Arc Editor public beta 20

1.0 (build 43), 2026-03-17 13:21 (Bali)

New

  • Added subscription and purchase system

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed activity type model updates stalling indefinitely when many models need updating simultaneously (e.g., after a flight covering many geographic regions), by limiting concurrent model updates (BIG-352)
  • Fixed app hanging when scanning for available backups during onboarding, by moving file system operations off the main thread (BIG-346)
  • Fixed app hanging when opening context menus on timeline items, caused by a synchronous system check for installed map apps (BIG-349)
  • Fixed crash when viewing altitude charts for locations below sea level (BIG-350)
  • Fixed crash when saving a place edit in certain navigation states (BIG-351)
  • Fixed navigation not working after saving a new private place created from search results (BIG-354)

Thank you, I had many hangs lately, hopefully fixed now.

Sietse

1 Like

I’ve been ignoring the betas but now I fancy a bit of excitement :wink:. How exciting is it likely to be? Is there a significant risk of data loss? Is there a summary somewhere of how the different apps relate to each other and how the new app changes things?

Thanks in anticipation

1 Like

No rush because I appreciate the work being done as-is, but do you have a sense of when you’ll have the activity maps working?

Not a huge deal but I like to occasionally look at my progress for the year on the map and the place dots can obscure some interesting stuff at some zoom levels. On the attached picture I’ve spent some time walking/biking at various places along the train line, but since I spend so much time at different stations on the line, it’s mostly obscured at a glance by the places.

Really cool visual most of the time, but sometimes I just like to see how I’ve been moving and nothing else

1 Like

Hi @gsoper!

For a full rundown of how Arc Editor relates to Arc Timeline, the initial forum thread goes into detail: First public beta for Arc Editor!

Though the short version is: There’s zero risk, zero data loss potential, and the new app is better than the old app in almost all ways. It’s also very close to being final - I’m aiming to ship it to the App Store proper ideally before the end of this month.

The new app doesn’t yet have all of the features of the old app - I’m adding them back in in priority order of which ones people mention they’re missing the most. But it’s got enough in there now to be worth switching to entirely. At this point I basically only keep the old app around because it’s my job. Otherwise I’d have deleted it already :joy: The new app is so much better!

Oh, though definitely keep the old app around for a little while at least. There’s no need to rush to deleting it or turning it off. The two will run happily side by side - they record to separate databases.

1 Like

Now that you’ve asked, I’ll up the priority of that task :joy: I’m prioritising adding features from the old app based on how often they get asked for.

Though for what you’re asking… I’m thinking the old per-activity map views in the old app aren’t necessarily exactly right. I mean, they’d do the job, but the fact that they’re only per-activity is a bit limiting.

So I’m almost thinking a better fit would be the feature idea of … map toggles. Like, when the content sheet is slid down there could be some tools/toggles visible on the map that let you turn on and off different kinds of map content, to filter the view to just the kinds of things you want to see.

I’ll make sure I’ve got the right tasks filed in the task tracking system, so that I’m tracking all this and prioritising. But yeah for the per-activity views, I’m loosely thinking those should be in the next major update, so v1.1. And the map toggles feature idea… I’d like to get that into 1.1 also, but we’ll have to see how things play out.

The subscription requirement seems live? Is that correct. I do want to support you, but don’t want to sign up for a second $70 per year.

I might have missed it, bit does Arc Editor have the merge locations function of Arc Timeline?

I’ve taken the plunge and it’s gone well! My only observation so far of missing something is that it doesn’t tell you the ā€˜source’ of a place, for example Google or Squarespace. Unless I’m missing something… I like to ensure frequently visited places are from Google, I’m not really sure why I do that!

1 Like

I really like that map toggle idea. Another super minor thing for me, but with that, if you’d be able to toggle certain activities, it would solve the messy airplane line aesthetic.

1 Like

G’day Matt

This update sounds like you fixed a lot of the hang issues; thank you!

I haven’t managed to reproduce the full UI hang with this build! So that’s definite progress.

But when I update a big activity (like, as you say, a long flight), it still kicks off a ton of simultaneous updates that effectively prevent most of the UI from working.

At the moment I have 191 active (3 timeline, 188 activityTypes) running for 10+ minutes, and thus most of the UI doesn’t work (e.g. maps are blank, activity types can’t be selected, etc.)

Hi @elucubrator! No need to worry. The ā€œpurchasesā€ in the TestFlight builds are fake - all done in the ā€œApp Store sandboxā€, so no real money is involved.

Also the subscriptions for the old app are meant to carry over to the new. No separate purchases or subscriptions required. But it looks like we’ve just spotted a bug in that carry over, which will need fixing.

But yeah, regardless of that bug, you can just tap through to do a fake lifetime purchase in the TestFlight build and it’ll stop bugging you, and no money will be spent :+1:t3:

Are you meaning the Place Merge feature? For when there’s things like ā€œBob’s Cafeā€ and ā€œBobs Cafeā€ and they’re the same thing but listed separately?

If so, not yet! But now that you’ve asked I’ll up the priority of that feature request. I think it’s slated to land in v1.1, so the first major update after the initial v1.0 release (which is targeted for before the end of this month).

Ah yeah, I think you’re right - it’s not showing the sources. I’ll note that down to get that shown somewhere!

Hm. That’s… weird. The fix in the last build was to throttle concurrent model updates to a max of 3. So almost all of those 188 must be… classification tasks, presumably. Curious.

Classification tasks are also deduplicated, so… it must be a lot of different classifications. I would’ve thought that’d be a quite rare situation to get into, but clearly you got into it! So it’s not impossible, and possibly easier to get to than I thought.

Did you happen to notice what kinds of activityTypes operations they were? Although if I recall right, there is only two: model updates, and classification. But maybe I’m forgetting some others. I’d better check…

The activity types are all the same except the very last one: