As competitors, we gain the most when we share and compare what we have learned with others.
When we originally built SoloStorm Cloud, we wanted to make it easy to quickly share information with our friends and fellow racers.
What began as an experiment to see if anyone would actually use it, has become a service that over half of SoloStorm users have accessed. Many consider it indispensable.
While this service is still in Beta, we want to make sure that the it works as expected. One feature that had a design flaw in it was searching for logs matching a selected event.
To define the location of an event, we round the GPS coordinates to a 100 meter box. While this isn’t perfect because of boundary conditions, we wanted to see if it would work as-is. As it turns out, the answer was ‘no’. Some people has issues with logs not being found or going ‘missing’ in their list of logs stored in the cloud.
Therefore, we have made changes to the search algorithm in order to use a ‘nine squares’ approach, where surrounding coordinate ‘boxes’ are also included in the results.
This change is now in production, and while you don’t need to update SoloStorm to use the new search, some housekeeping things were taken care of in the interface between the app and the service that affect the log download progress indicator, so check for an update.
At some point in the future, we may revisit how events are identified in order to make searching more efficient, but this should be transparent to customers. We have quite a few ideas on how to improve SoloStorm Cloud in order to make it easier to search and share with other users, as well as send data to other platforms such as the upcoming Podium service.