Arc Editor public beta 2

Announcements
21

Hi @trackmytracks!

Yeah at this stage if you want a fully complete app with many features, Arc Timeline app is the one to go for.

If you want to try out the rebuilt app, with better recording accuracy and detail, greater stability and reliability, but currently very limited range of features (and many of the existing ones still quite incomplete), then there’s the Arc Editor betas.

You can also try both, and decide whether Arc Editor has enough functionality for you yet or not. Though I suspect it probably won’t be good enough yet. Personally I’m running both of them, not just because it’s my job to test and maintain them, but also because Arc Editor doesn’t have enough features yet for me to feel like it’s ready to take over fully.

22

Cool, thanks for the reply. If I do purchase now from app store would I have to purchase the new app again when it becomes available?

23

@trackmytracks No second purchase required! I basically treat an Arc subscription as a subscription to the whole “Arc Family” of apps. Those being: Arc Timeline, Arc Recorder, and now Arc Editor.

There might be some technical shuffling I need to do at some stage, once I eventually remove the old Arc Timeline app from the App Store. But that’s a fair way into the future, and that’ll be my housekeeping problem to deal with, not yours.

But that minor housekeeping problem aside, this is how it works: If a subscription is started in one app, that applies to all of them. All of the apps are aware of that subscription, regardless of whether it was started in that app or not. And the same goes for Lifetime purchases - all apps in the Arc Family are aware of it.

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24

Quick question on the Editor backup. Does the new Editor have a backup system in place yet, or are you still using Arc Timelines system?

Just wondering if I can only use the new Editor as it’s so much better.

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25

Tick on something you want to edit, e.g. walking, then swipe the info screen down to see the map full screen. Swipe info back up, and tick <. Now you are at the top of your day.

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26

I just noticed that Arc Editor doesn’t support the Common Path Data Feature.

For example this is in Arc Timeline:

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Such a section doesn’t exist in Arc Editor. I personally really like this feature! Great way to look at my running routes.

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27

Not an automatic one yet. There’s the debug export/import buttons on the Settings tab, down the bottom in the Database section. I’m currently using them for whenever I need to delete the app during testing and reinstall.

A full export takes … actually I can’t remember now. I think with my database it might be something like 10 minutes. (Which is much faster than it was in old Arc Timeline app! Things have got a lot more efficient, with the cleaner code).

A full import takes about 35 minutes for my database, I think. Which again is dramatically faster than a full restore from backup takes in old Arc Timeline app.

The integrity of the exports is also much better than in Arc Timeline. Though I’ll have to work hard to maintain that once I add in the incremental daily backups functionality - that’s where things get more complex and risky. For now, because it’s just a manual full database export, it can validate it and integrity confirm it at time of full export. Which is much simpler than with incremental / partial backups being done automatically each day.

Anyway yeah, short answer is there’s for now only that manual button for a full database export. The automatic daily backups system is “Coming Soon! :sparkles:”

Heh. Personally I’m sort of “only using Editor” myself, because I much prefer it now. But I’m still keeping Arc Timeline running, because … it’s a decade old and battle tested, and it is doing those automatic daily backups. So if anything goes horrifically wrong with Editor and I lose that data, old crusty Arc Timeline will still have been there, doing its thing, so not all will be lost.

28

Aah, that does it! Ok got it now. Thanks :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I bet that’s going to be a pain to fix, unfortunately. SwiftUI is going to make it a challenge. But at least now I know what’s causing it!

29

Ah, I’m glad to hear someone actually wanting that feature! I shall add it to the todos.

Me too! But weirdly I’ve never heard anyone talk about it since I added it, many years ago. So I got the impression it was just me. And because of that I kind of left it half finished, and never properly polished as a feature. It could be much better than it is, but there just didn’t seem to be any interest, so I didn’t set aside the time.

So I’m glad to hear you like it! That gives me an excuse to spend time on a) adding it to Arc Editor, and b) doing it better this time :blush:

30

Bit the bullet and now only use Arc Editor. Seems to work even better without Timeline & Recorder working in the background!

Cannot wait to see what is in the next beta!

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31

A ‘start’ button.

I live in a golf community where I travel short distances in a golf cart. Once the app has woke up, the GPS track is uncannily accurate. However, I do get this ‘annoying’ gap in the track. I know what causes it (Arc waking up and detecting movement), but can you add a ‘OK I am going to be active now’ button?

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32

Hey Matt, I’m a user since July 7th when I started overlanding through Europe (and should political escalations calm down and open up eastward routes, all the way as Asia).

Tried finding a way to contact you personally but I failed, so here we go:

The Arc Timeline App is Not even exactly what I was looking for to record my travels, it goes far beyond and is just an amazing tool. Training myself and the app how to handle my data is pretty hard in the beginning, it still takes me around half an hour each day to clean up the mess. Despite that the most important thing is that the data is recorded non-stop, interpretation of that can be edited anytime and might need less input in the Future - hopes up for Arc Editor.

And here’s my request:
Beta is already full, I was hoping you could send me an invite to test flight. I think, although for a new user I’m lacking routine of how arc works, I might still be able to give useful feedback from an overlanding perspective.
My first impression is that the app is layed out for City Life, because in rural regions it’s quite tricky to find a good mapbox (or mostly google search) match for my wild camp sites or hikes.

Anyway I’m glad that I found your Arc App.
I’m ready to purchase the lifetime option now that I learned there’s much going on (I was at first sceptical about a 12y old app) and you confirmed just some posts above that the lifetime will apply for all Arc related Apps.

If that’s interesting to you, I was looking for something like this often enough over the years but never learned about Arc until I was able to define some parameters in ChatGPT.

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33

Heh. Sometimes people ask for this, but I always say no :joy:

The reason being: as an app developer, if you start adding buttons or features like that, you’re pushing your mistakes and problems onto the user, instead of fixing them yourself.

If the app isn’t waking up and starting recording fast enough, that’s on me - that’s something I should fix and make better. If I add a button so you can make the app wake up when it didn’t wake up fast enough itself, I’m basically saying “meh, you can do it instead of me; I’ll make it your problem instead of me doing my job”.

So really the solution is to get Arc to know when to wake up faster. Or just wake up faster in general (which is entirely possible - it’s just an energy/battery saving setting as to what range of sleep cycle durations it uses).

I tend to adjust the latter every year or so - shorter sleep cycles, as phones get more powerful, and longer battery lives. The energy saving needs get gradually less every year. I’m probably due for doing another adjustment like that soon.

For the former - making the app recognise better when it should be doing short sleep cycles… oh you know what, I think I just remembered a mistake I made in Arc Editor that’s relevant to that.

In Arc Timeline I think if it doesn’t know enough about your current place it falls back to 30 second sleep cycles. But I’ve got a feeling I accidentally in Arc Editor allowed it to fall back to 60 seconds in those cases. Which is way too long. I’ll check that!

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34

Hi @plecta! I’m glad you’re liking the app!

Unfortunately this is one of the challenges of the app. It’s designed to learn your patterns, like AI, but if you’re always travelling to new places then it’s always going to be a step behind you. Every new day of new data is a new discovery for the AI. So it can’t look at it and say “oh I recognise this; this is like yesterday”. It looks at it and thinks “hmm, this is all new; I’m not sure what to do with this!”

So while it will still learn overall patterns in your behaviour, your adventurous lifestyle will be a challenge for it every day! Which leaves you with more cleanup work to do yourself. Sometimes that’s fun, but often it’s just tedious housekeeping.

Oh it’s full already? Ok, when I send out a new build in the next few days I’ll up the limit again. I didn’t realise it’d already maxed out!

Yeah unfortunately that’s a limitation of all the Place database services (Google Maps, Mapbox, Foursquare, etc). They’re varying degrees of good to great for city locations, but the further you get from urban centres the worse the data gets. That’s just how it is, unfortunately.

Google Maps (that Arc Timeline uses / falls back to - remember to tap that “Search Google Places” at the bottom) has the most comprehensive places database, but in many cases it still feels far from good enough. Foursquare’s database used to be great 5+ years ago, but it’s since slipped away and is no longer a leader.

Yep! The “Arc Family” of apps are my lifeblood - they’re what I spend almost every day working on, and have done for the past decade or so! And they’re not going away. Arc Editor is the next generation of it, all fresh and new and ready for all the latest technologies and techniques, so that it doesn’t become one of those ageing apps that fades into obscurity due to getting too old and crufty. I use these apps myself every day - they’re not just my job, they’re also integrally useful to me personally. So they’re definitely going to live on for a long time :blush:

Marketing really isn’t something I’m good at :smirking_face: Though it’s interesting that in the last year I’ve heard more and more of people having Arc recommended by ChatGPT and other AIs! I guess the AIs have learnt about it, so now they know it’s the right kind of app for certain use cases, and they know to recommend it. Which is great for making up for my marketing weaknesses :joy:

35

Oh, one note on the adventurous lifestyle: I do a lot of cycle touring around the world, going to new places the app hasn’t seen before. So while it doesn’t recognise those new places on the first day, it does often realise “ok so this is all new, but I do recognise what looks like cycling”. So it’ll learn some patterns well like that, even if it doesn’t know the actual new places yet.

So it does still learn overall patterns (like I never drive, I only walk, hike, cycle, etc), and learns how to recognise them. But when there’s new places it’ll still struggle. “Is he at this nearby cafe? Or this bus stop? I’ve got no clue - he’s never been here before”.

36

Wow. Can’t imagine people using Arc Editor only. For me it’s still significantly worse than Arc Timeline at recording underground train trips. It seems to have a bad habit of grouping the underground train trips into Visit items, despite in the individual segment view the journey is noted as Metro. I think Arc Editor is just less smart at such trips compared to Arc Timeline.

37

Heh. I wouldn’t say less smart, because I think both apps are incredibly dumb about how they deal with the low data / no data situation of train trips :joy:

It’s a difficult problem, but I think in their current states both Editor and Timeline do much worse than they could be doing. And I still need to set aside some time for improving that! I’ve been putting it off for literally years.

The problem is every time I notice it I’m on a train. It’s not like I can say “Ah ha! I see the nature of the problem. I’ll open up my laptop and fix it now”. At best I note down an observation about what happened, note the time and trip, and plan to get back to it later.

But really for that kind of testing and fixing it’s ideal to be doing it right there when you’re recording the data. Like even ideally be looking at the full debug data in real time while on the train - phone plugged in to laptop and Xcode. Which I did do for one testing session many years ago.

Sigh. I’ll get back to it eventually. One of those eternal “I know what needs to be done, it’s just going to be superbly fiddly and awkward to do” situations.

38

I’m not sure what to think of such yet it also relates to my own use and perhaps others of other visits that may sometimes be a mix of sometimes one visit or multiple ones with walking or auto. If that makes any sense.

Would such be of use. Selecting multiple items and then saying this is one visit or one transport interval?

Of another subject : mis-assigned visits that mess up confirmations mentioned elsewhere that i’ve been trying to visit. Does place data such as address help at all to perhaps help in anyway to maybe auto-identify or highlight such? Large areas such as parks, malls or other not sure but something else such as multiple adjacent places could such help determine that indeed it isn’t a large area like a park but something possibly incorrectly identified.

39

Oh yes personally I would love the ability to multi-select a contiguous part of segments in the Individual Segments view and change their type all at once. If this becomes easy to do in the UI, it’s actually less tedious for me to fix underground train trips even if Arc doesn’t improve on the recording front.

40

I experienced a new bug in beta 2 today: I was trying to change a visit into a metro but then I got a black screen in the view that should be showing a list of places and a button to change individual segments. Also the map on the top wasn’t loading at all and it was only showing a green dot.

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