Hey, I’m loving editor so far and mostly switched over completely, but this morning I had a really weird experience with it.
I tried confirming my home last night but it wasn’t an available option despite there being a year worth of data suggesting that I was home, and then this morning my phone was extremely hot and had a battery percentage of 60% after two hours off the charger. The internal ios battery stats are suggesting that it was almost all drained by editor. Any ideas what is happening?
Edit: an update on the home thing. I’m at the airport confirming places and the airport terminal I’m in has been given the little home icon. Very weird. This is only an issue with editor, back on timeline it just punches in my home place without questioning
I wonder then if it’s a problem with Apple’s reverse geocode in China. Hmm… I’m not aware of any such issue, and it seems a weird thing to happen. But, possible maybe?
Yep, that’s the plan! Though that will be a separate view from the current calendar navigation widget. The current widget will stay as-is, but there’ll be an extra full screen view, for visualising your data in calendar style, with annotations on each day.
Yeah I’ve noticed some weirdness like this too sometimes. Though I haven’t quite spotted what the pattern is yet. Hopefully I’ll pin it down soon. There’s some weird edge cases in the timeline nav…
That’s a weird one. I haven’t seen that one myself yet. Not sure what it’ll be… I’ll keep an eye out for it!
A few people have reported this now! Again unfortunately I’m not sure what the cause is. No doubt something in Editor is getting caught in a loop, chewing through battery wastefully. But it’s another one where I haven’t seen it happen myself yet, so I don’t have a good sense of the cause or conditions yet. Hopefully it’ll make itself known to me soon!
I have zero tech knowledge so disregard if this is irrelevant. To expand on the battery drain, the morning that it happened I was taking a bus along a very similar path that I pretty often take a train, the bus then turned and started tracing along streetcar tracks that I use occasionally. At an odd day and hour as well.
I did notice when I opened the app that it was fighting hard to suggest the train or streetcar even after I started confirming the bus. Could that be a potential place for a loop to form?
Is it possible to add a log view for this issue? So i can fo into a unknown city place, confirm one of the day. and in the place detail, a log button or view to get the reverse code to let you see what happened?
I don’t have any good theories myself yet. So that one … at least sounds like something! I can’t think of any obvious code paths that’d be capable of getting stuck in a loop around that kind of situation. But it’s still useful context!
Fingers crossed I catch it in the act myself soon. Although the best time to catch it is when the app is connected to my laptop and the debugger, so I can see what’s going on. Which invariably doesn’t happen with these mystery bugs - they happen when we’re out in the real world instead
Yeah good idea. I’ll add logging for the reserve geocode stuff. Although it should already be logging if there’s an error, but I imagine this isn’t exactly an error case, just the geocoder returning nothing of use. Anyway, that’s still something that can be made to go to the log file. Will do.
Forgot if mentioned. I’m not sure how often yet at least recently it seems like when I’m in larger locations such as a large store, just walking around, Arc Editor at least recently but forgot if always it seems to often maybe correctly identify some location yet there are multiple locations with car between them yet I was just walking around.
As far as mentioned issues with Home or certain locations, not sure if related yet from what I can tell, sometimes gps data perhaps from devices can be inaccurate such that many previous times over the years I might have had to confirm things like areas somewhat close to home but a bit off, such as being at home yet gps data suggested I was many dozens of meters away such as some straight line suggesting travel yet I just deleted something or confirmed as Home. Maybe I mean to say there could be various things that iOS reports and Arc picks up, and over the years I did various things to just make it appear as being at Home (or elsewhere). Maybe some future AI models or something might help.
This is in the next build now. It logs to log file when there’s missing data from the reverse geocode service.
And places tab also now detects all places in the selected date range that are missing data, and queues them up for reverse geocode! So backfilling gets done automatically now.
It can still hit the rate limits and take a while. But you’ll see a loading spinner on places tab to let you know it’s still working on it, if that’s the case.
New build might go out tomorrow. I’ve been on holiday for the past week, so am just back to the code today. Feels like we’re due another build, but I’ll have to check what’s in it first…
For that noisy GPS data problem, I’m probably going to add in the “trust factor” system that old Arc Timeline app has. That helps to learn when it’s a location with noisy/messy GPS data, and adjust for it. Arc Editor / LocoKit2 doesn’t have that yet.
LocoKit2’s more advanced Kalman filter does a much better job than the old one in old LocoKit. But yeah, “trust factor” system might still be required. Sometimes it’s just too messy (and the phone reports very wrong accuracy numbers).
I’ve been investigating this one. I don’t think I’ve found the main cause yet, but I did find one thing that was using way too much energy/battery in the foreground, and have fixed that.
The Mapbox map view’s current location indicator was redrawing on every frame (eg 60 times per second). That’s absurdly wasteful and unnecessary. So I’ve replaced it with a custom one that looks the same but only redraws when new location data actually arrives (eg about once per second at most).
That’s fixed one major battery drain. But that’s only when the app is in the foreground. So yeah, I don’t think that’s the main cause of these mystery energy drains. Still… it’s progress. I’ll keep hunting for more.
It happened again today. This and last time both happened after I going out and back to a stationary place. I see these red line in logs in both this and last times. and Reboot devices can fix the usage and hot issue
I don’t think those errors in the log are relevant. But I can’t be certain. So I’m going to set some time aside to fixing that bug soon, just in case it’s related / relevant.
It’s interesting that a reboot fixed it. I’m guessing swiping the app closed and restarting it didn’t fix the problem? That would match my own experience - that it persists until phone reboot, rather than app restart.
Which is super weird. If it’s Arc Editor that’s the problem (as it clearly appears to be) then restarting the app is the same as restarting the phone. It should be no different. But for some reason it is different… I don’t know what that means, but it feels like an important clue. I’ll keep hunting.
Oh and I really need to get the new build out! It’s got some energy use improvements. I’ve been distracted by business catch up stuff since getting back to the office. Haven’t properly got back to code and shipping yet. Hopefully today.
This is a very minor thing but is there a way to toggle the purple place badges in map view? I really like them in most contexts but sometimes when I’m wanting to just look at my routes, they can block lines on the map without a close zoom.
@Matt
Today I saw your post about Arc Editor Beta. Can I install this version with the previous Arc Timeline version together to test? What’s about the datas from the Arc Timeline?
