About SportsTracker
-------------------

SportsTracker is an application for people which want to record their
sporting activities. It is not bound to a specific kind of sport, the user
can create categories for all sport types which are endurance related,
such as cycling, running or swimming.

The main advantage is a good overview of your exercises and you can easily
create statistics for specific time ranges and sport types. 

If you own a heartrate monitor with a computer interface you can organize
the recorded exercise files by attaching them to the exercise entries and
view them on demand. You can also import the data from the exercise files.
Users of a Polar device should install PolarViewer for this feature.

All the application data is stored in XML files. So it should be easy to
access it with other tools or to write importers and exporters for other
applications.


Requirements
------------

SportsTracker is a .NET application written in C# using the Gtk# toolkit. 
It was developed and tested with the Mono implementation of .NET. Other
.NET runtimes might work too, but I have not tested them.

You need the following tools/libraries for running SportsTracker:

  - Mono >= 1.0 (from http://www.go-mono.com)
  - Gtk# >= 1.0 (from http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net)

If you want to use it with your Polar heartrate monitor you also need:

  - PolarViewer >= 1.1.0 (from http://www.saring.de/polarviewer)
  - s710 >= 0.16 (from http://daveb.net/s710)

The application was tested on GNU/Linux (Debian Sarge), although it should
work on all Unix-like systems. It also runs on Windows 2000/XP, other
Win32 systems might work too.


Installation on Linux or other Unix-based systems
-------------------------------------------------

You need to perform the following steps:

  - make sure that your system fulfills all requirements
  - extract the application archive
  - change to application directory
  - call 'make' to compile
  - call 'make install' to install (you need to be root)

If your Mono and Gtk# was installed to /usr/local you will get the compile
error message "No package 'gtk-sharp' found". Then you need to enter:
'export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/' and run 'make' again.

To start the application you need to use this command:

  mono /usr/local/bin/SportsTracker.exe
  
If your system can run .NET 'exe' files directly (using BINFMT_MISC in
your kernel) then you only need to start 'SportsTracker.exe'.

If you want to uninstall SportsTracker you only need to call 'make uninstall'
(you need to be root) in the application directory.


Usage
-----

This is a short introduction for the usage of the application:

Before you can add exercises you need to create a list of your sport types
in the editor dialog. Examples for sport types are "cycling", "running" or
"swimming". By assigning a custom color for each sport type the list of
exercises looks much more clear.
For each sport type you need to create at least one subtype. Subtype examples
for cycling are "MTB tour", "MTB race", "Road tour" and so on. If subtypes
does not make sense for your sport type just create a subtype called 
"default".

After that it's possible to add and edit exercises. In the exercise dialog
you need to specify the date, the sport type, the subtype and the intensity.
You also need to enter the distance, the avarage speed and the duration. In
most cases the user has just 2 of these 3 informations. The third one needs
to be calculated correctly by pressing the appropriate button.
All the other inputs are optional. Data such as the route description can be
added to the comment text.
Users of heratrate monitors can assign the recorded file to the exercise.
Most of the exercise data can be imported from this file, so it does
not need to be entered manually. The exercise files can also be viewed with 
the configured application (e.g. PolarViewer).

For the creation of statistics the user needs to specify at least the time
range for the calculation, e.g. the current month. It's also possible to set
filters for the sport type, the subtype, the intensity and the comment, so
only the specified exercises will be included in the statistic calculation.


Contact
-------

You can find the most recent version of SportsTracker on my website at
http://www.saring.de/sportstracker. If you have problems or comments
please send me a mail. The address is projects@saring.de.


License
-------

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

The application icons are based on the icons from the GNOME project, the
logo was inspired by Eugenia Loli-Queru <eloli@hotmail.com>.


Stefan Saring
2004/12/30
