There are an awful lot of fitness tracking apps out on the market right now, and a pretty common feature is comparing your own activities to other people who are using the apps.

I’ve always found that a bit weird - Unless you’re already a marathon runner or a century biker, it can be extremely discouraging to look at your friend’s list, and see how much better other people are being active than you are.

As we’ve been developing SuperProof, we’ve really started focusing on making it a fitness app for the rest of us - just because you’re not Lance Armstrong, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to enjoy moving around.  That’s one of the reasons Superproof is so heavily focused on automatic data collection - removing manual entry means we’re that much easier for somebody to pick up and use, making fitness part of their every day background activity instead of something they have to set aside extra time to do.

What does this have to do with comparing activities to other people?  Well, one of the features in the version of SuperProof that we’ve been cranking on, is a leaderboard that makes it easier to compare yourself to your friends.  But, our leaderboard isn’t based on distance, or current level of fitness, it’s based on the points you earn while doing activities.  Because of how we reward points, it means that somebody whose primary activity is dog-walking, can be competitive with somebody whose primary activity is running Ironman triathlons.

It’s a small thing, but it’s really encouraging to know that every little bit of activity counts.

There’s lots of new, upgraded stuff coming up, but this is one feature that has been really great to see start working.

Last night Superproof 1.1 was released, and is available on the app store now.  We feel like this is a significant update, and a sign of cool things to come.  Here’s a breakdown of some of the new hotness in this update:

New points system

We got a lot of feedback that the existing algorithm for points didn’t take into account the kind of activity you were doing enough, which resulted in an hour long walk being about the same amount of points as an hour long run or bike ride.  We initially tuned points this way to really place emphasis on Time.  Making the effort to run for an hour was the same level of time commitment as walking for an hour, and we wanted to reward that.  But we also realize that we needed to have more variance in points, so you weren’t getting the same amount of points for every activity.  As a result, we did 2 major things to revise the way points work.

1) Changed up the algorithm for calculating points.  The points you get for an activity are broken up into 3 parts: time, distance (or calories, if at the gym or a place), and bonus points.  We factor the kind of activity you are doing into the first 2 components, then add it up to create a base point score.  We then add bonus points.

2) Bonus points.  This is where the fun comes in!  We now have all kind of special bonus points you can earn during your activity, each of which typically boosts your score by 3-5 points.  Here are some examples: 

• Average temp > 95 degrees +3

• Wind speed > 10 mph +3

• 1st of X activity you’ve proof’d +5

• Activity in the rain +5

• 3 Activities Proof’d today +5

• > 5 day streak +5

There are a whole host of others, and we’ll keep adding more.  For now though, we think this makes the points system work a whole lot better.  You may see your per-activity score go down a bit based on the previous scoring system, but don’t worry — it will average out!

You can see breakdowns of your bonus points by tapping through them on the top of the activity complete page, or from the redesigned activity detail page.

New, more refined UI

We’ve gone through almost all of the UI and tried to polish it up a bit.  Main parts to note:

• New Trophy views have some nice, fancy animations

• Refined the challenge inbox page

• More/better loading animations

• Daily stat views are accessed by tapping on one of the bars in the weekly view from your profile:

New challenge views

We’ve added a view that allows you to see how many challenges are nearby you.  This should make it easier to see what’s around and close, instead of looking at your challenge inbox which is full of everything left for you.

Generate challenges from the Superproof Robot

Sometimes you can’t get friends to create challenges for you, so we introduced a feature that prompts the Superproof Robot to generate a challenge for you nearby.  We’ve used this feature in the past to discover some pretty interesting outdoor places we’d never known about, so we hope you find this to be fun and useful!

Overall, we’re really excited about this new release, and hope you enjoy.  As always please give us feedback about any of the new features!

For those of us who don’t play team-sports, exercise is often a solitary endeavor.

That’s a problem.

We know that one of the biggest motivators in exercise, is if your friends are involved.  Easy for the people who play team games, not so much for those of us grinding it out on a run.

Superproof is stepping in to fill that gap.  We think exercise should be fun for everybody, and we’ve built something that we think gets us there.  It’s like an exercise tracker mashed up with geocaching.

So, your friend can leave you a message or a challenge from our website, which you trigger and pick up when you run / walk / hike / bike / rollerskate by that location while running Superproof on your iPhone.

This way, everybody you know can still exercise with you, even when they’re not with you.  They can still be sitting on the couch eating pizza (which is awesome, btw), but can leave you challenges and messages while you’re outside.

We’re working on a bunch of deeper game mechanics, but at its core, Superproof is about making exercise fun for everybody.  You shouldn’t have to be a gym rat or a marathon runner to enjoy it.