Gyroscope V1.6 Release Notes
New cards, more fitness features, and more…
For the latest version of the app (now in the App Store), we wanted to dramatically expand the fitness capabilities of the app. We’ve added dozens of new cards to help keep our users healthy and motivated.
We previously had separate running & cycling apps for more serious athletes, but now they are all merged into the same app. Every day you’ll be able to simply open Gyroscope and see the complete story of your life.
How many donuts?
One of the most popular features in Gyroscope Running was our conversion of calories to donuts. Now we do that for all of your different workouts, whether you went on a bike ride or to the gym.
Our goal with Gyroscope isn’t to simply visualize your stats, but help you make them much better and stay in full control of your life. One of the ways we want to do this is by helping you form good habits and stay motivated.
Time Since Last Workout
The fitness section will now show exactly how long it has been since your last workouts, and make sure that number doesn’t get too high. Being motivated once or twice is a good start, but the real health benefits come from developing long term habits.
Compete with your friends
The final push may come from seeing what your friends are doing and starting some friendly competition. In addition to a card with your own steps, now there is a daily leaderboard showing how you compare to your friends. Adding friends on Gyroscope will let you easily share your latest data with friends, even across various platforms and devices.
Better correlations
One of the unique things we can do is understand how everything fits together and highlight the intersection of various data points. One complaint we had previously gotten was from people who had low step counts but went on long bike rides or did other activities instead.
We’ve started highlighting those activities across more reports, annotating things like when you went running, to the gym or were sleeping. The workouts labels can be tapped to reveal many more details, like maps, heart rate graph, calorie & donut counts, and more.
Your complete fitness history
The weekly and monthly reports now show an overview of your workouts and should reveal the complete picture of what you’ve been doing. Each item in the list can be tapped to see details and customized with a photo.
Whether going on a run, walking around town, at the gym, or anything else, you can combine your photography with your data to tell a unique story.
Pro Features
Gyroscope Pro subscriptions are how we make money and keep the company running. If you enjoy Gyroscope, please consider upgrading to Pro. This new version introduces additional power-features for Pro members…
Satellite Mapping
In addition to workouts, we want to help you capture and understand other parts of your life like travel and transportation.
While our dark maps have been popular and highlight the content, we wanted an option to reveal more of the context of your surroundings—whether large manmade skyscrapers or large bodies of water, mountains, forests, parks, etc.
All of the map views will now have a globe icon in the corner. Tapping it will switch to a satellite map of the same region. The beautiful satellite maps are powered by Mapbox.
Custom Avatars
Another Pro feature is the ability to tap the Gyroscope G in the corner & swap it with your avatar, to personalize your card before sharing it.
Other bug fixes & improvements
We’ve also added a bunch of other subtle fixes and small features to make the overall experience much smoother.
Photo upload
Adding photos now uses the standard iOS photo picker, giving you quick access to all of your different albums and making it easier to go back and find the right image.
Invite your friends
We’ve added options to tell your friends about Gyroscope via text or email. Easily send a link to the app to your best friends and start competing on steps within a few minutes.
No waitlist for the app
We’ve also solved some of our scaling problems and removed the waitlist, so new members who download the app can now instantly get started and join you.
Search by username
We’ve added an option to search for users by username and add them as friends. This means you can just tell someone your Gyroscope username and they will be able to send you a friend request.
Hiding age
We think the age counter provides valuable perspective on the fact that your life is constantly passing by. However, not everyone wants to see this constant reminder (and it also uses some battery life). It can now be easily turned off from account settings. Turning it off will also hide it from your profile, so no one else will see your age.
Hiding weight
Want to add people as friends but don’t want them to be able to see certain things like your weight? The “hide weight” setting will remove weight from your profile so no one else will be able to see that data.
If you have the app already, update to 1.6 to start using the features. If not, you can find it in the App Store by searching for “Gyroscope.”
Special thanks to our CTO Mahdi for building most of these great features, and to all of our beta & pro users for providing the feedback and stories that help us keep making improvements.
The latest iOS10 beta has a major problem with transparent PNG’s and has problems with Gyroscope and many other apps. We advise not installing iOS betas on your phone until they are officially released by Apple.