golden cheetah v WKO

[andrewhk]

I have been using WKO 2 but am considering switching to golden cheetah, largely so I can work on a Mac (and without using parallels). Any views as to how effectively it works with ibike files? My computing skills are also limited and I am concerned I may be out of my depth if it is not intuitive etc.

Thoughts welcome!
Andrew

[NCH1]

Once you have downloaded your ibike csv ride file, in GC go to ride>import from file, and then navigate to the folder where you store your ibike ride data. Mine is saved in My documents. Once you have located the CSV file, press open>save>finish. Your ibike file will then be loaded in GC.

I don't mind GC, but prefer WKO. GC has its own terminology, and is unlike the terminology which is in common parlance when using a power meter. GC also does not have any documentation, well, as far as I can tell.

Nik

[racerfern]

Golden Cheetah takes a bit of getting used to since it's different. But it does run native Mac, it's faster than WKO and doesn't gobble up as many CPU cycles.

It has most of the charts and its version of PMC yields results very similar to WKO, but may actually be a tad more accurate as its based on a different forumula by Dr. Philip Skiba.

I think most importantly, GC responds to its users, improving and evolving very rapidly.

[andrewhk]

Thanks Nik/Fernando. I could not find any instruction docs which is a clear disadvantage from my perspective (not that the WKO+ instructions are great, at least in comparison to ibike's). The different terminology does not concern me as long as I have an understanding of how the formula work (at the end of the day, as useful as the PMC in WKO+ is, it's just maths and its correlation with how we react in practice will vary from individual to individual). I guess the best answer is just to download golden cheetah and play with it for a while!
Thanks again, Andrew

[JPCH]

Anticipating my future "power training" with the iBike Dash, I've tried WKO and Golden Cheetah.
My first motivation for Golden Cheetah was the Mac compatibility (I don't like my business PC too much).
I tested both based on my Edge 705 and a power calculator complementing GPS data.

I like both, but I eventually prefer Golden Cheetah.

Golden Cheetah is really becoming a great tool.
I've downloaded the last "nightly development build" which is full of features and surprisingly stable.

You have now ride summary, ride plots, histograms, critical power analysis, histograms, Quadrant, 3D plots, Weekly Summary, Metrics, Google Earth view, Performance manager, Aero Lab, Data Editor ...
The data editor is great : it allows to see numeric data and to remove useless data (like GPS still active in the car)

@ Velocomp: do you intend to also implement real time computation of xPower, Bikescore and other non WKO metrics ?
It looks as easy to compute as "non-open source" metrics. Having a consistent overall environment is probably better for training.

JP

[racerfern]

XPower and BikeScore are not GC creations. They are copyrighted by Dr. Philip Skiba and used in GC with his permission. XPower and BikeScore are roughly the equivalents of NP and TSS and track amazingly close to each other.

On a separate note, I just finished a discussion with one of the GC developers to fix an issue with map display. Since the iDash records GPS data from iPhones it can be displayed in GC on the map page. However the LAT/LON numbers were getting flipped so no map was shown. An upcoming release will fix this in GC.

[JPCH]

Thanks for the clarification.

The next step for them could be Golden Cheetah for iPhone