Open letter to the makers of the B.icycle app
Dear B.icycle app maker:
This letter is to thank you for the latest upgrades you have made to your application, the B.icycle app I use to track my daily commute progress.
I have had your application on my iPhone since I first bought the phone over two years ago, back when my ride to work was only 8 miles round trip and your product didn't auto pause at stops. We have both come a long way! Now I ride 35 miles round trip, and your application fails to work at all!
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First there was your version 3.0, a great upgrade that added auto-pause and recorded a much more accurate time, distance and altitude. It was thanks to this upgrade that I learned:
the distance I travel changes by as much as half a mile every day, due to previously unrecorded alterations in the very crust of the Earth!
my altitude changes daily! Scientists are currently hard at work trying to determine if this is the cause of the change in travel distance mentioned in #1. The current working theory is that the planet has acne.
Some days my top speed exceeds 300 MPH!
Then version 3.1 came along and it worked much better! My top speeds stopped violating physical laws, and the strange changes in distance traveled became a problem only on my night-time ride home, which gave scientists more to work with. (The crust of the Earth may be expanding as it cools!)
Unfortunately, 3.1 had a minor bug in that if it was one of the applications that were open when my phone ran out of battery power-- which was a very likely event insofar as the B.icycle app is by far the largest power suck on the phone-- itdeleted my entire history.
WHAT A GREAT FEATURE! Sure, I was mad at first. A year's worth of aggregated cycling data gone because your application reset and lost the ability to count up all the mileage in the history... wouldn't you be upset? Of course! But then I thought: "Wow, I have over 8,000 miles in that history, but what is that number to me, really? The important thing is thatI did it! It still shows in my body, in my heart and lungs and legs. What's a number, really? What's the difference between knowing I biked 9,217 miles in a calendar year and knowing I biked only 8,969 miles in a year? Other than 248 miles I'll never know I biked/didn't bike?"
So thank you for this feature. It taught me the true importance of my bicycling trips and what they really mean to me.
Also, thank you for your kind response to my request for a fix to this problem! I was worried at first when I fired off an email to you explaining that I'd lost all of this data and your response was an auto-reply in German. But then 3.2 was released fixing ALL OF MY PROBLEMS!
Version 3.2 is perfect! I tried it for the first time today and discovered the applicationno longer opens at all! This is EXACTLY what I needed!
"You should stop thinking about how long your ride takes!" you're telling me. "Stop thinking about numbers! They aren't important!" You are so right!
And so now I'm going to stop thinking about my ride and your app and how long things take, and how steep a hill is, and move on to thinking about more important things, like: which one of your competitors I'm going to patronize starting today.
Yours as always,
Gene Doucette, The Urban Cyclist