Electronics, Lighting, & Gadgets - SportTracks or Ascent for Garmin 705

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TrekJapan
04-12-09, 03:17 AM
I just picked up a 705 and bought Ascent for Mac and downloaded SportTracks for Win Vista.

By and large I'm a Mac guy but I do have a Vista box sitting right next to my iMac. Not exactly difficult to commit to one program or the other but I do want to commit to one. Right now I'm tracking my workouts on both.

Right now I'm tending to lean towards SportTracks as it handles a heck of a lot more information than Ascent and best of all it's free. But I already paid for Ascent as well.

At any rate anybody use one and then switch to the other before? What was the compelling reason for changing.

For me Ascent is more intuitive. It also has the cool animation mode.

SportTracks is a little tougher to get around in but I love the way it handles images. I can't save my terra map or road map with course in Ascent except to do a screen capture. SportTracks is awesome in that respect.

Thoughts? Another program out there I'm missing maybe?

John

ejbarnes
04-12-09, 07:00 AM
I can't speak for the Mac programs.
This version or SportTracks is pretty darned good. I still put my data into Garmin Training Centre, Motion Based, Cyclistats, Sport Tracks and even MapMyRide.
Reasons:
Training Centre- I just assume that Garmin would know the best way to work with their own hardware.
Motion Based- Again Garmin, but the data is stored on line. This way if a computer crashes the data is stored off site.
Cyclistats - Will allow me to view my data in so many ways. With the Graphs my progress or lack of, is very easy to see.
SportTracks - Nice work with the Data and the maps are great. If sport tracks had the charts and graphs from Cyclistats it would be near perfect (For me).
MapMyRide- Is just an easy way to share my rides with others. (I did drop my premium subscription as the advertisements are getting to be a little much.) Lately though this site has improved it's data handling and will now acquire heart rate, cadence etc.

I know that it is a little goofy to use so much but each program plays the data differently. Now that a routine has formed all data is gathered while filling up with water after my ride.
With a few more improvements SportTracks could be my only software.