GPX Explore 1.5: the whole file, and the whole workout
GPX Explore started as a small favour to myself: open a GPX track, see it on a map, see the climb. It has quietly become the most downloaded app we have, and eight out of ten installs are on the Mac, which is not what I expected for something I first wrote for the phone. Version 1.5 is the release where it grows up from a viewer into something that tells you about the ride.
Read everything
A GPX file from a watch, from Strava, or from our own WorkoutGPX carries far more than coordinates: heart rate, cadence, power, speed and temperature ride along on every point in the Garmin extensions, and the file itself has a name, a description, links, waypoints with symbols and comments. The old parser read the line and dropped the rest. The new one reads the complete GPX 1.1 schema, extensions included, and it stopped guessing: a track without elevation is drawn flat instead of at sea level, a track without timestamps shows no invented duration, a timestamp with fractional seconds (Strava, Garmin) parses instead of turning into “now”, and a file with only waypoints opens.
Chart any series
The chart under the map used to be elevation only. It now has a picker for whatever the file carries: elevation, heart rate, power, cadence, speed, temperature. Hover or scrub any of them and the marker follows on the map. Speed is derived from the timestamps when the file did not record it. Above: the Blue Hills Reservation trails from the classic Topografix sample set, three tracks and forty-six named waypoints recorded in 2001.
A summary worth opening the file for
The route card shows what you actually want to know: distance, moving time with pauses taken out, average pace for runs and walks or average speed for rides, max speed, elevation gain and loss with GPS noise filtered, the sensor averages, and splits per kilometre or mile behind a disclosure. Nothing time-based appears for a file that has no times. These numbers were tuned on real files rather than tidy ones: a 2001 receiver logging a point a minute, a watch logging one a second, a route whose points carry edit stamps instead of a clock, a tour stitched into a single segment across two years. Each of those broke a simpler rule, and the rules that shipped are the ones that survived all of them.
Get it out
Share the GPX file from the toolbar, or export the map with the chart under it as one picture, coloured the way it is on screen, with the name and the numbers along the bottom. Below, a Garmin Connect run around Washington’s McMillan Reservoir with its heart rate under the map.
For the Mac majority
A new document opens filling the screen and remembers the size you set. Settings is ⌘, the chart is ⌘E, the route card ⌘I, fit to view ⌘0, and the three map styles are ⌘1 to ⌘3. Finder’s Quick Look preview draws the track coloured by grade, like the app, instead of a red line. GPX files finally get their own document icon in Finder, and big files open several times faster: a 3 MB Garmin ride that took a second now takes a tenth of one.
GPX Explore 1.5 is a free update, and the app is free: one download for iPhone, iPad and Mac, no account, nothing leaving your device.
