TacX Training > TacX Desktop

It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to start biking indoors. 👎

That means the TacX comes out of the basement and I am, once again[1], confronted with the awfulness that is TacX Desktop. I fired it up and was confronted with all of the same bugs and UX missteps that I’d noted a year ago. It’s like the app hadn’t been updated at all.

I got suspicious because I have a friend who uses his TacX regularly and he wouldn’t put up with this crap…so what is he using? I searched the App Store again (MacOS) and found a TacX Training app as well as the TacX Desktop app I already had.

My only quibble with TacX Desktop is that they should kill it already. If they can pop up a notice every single time asking me to grant permission to use a sharing feature that I don’t want, then they could pop up a notice informing me that TacX Desktop is end-of-life and that I should switch to TacX Training instead.

There is no advantage to TacX Desktop that I can see. The only extra feature that I see is that you can create workouts directly in TacX Desktop whereas TacX Training sends you to the web site to do so. However, TacX Desktop doesn’t allow you to edit a workout, whereas the version in the cloud does. There is no local storage for TacX Desktop, so there is no real advantage to the feature: you’re still storing in the cloud. The editor in the app and on the web site look and feel exactly the same.

TacX Training DashboardThe TacX Training App seems fine, so far. I don’t use the movies or the training plans or anything but my own workouts. I have seen some user comments complaining about the “opponent” feature, but I’m not using that.

I’m not really interested in watching a video of the outdoors in the summer—I’d rather watch a more-distracting TV show or movie—or in competing against random people[2], or in a training plan that makes me sit on the bike for 90 minutes, pedaling at 50% or 68% power. If I’m going to sit on a bloody bike indoors, it’s not going to be for a recovery ride—I’ll just go for a walk or hike outside instead.

I’d offer the following suggestions to the developers, but that’s all I can think of right now.

• It would be great to be able to clone a workout, so that you can make a slightly longer/shorter/harder/easier version
• The ride is imported correctly into Garmin Connect, but the corresponding Sync to Strava doesn’t include the elevation change, for whatever reason. Maybe this is Strava, though.