Some of you are aware that there was a thread a while back about a young guy who distributed command-line apps for downloading and plotting PowerTap data onto a Mac. I just want to advise you that he has now built a GUI interface around the apps and gnu plot scripts and you no longer have to use the terminal window to run them. It is now a single GUI application called GoldenCheetah. Several people have helped him to de-bug it and it now works reliably (at least with firmware 2.21 and USB harness).
It's quite rudimentary at this point, one window showing ride summary data, and another one showing plots for wattage, heart rate, speed, and cadence, with a data smoothing slider. But he's intending to add features like power distribution, power target and heart zones, interval plotting, etc., as time becomes available (he's a busy student). It's certainly no CyclingPeaks at this point, but combined with a pen and a notebook, you can probably put together a pretty decent training routine with it. You can download it here:
http://goldencheetah.org/download.html
It's all open source and available for free. If you've recently purchased a PowerTap and (like me) grind your teeth at the thought of Purchasing a windows computer or (worse) installing Virtual PC on your Mac just to view PowerTap data, here's one way to save time, frustration, and money (!). Supposedly Saris is releasing their Mac version of PowerAgent in October, but I doubt it would be much more sophisticated than GoldenCheetah. If any of you know your way around C compiling perhaps you can chip in and help (some other people have).
Just though I'd pass the info along,
George
😉