Feature request annotations: 1) Ability to copy & 2) Start typing in the title

Hi, I use a lot of annotations in my calendar for three reasons

  1. Making the TR sessions more meaningful, eg Acrodectes+1 3x15m 60/60@120-130%/40%
  2. Marking races, incl regular weekly club TTs
  3. Planning other workouts outside I want to do, eg TT 65m at 70% intensity.
  4. Mark the week and its purpose, with any notes… eg this is wk5 of 40kTT

There are two (trivial) things that would be useful

  1. the ability to copy an annotation. A simple copy this and put it here, as I can with any workout. At teh moment I have to go to the annotation, open it, click on the title, select it, copy it, close that, open a new annotation, click on the title and then paste it.

  2. I do find it a bit irritating that when I create a new annotation I want to start typing the name as soon as it is open. However if i do, nothing happens. I first have to select the name of the annotation, and then start typing. This seems a redundant click to me. It strikes me that when you create an annotation it would naturally be the first thing to do to start the annotation itself.

I know this is very trivial, but its a simple UI improvement.

Minor thing that puzzled me.

  • Annotations appear to be sorted in alphabetical order. You can’t change that (unless you choose how you name them)
  • If I add a second workout to a day (lets say I am unsure which I am going to do, or simply parking one for a while, the order seems to be determined by the first that was there. I think… So you can’t easily see the pattern of work for the second one. So it would be nice & useful to see the pattern for second one, OR be able to determine in which order they are displayed in the calendar.

There just some ideas that would smooth things a bit… for me anyway

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Copy/Paste for annotations is planned. No timeline is stated, but it has been requested and acknowledged at least a couple of times.

The order for workouts (manual or otherwise) shown on the calendar, are set from highest TSS on top to lowest TSS on bottom.

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Thanks. Does that include positioning the cursor at the annotation title?

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I don’t think I have seen that specifically.

I do think a default cursor in the title makes perfect sense and should be added to the list. Can you check on this and the other parts of the request, @Bryce?

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I also have an annotation feature request:

It would be lovely to be able to select whether or not annotations are synched to my other calendars (ical).

I like to mark big work stuff in my training calendar on TR, because that makes planning a bit easier. But when I do, that results in a double entry in my ical calendar (work stuff is automatically synched externally as well).

Having an option for a non synching annotation in the TR calendar would be handy. Not a big issue or anything, obviously.

The logic for annotations is, as you mentioned, alphabetical order. Workouts on the other hand, are organized according to their TSS, where the highest TSS is listed first. Chronological timing does not play a role in the organization of workouts/annotations within the Calendar day.

As Chad mentioned, we do plan to add the ability to copy/paste annotations at some point in the future, but we do not have resources availiable to devote at this time. Our Developers are hard at work bringing the Calendar functionality into the apps :+1:.

Regarding the ability to begin typing immediately without clicking the textbox, I have also noticed this and agree that it is somewhat redundant. This will likely be a low priority issue, but I will pass your suggestion onto the team :smiley:.

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Thanks Bryce, I know how this stuff works and was just adding a few small pieces to the list.

I am sure that improving the calendar functionality of the apps is a much higher priority. And also a lot more work.

Hi, some time back I suggested some improvements to annotations, namely

  1. The ability to copy them,
  2. when you enter an annotation you are automatically at the name and don’t need to click on the field

Also I suggested
3) That races are shown in a different colour on the TSS chart to TR and External activities.

I know you guys have a shed load of enhancements with the ipad still to come. Are these things still in the pipeline somewhere?

Cheers

@mcneese.chad So I know why you moved this question here, Chad, but will it be noticed and get an answer? Cheers. it was April when I suggested these…

Most likely yes, based on these assumptions:

  1. Any thread that gets a new post (even long, and old ones) bumps to the top of the active thread feed. This means it will show for anyone looking at the “Latest” thread.

  2. Assuming that people have their forum options set as “Watching” for any reason (the default is to set this when making a reply), they will get a notification that the thread has a new post. This is also true if they have it set to “Tracking”.

  3. Bryce (and maybe others) also watch this forum category (TR SW), especially the ones tagged with “feature-request”, and reply to nearly all these threads.

  4. The fact that the recent post is essentially duplication of the open requests, make it more of a +1 (actually not so much in this case, since it is from the same person as the OP). As such, it belongs in the parallel thread and not left on it’s own.

If you want the guarantee of a direct answer, you are best to send to support@trainerroad.com so you will be in the que. They reply to all those submissions, even if it is a “we have the suggestion on file…” type of thing.

The acknowledgement from Bryce above is about the best you can expect, really. They are actively working on many things, and as much as we’d like to have specific things added, we have to be patient and know expect them to be implemented quickly.

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Hey Phil,

Sadly, I have no updates for you at the moment as we are still hard at work on updating the applications. The top to bottom revamp of the apps is a time-consuming process, but we are making good headway. We have completed the desktop apps and we have made significant progress on the mobile applications as well.

Until these are completed, web-improvements will be few and far between as we focus on our prioritized project. That being said, we have not forgotten these planned web improvements. They sit in a large database of improvements, bugs, and modifications awaiting a Product Manager to prioritize them into our workflow.

Just to summarize:

Suggestions 1 and 2 are planned improvements, although, they are a low-priority at the moment.

This is something that has been suggested in the past but is not planned at the moment.
Changing colors and appearance is something that our Design Team handles, and their job is to ensure that TrainerRoad retains a cohesive design and brand image. While they are not opposed to adding color differentiation, there needs to be a significantly improved user experience to justify the change since our goal is to make TrainerRoad as simple and easy to understand as possible.

I hope this clears up our current progress and prioritization of these feature requests :slight_smile:

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Thanks Bryce, Having worked in the software industry for some considerable time I understand.

On the third idea - the “Showing races in the TSS chart (in a different shade/colour)”. This is genuinley a user experience piece, related to training over time, (not simply a colour thing), as seeing how TSS drops after races and you then build again adds meaning to the TSS chart over time. Something that is obscured at the moment. I frankly don’t care what colour it is as long as I can clearly see my races, amongst my training, which explains why my TSS is fluctuating.

Ah, I understand. Our Design Team is working on a way to display your races on the TSS chart to give you the neccessary context for understanding your TSS chart. Still workshopping it internally, but we do have plans to address this :+1:.

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Brilliant, thanks @Bryce. My only thought… The only issue I have is the difference between A, B and C races. Personally I did around 35 Time Trials last year from 10mile week day club events to 12 hr national championships. Clearly only a few A races, and plenty of Cs. I suspect that the simplest way would be not to worry about the differences, and have races all in the same colour) as I would see a steady stream of small TSS races and then a number of bigger ones for my longer events. However that might not suit everyone, and some variation in the shading of the race colour might make sense - perhaps lighter to darker as you progress from C to A. (of course as soon as you release it someone will has for differentiation between race types :slight_smile: so you can’t win.)

Just a thought… Have fun workshoping that one… Cheers

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