Discussion: Attackpoint vs winsplits

I’m trying to persuade my club to use attackpoint for splits instead of winsplits. For some reason it does not seem to be an obvious switch. Before I go deep in argument that I cannot win, are there good reasons to keep winsplits except for personal preference and inertia?

Why not both?

I think Boris means, ¿Por qué no los dos?

AP shows everyone on a course. Winsplits breaks the splits down by class.

Winsplits displays the results the way you upload them. If you want them by class you can just upload them by class instead of course.

WinSplits has a Pro version (one time fee) that includes more detailed analysis of all runners.

@Cristina, do you mean Attackpoint displays them the way you upload them?

Winsplits can do either, example given

I'm not sure winsplits does this, but with attack point I can rerun a course and add manual splits, and the scoring system/speed lets me compare to some extent different courses and overall improvement, which I find really helpful!

ledusledus, why not just volunteer to upload the splits to AP after a couple of events so people in the club can try it out? They'll still have the Winsplits if they want them.

Because I have volunteered and people keep forgetting that they should send them to me. So I end up sending beg emails that I don’t feel like.

Attackpoint has a graph feature (which I find very useful) that I don't think Winsplits has, as well as SplitsAnaylsis, which I feel does a better job of analyzing time lost. Attackpoint allows easy (automatic) linking of GPS data to results, and although few use it these days, you can also add comments to each leg.

And Attackpoint is of course Made in the USA.

Made in the USA? Geez JJ. Are you not paying attention to world news or are you trying to turn people off Attackpoint?

Well jeez, Winsplits comes from some horrible socialist country...

Attackpoint gives you Attackpoint ranking points. Winsplits doesn't give you Attackpoint ranking points.

I like both - the feature in Attackpoint that links the race splits to your training diary so that they appear there and on your home page is good, so are leg comments and the ability to go from a split table directly to other logs to see how they went.

We simply list both on our Result page:
http://www.ramblersoc.ca/results/
(Made in Montreal!)

ledusledus, can't you show your clubmates how darn simple it is to upload splits here too? A couple of minutes and clicks and it's done.

Unless there's a negative split or a missing ID or...

For some reason all the splits I tried uploading over the weekend from XML had missing SportID although the matching CSV files were perfectly fine (except for one person in each who had split issues, no idea why that was).

the negative split is a problem, I think.

negative splits usually result from the controls not being time-mastered (synchronized) before the event. We usually sync the controls Wed or Thurs before every event - takes just a few minutes and gives a full day to get them into the woods, and pretty much guarantees that unless a battery is dying or real funky, there won't be enough drift to cause a negative split.

If there is a negative split, compare the clocks and manually fix the results in OE before exporting / publishing.

> If there is a negative split, compare the clocks and manually fix the results in OE before exporting / publishing.
OR attackpoint could give a warning at the "check" stage of the race and do some automatic calibration of it.

It's fine if you're the one who holds onto the software but we have two people in our organisation who take ownership of our computers and neither is bothered with it. It uploads fine to our Eventor software and that's where their job ends. We also have a multitude of course setters, about 90%+ of whom don't synch the bricks before events (which has caused minor issues in the events where we've had two finish bricks put out).

The negative split issues I encountered over the weekend were nothing to do with brick synching but rather some anomaly with the program. In each case, it just so happened the competitor(s) in question were running with someone else so I just copied their splits across (don't know why it happened in either instance). One case it was the first two splits that weren't displayed in the correct time format but in the other it was something completely different, wrong time format and all backwards for some reason. Fixed them easily enough in the CSV file but the XML file had some other issue so I ignored it.

I first encountered this problem when I was living in Sweden and there wasn't really any interest in uploading splits to Attackpoint so I wrote a script for myself to get the data from Winsplits and turn them into and IOF XML file that can then be uploaded to Attackpoint:
https://github.com/bluefeet32/IOF_XML_generator

Winsplits has an API that you can download XML from but for whatever reason this doesn't contain the SI card numbers. I originally took them from Swedish eventor but that missed some people who didn't pre-enter so now I download the ".spl" file and get the SI numbers out of that and into the XML. This mostly works, except winsplits uploaded through eventor have eventor id's stored in the si card space.

It'll only work on Linux for now and needs some tidy up work after I added the spl feature. Basically any splits I've added to Attackpoint use this, including things like WOC.