prime blog

We've had a few emails with a similar message: where are you? It's been months since the last update!

We're here, cranking away at this. Feedback from the alpha users was overwhelmingly positive, and we had several requests for features people regarded as "missing". So we decided to add 'em in before we went live. And boy, did they take a while. What we thought would take weeks, took months. But it's working great. New features, new server, new voices, new music. Coming soon.

Very soon.

I promise.

:)

Last week I attended my first refresh phoenix meeting. It's a great bunch of folks from various web design/development companies around the valley (30secondrule, fortymedia, obuweb, tornado design being some that come to mind - sorry for those I missed, no slight intended)

It was an ideal night to go; they were having a demo/pitch session, so along I trotted to talk about primecondition.com. Brought it up on screen, logged in, made a new workout, mixed it to mp3, downloaded and played it through some crappy portable speakers I'd brought along.

And they got it. Awesome feedback, great questions. They immediately grokked what I was trying to do.

That's a nice feeling.

(for photos see james archer's flickr page)

One of the first bits of feedback we heard was that our default rep speed (of two seconds up, two seconds down) was just too darn slow for some exercises - namely bodyweight exercises like pushups and crunches.

And yes, I'll agree - pushups are my bane - if I try to do a four second rep pace, half of that time is spent groaning with my face on the floor. Me? Resting? Never, it's all part of the exercise...

So, (barrage of trumpets) introducing different default rep speeds as of tonight!

Pushups, crunches, etc. now default to 1 second up/1 second down - other major exercises stay at 2/2. (In the end, you'll be able to set your own, but right now I just want a good default)

Also! Another request came in for the saved MP3 filename to have the workout name included in it - done! It now saves off as Your_Workout_Name_Todays_Date.mp3.

Enjoy!

A beta tester asked a question over the weekend:

"Will other people see my workouts?"

Welcome to the primecondition blog. It's been around for a few weeks but you would have had to know where to look. 

You probably know by now that primecondition lets you create custom MP3 workouts. You may be beta testing right now. If so, thanks! We've had some amazing feedback over the past few weeks, but we've barely scratched the surface. We've got a lot of things coming down the pipe in the next few weeks and months.

Keep an eye on this blog: you'll see it here first!

Okay, so I've been asked this one a couple of times:

"Will Prime be able to include a vocal description of the weight I want for each exercise?"

Short answer: Yes, but not yet. All the code is already written for this, but there's two things holding it up:

• first, recording all the possible audio combinations. You'd be amazed at the different numbering and naming schemes on commercial exercise equipment - are you going from 30 lbs to 40 lbs, or 10 kilos to 12 kilos, or 3 to 4, or C to D, or light to medium?
• and second, making the UI for this simple and straightforward. I'm on about my fifth different revision for this so far. The idea is, you'll only have to enter in your details once, then they're remembered. But I want that "once" experience to be easy.

So, it is coming, but my guess would be when the paid (premier, max, ch-ching, whatever you want to call it) plan launches, not before.

Had a questioning email yesterday from a new signup:

"listening to the workout it takes a long time between sets. can i make this any quicker?

I answered: no, not yet. The default workout builder page picks a set time between exercises - about a minute, half of which is spent setting up for the next exercise. At some point when I get the advanced workout builder page up, you'll be able to tweak to your heart's content.

But absolution is mine! A few hours later, another email arrived from said exerciser chap after he'd actually done the workout:

"forget what i said. the time is GREAT. might even be a litle fast. i had to rush sometimes ;)"

Indeed, it's a very different experience just listening to the audio as opposed to doing the workout. Time tends to move surprisingly fast when you're trying to get your breath back.

Added a few more tracks for exercising to - still in the "cinematic" genre, lots of percussive hits. I'm still debating as to whether to just throw in the "tribal" or "edge" music right now or wait a while.

I guess at some point I may also add some "weighting" to the new music, so the newer it is, the more likely it'll show up in a workout. Right now it's the luck of the draw - by chance alone, if you burned off a new workout, you may or may not hear the new stuff.

Another couple of tracks added today. Testing them, noticed that the levels were wrong, and one caused some audio crackles when combined with some of the louder exercise voiceovers, damn it. It's not a big deal, just means a slight tweaking of the audio settings on those files, but it's inconvenient and apologies to anyone who had any crackles in their workout.

A quiet milestone reached today - it was the first day I've allowed signups by people who I didn't know. So far, it's been either friends, colleagues, family and a few live demonstrations.

I have what I call a "heartbeat" page where I can view some general stats on new users, and how long it takes a new user to create their account and create a workout - and so far I have two extremes - a couple of people have signed up and not mixed anything, but it's been fairly gratifying to see that most folks take less than ten minutes to signup, approve their account, create and mix their first workout.

And a trend seems to be that someone mixes off a simple "test" workout with two or three sets, and a few minutes later (presumably after listening to it) comes right back and builds a real, 30-45 minute one.

Groovy. 

It's taken longer to get here than I wanted (isn't that always the case?) and there's still a long way to go, but it feels pretty good.