Just in case you're still looking, and for the record, I'm in the same situation. I use a
Garmin ForeTrex 201 wrist-mount that I'm very happy with, apart from the buttons being too small to operate with gloves on. The best Mac apps I've found are
Ascent and
Trailrunner.
Ascent pros:
Lots of detailed info, graphs
Diary with weekly/monthly/yearly totals for distance, ascent etc
Direct GPS support
HRM support
Cons:
Clunky interface, editing spurious points off a route is painful
TrailRunner pros (3.0 currently in beta):
Very pretty interface, mapping
Good diary system
Cons:
Really quite buggy (even current 2.0 release version), seems to be a release every week or so
Speed graphs are pretty, but smoothed to the point of meaninglessness!
Lacks detailed control of Ascent
Ascent would be best if it was prettier, Trailrunner if it wasn't so buggy! Hard to choose.
I've not found any decent online services either. Snowranger (I'm Synchro on there) is pretty cool in the way it divides up runs/lifts/breaks etc, but it's a bit dumb in other ways - it doesn't filter spurious points that say you're doing 200mph for 5 seconds, and it doesn't split days within a single GPX file, so it currently says I've done 60,000m vertical in 6 days when it was actually about 12. I'd love a straightforward visual track editor: It would be nice to be able to delete that ill-advised foray into the woods when trying to record a track for others to follow!
I'd even live with a Windows app (I run VMWare), but all the ones I've found are limited and butt-ugly - there's a huge list
here - tell me if you find something good!
I compiled
Viking with MacPorts, and while it's seriously clunky, it does work and provides basic selection and editing of data points
and resaves to GPX files rather than its own proprietary format.
I've tried
Ascent and
GPSies for iPhone, but the iPhone GPS is nowhere near as good as the Garmin, it's prone to interruption if you get called and it eats battery, and taking gloves off to operate it at -20 is a no-no. The apps are too simplistic compared to the desktop ones. I've not tried
OutFront. I find the garmin works fine all day even when it's really cold, which is impressive when you consider it's exposed all the time.
Regarding the contentious tracking of speed with GPS, I've had good results repeating the same run, getting up to a shade under 80mph (125km/h) with fair consistency. I'm off to an
xspeed day in Flaine tomorrow, will be interesting to compare properly set up timing beams with the GPS.
