Strava but for freediving? Any ideas?

[shoelessone]

Hi all!

I'm just getting into freediving, but am a bit of a nerd. I've got a lot of friends who are bikers (road bike mainly), and they use an app/website called "Strava" to track their progress over time. I thought it would be cool if there was a similar website for freediving...

As it happens, I'm soon leaving on a backpacking trip through India, and I'm going to have a lot of time on my hands. I'm also a software/web developer, and I thought, "hey, maybe I should see if the freediving community would be interested in such a tool!" - which is ultimately why I've created this thread.

In (super) short, my goal would be to take many of the "features" here: http://www.strava.com/features and reimagine/rework them for the freediving community. Things like graphing your dive profiles, tracking your personal records, tracking your records against others in your area, etc. My goal would also be to support data files from various dive computer manufacturers (Aeris, Suunto, etc) so that you could relatively easily upload a data file from your computer to the site to automatically create dive history for yourself.

Basically, I'd LOVE opinions on:

1. Would this type of tool would be useful
   
2. If there is already a tool out there that you feel meets/fits this need already (and it's totally fine if that's the case - I don't want to reinvent the wheel!)
   
3. What would you like to be able to use such a website for? I.e. is there a particular feature that you'd love to have that would make using such a website useful for you?
4. Do you see yourself spending the time to manually enter dive history (i.e. depth/times of dives, surface intervals, location, etc)? Alternatively, do you think you'd be interested in being able to upload logs from your dive computer?
5. Is there any specific feature of such a website that might motivate you to use it? One big thought I had is, personally, I'm lazy, so going to some website to do a bunch of data entry doesn't sound so interesting to me.. I'm trying to think if there might be some "killer feature" that might make me WANT to enter my data. For me, that might just be a useful/pretty analytics engine that showed useful graphs of performance over time, allowed me to analyze the data.

Thanks for any ideas/thoughts/tips!!!

 

[qsys]

If you're writing that app, you might check out jdivelog (sourceforge.net/projects/jdivelog/). It's software for diving, but it reads dive computers from various manufacturers. It might be relatively easy to take out that 'read dive computer'-part, or maybe some other parts, like the logbook etc. It's written in Java, and chances are pretty high that that's the way you will go?

 

[shoelessone]

If you're writing that app, you might check out jdivelog (sourceforge.net/projects/jdivelog/). It's software for diving, but it reads dive computers from various manufacturers. It might be relatively easy to take out that 'read dive computer'-part, or maybe some other parts, like the logbook etc. It's written in Java, and chances are pretty high that that's the way you will go?

Thanks for the link! I actually was also going to ask if anybody might be willing to upload/send me a log file straight from your computer (I'm hoping to buy one soon, but don't have one myself yet, and sample files woudl be super useful to parse/experiment with).

As far as the language, I imagine I MIGHT need to write something with Java (or a slightly lower level language) for handling parsing, or perhaps run some sort of third party application to handle parsing log files if needed.

But otherwise, I'll likely write the web application in PHP, or possibly django. I'm hoping that log files are basically glorified CSV files, but that might be hopeful .

 

[qsys]

I have no idea about the format of the log files, but it doesn't appear to me they're just (glorified) csv files. But with the 'importer' from divelog, you get xml. Or you may intercept somewhere earlier and put them in a database. Dunno.
Anyway, I can send you the xml-files I got from my dive computer, but be aware that they're scuba diving logs, not freediving logs.