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macOS - v2.1: Rowing Analysis on the Big Screen

Trckify Mac 2.1 ships in lockstep with iOS 1.5. The phone or Apple Watch records your rowing session with per-stroke detail; the Mac is where you actually analyze what happened. The Mac edition gets a substantial rowing-analysis suite, plus the same trim and export improvements as iOS so what you edit on the Mac travels back to the phone correctly.

The Analysis tab, re-organized for rowing

Open a rowing session on the Mac and the Analysis tab now shows a layered view designed for the multi-piece nature of a typical row:

Per-stroke chart. Every detected catch is plotted on the SPM timeline, color-coded by classification (normal, weak, turning correction, turning stroke, short anomaly). You can hover to see the period and confidence of each stroke. The chart’s X-axis is session-time so it lines up exactly with the elevation and heart-rate curves above.

Zoom navigator. A second slider beneath the chart lets you zoom into any subsection without committing to a permanent trim — handy for inspecting a single piece in detail while keeping the full session open. Zoom is purely visual, doesn’t sync, doesn’t persist.

Section panel. Each named section gets a row with average SPM, stroke count, distance, pace per 500 m, average heart rate, and a small inline stroke-profile thumbnail. Click a section to focus it on the map and chart; option-click to add a new one by dragging a range on the chart.

Section editing, deeply

Sections in 1.5 are the editable training-plan unit — the way you describe what your row was actually for. The Mac edition makes the editing first-class:

Option-drag on the SPM/elevation chart creates a new section across that time range. A name field appears for “Warmup”, “5×500m”, “Cool down”, “FloEr swing”, whatever you call your pieces.

Drag the handles of an existing section to extend or shrink it. The displayed stats update live as you drag — average SPM, distance, time, pace.

Right-click a section to rename, delete, or “extract this as a separate FIT file” (planned for 2.2).

iCloud round-trip: edits sync to your iPhone within seconds. Sections you drew on the boat post-row (in the iPhone Sections panel) appear on the Mac with the same names, same boundaries.

The dedup defense from past releases stays: if cloud-sync delivers two slightly-different versions of the same section, the Mac picks the one with a non-empty user-set name and discards stale auto-detected variants.

Typical Strokes — averaged stroke profile per section

Per-stroke detection means we have hundreds of individual strokes per section, each with its own raw acceleration trace. The new “Typical Strokes” panel computes the average stroke shape for the section — phase-normalized so all strokes overlay on a 0..1 cycle axis, regardless of their period — and shows you what your stroke looked like on average.

This is more useful than it sounds for diagnosing form: a clean stroke shows a sharp catch peak followed by a smooth drive plateau and a relaxed recovery. A “soft catch” stroke has a rounded, late peak. A late finish has a long tail into the recovery. The averaged trace makes structural patterns visible that no individual stroke would show.

Comparing typical-stroke profiles between sections is the main use: do my second-half strokes have softer catches than my first-half? Is my power section actually faster, or just more frequent?

Turn Detector overlay on the map

Long out-and-back rows usually involve a few 180° turns. The Map tab now overlays detected turns as orange arcs on the polyline, with a legend showing how many turns happened during the session. The detector uses bearing-accumulation (not heart-rate or speed) so it works for paddled, sailed, and rowed boats equally.

Combined with the section panel: you can see at a glance whether your “5×500m” section actually started after the turn, or if the first 100 m of it is still you swinging the bow around.

Per-Device Stroke Filter

Mac users, especially when using the Mac as a coaching tool, want more control over what counts as a “real stroke” than the iOS default-filter provides. The Mac introduces four toggles in the Section Analysis panel:

  • Hide turning corrections (one-arm pulls during turns)
  • Hide turning strokes (full strokes happening mid-turn)
  • Hide weak strokes (sub-threshold pulls, often pause transitions)
  • Hide short anomalies (likely double-detections or clipped sensor windows)

Toggles are per-device (not iCloud-synced) so a coach reviewing a session on a different Mac sees the unfiltered raw data unless they explicitly hide categories themselves.

Important: the FIT export doesn’t read these toggles. Exports always use the canonical filter (all classified outliers excluded) so the file you upload to Strava/Garmin/Concept2’s logbook is identical regardless of who exports it. If you want raw stroke counts including outliers, the in-app inspector is your tool — the file format isn’t the right place for inspection-time preferences.

Trim, exports, and the iOS-Mac round-trip

The iOS 1.5 trim refactor — non-destructive markers persisted on the History entry, synchronized via iCloud — applies identically on the Mac. Trim a session here, the iPhone reflects it on the next sync. Trim there, you see it here. Both sides display the trimmed bounds in the Map and Analysis tabs immediately when the iCloud notification lands.

The export refactor applies too: the FIT/GPX files you save from the Mac now include the trim, the latest sport classification, and the latest stroke filter. Two practical consequences:

Re-export an old track and the file is fresh. A cycling session you imported in March, with the buggy old FIT-sport-code, exports correctly as Cycling now without you having to re-import the source. (The old code wrote ID 22 = motorcycling for rowing. The new code writes ID 15 = rowing. The Mac re-encode fixes everything that was wrong, on every share.)

Trim takes effect in the file. A long ride with five minutes of cellar-to-street GPS noise at the start and a forgotten-to-stop-the-recording trail at the end exports as the cleaned-up middle section. Distance, duration, average pace, average heart rate — all recomputed from the trimmed data.

Smaller things you’ll notice

Test reliability. Tests have moved into dedicated Trckify Tests and Trckify Mac Tests schemes so running ⌘U doesn’t accidentally target a connected iPhone. Faster iteration during development and CI-friendly.

Fewer redundant re-renders. Stroke pipeline performance got attention: section mutations (rename, drag-extend, delete) are now instant instead of taking a second to recompute the per-stroke profile aggregate. Session loading on the Mac is noticeably snappier for long rows with hundreds of strokes.

Storage transparency on the way. The settings screen will gain a storage breakdown in 2.2 — how much disk the recorded .trckify motion files take, how much the export cache uses, with bulk-cleanup options. Power users with hundreds of stored sessions can free space without losing any source data.

What’s next on Mac

Side-by-side track comparison (overlay two rows on the same chart for before/after analysis). Per-section FIT-extraction (export a single piece as its own file for Strava). Season statistics. The recurring “Apple Watch as a remote control during a Mac-based ergometer session” idea is in the long-term backlog.

Update available now via the Mac App Store. As always, Trckify is one Universal Purchase across iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac.