Hi, I try to get used to the new Arc 4 features. However I miss a feature, that has been in the old Arc timeline App: When there is an unknown location and I want to give it a public name, it is really hard to do so. I wish I could either see the public place (e.g. train station) on the map and tap on it, or that “train station” is suggested without searching for it. Because sometimes, “train station” is easy to recognise, but other locations are harder to recognise on the map, especially since they are not visible. Maybe a toggle where I can switch on public locations and names on a map? I’m having a bit of a hard time to clean up my timeline in Arc 4. An pretty much everything in my map is “Unkown”, especially when I went on a tour and I’m outside my everyday places of my home. However, they are also the hardest to research.
For example an unknown place can look like this. I remember the location was some sort of shop, but I don’t recall the name. But there are also no suggestions either by the search, nor on the map itself. This is really hard to get all the places back together.
Hi @dagguet — quick context on what we can and can’t do here:
The labels you see on the map (or don’t) are Mapbox’s domain, not Arc’s. We don’t have access to those labels and Mapbox controls what’s shown at which zoom level. Not ideal, but it’s their map.
What we can do is reverse-geocode visits via Apple to get street addresses, the way the old app did. In the old app, visits without an assigned place fell back to showing their street address as the title — so even unidentified places had useful labels. In AT4 the title-chain machinery is in place (BIG-495, shipped 1.1.0), but the visit reverse-geocoding work isn’t running yet — most visits don’t have street addresses populated to fall back on. That’s filed as BIG-227, just bumped to High priority. Once that lands, visits like the one in your screenshot would show their street address automatically.
Thank you. Yes of course this is a Mapbox design. But the old app also used mapbox? Just to compare I had a look in the old map and at the same zoom level it gave me more detail and context of the places around, the street names are visible on the map etc. Also when you edit the place and search, you have the Google places, which makes it easier to find your unkown place again. When you start typing, you find the places easier than in Arc 4. hard to explain.
Compared to the scoresheet of arc 4 above, this one shows me street name, and some other public places in Arc 4 I hardly see the city or town name, rarely more:
Definitely, the Google Place lookup feels a bit less useful in Arc4 than before. Often, while typing I get lots of unrelated hits. I noticed that the Google results also depend on the Arc UI language, e.g. if Arc is in English, searching for a German place name will not yield (the expected) results.
Important to note that one screenshot is dark mode, the other light mode. That’s different style configs on Mapbox’s side, and Mapbox for whatever reason prefer to show fewer labels in dark mode.
Later we will be adding a settings view for choosing different map styles (ticket BIG-164). Though the level of label detail will still be up to what Mapbox have decided for the chosen style. But there will be at least more styles to choose from, and the ability to choose different ones for use in dark mode and light mode, configurable separately.
Both old and new apps use Google Places only for place results. The old app used to also support Mapbox search, but Mapbox took themselves out of that market - their API no longer supports it. That’s why the old app still has that explicit “Search Google Places” button, though nowadays the old app can only get results from Google Places, same as the new app.
The Google Places API usage for both old and new apps is the same. So any differences you see in the results there will likely be either chance, or the app also including some places it has locally in cache.
