can not train, or any other reason that means that they can’t reliably follow the schedule in the Calendar. For this user type, the chronological list of upcoming rides doesn’t help them as much. In order to have the basic “open the app and ride” experience, the Calendar has to be up to date. So, if they skip a workout on it’s scheduled day but still want to do it on another day, they have to make changes to the Calendar, which you can’t do inside the Mac app. If you hardly ever ride to your Calendar schedule, that’s a lot of back and forth from the website to the app and I can see how that would be tedious. For this type of user, there isn’t yet a workaround and people are still unhappy about it. You could make an argument that the point of TR is to have structured training and therefore making the app support unstructured training isn’t really core business, but it did work for this user type before and now it doesn’t, so I get it.
Aside from these user types, as @matthew.weigel points out, there are other elements that aren’t in the Mac app yet, like extended cooldown.
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Are the online browser calendar, iOS app, and Mac app sync-able?
If I “start a plan” within the browser calendar, is there a way to get the apps to sync or…???
Thanks.
I can’t speak for IOS, but that’s how it works for my PC and Android. Set 9n the web and it’s all visible on the apps.
Your plan and data is in the cloud, on TrainerRoad servers.
Browsers and all the apps connect to TR cloud to get updates. So everything is in sync, assuming all your devices are connected to the Internet.
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The iOS app doesn’t reflect any changes/moved workouts I make within the browser. Help?? 