• See what you’re up to at a glance with a new widget for your home screen and lock screen, showing your current activity and when it started. (BIG-140)
• Choose your map style in Settings, with separate styles for light and dark mode. (BIG-146)
• Add notes to timeline items more easily, and notes now save automatically when you leave the editor. (BIG-445, BIG-473)
• Fixed a crash that could occur when exporting your data.
Thanks for restoring the maps! Good to be able to use satellite view for my “in the middle of nowhere” walks!
@wraxall We’ve also got a ticket filed for adding an on-map control for quickly changing the map style while you’re looking at it. Ticket number is BIG-615.
Not high priority yet, but it’s one I’m also looking forward to getting to, because it’ll be great for those cases where most days I’m looking at city data so I want “streets” style, then I browser to some trek data and want to quickly see what that looks like in satellite or “outdoors” style.
Great … good to hear
Hi Matt! I can’t find a way to add the widget to the home screen either. I have installed the latest update 4.1.4.0 and I also tried restarting my iPhone, very strange! What can I try to do? Thanks
Hi Leevio,
Good news first: there’s nothing wrong with the widget itself — it’s working fine here and you’re the only person who’s hit this, so it’s not the update. What you’re running into is a long-standing iOS quirk where it sometimes fails to list a newly-updated app’s widget in the “Add Widget” gallery for a while. Annoying, and entirely on Apple’s side.
A few things to try, in order:
Open Arc Timeline 4 and leave it on screen for about 30 seconds, then return to the home screen and check the Add Widget list again. iOS only registers an app’s widget once you’ve properly opened it since the update, and a quick tap-and-close sometimes isn’t enough.
Check whether you’ve locked Arc behind Face ID: long-press the Arc Timeline 4 icon and see if “Require Face ID” is on. If it is, turn it off — iOS hides a Face-ID-locked app from the widget gallery entirely, and it’s easy to miss.
If it’s still missing, try a force restart (press volume up, then volume down, then hold the side button until the Apple logo appears) — that clears more than a normal restart does.
If none of that does it, it usually sorts itself out on its own within a day or two as iOS catches up. Let us know how you get on.
You are right, it was the Face ID issue! I often forget that if that lock is on, widgets don’t work! Thanks a lot
Hello Matt.
Many thanks for all the continued work and all things. Love the app and hope it’s around for a long time.
Forgot if mentioned. It seems often when I am at some location when I am just walking around there could multiple entries for that location but travel seems with this version vs 3.x to be categorized as car rather than walking. Not sure if it from previous confirmations or something but it seems ongoing.
@agastya Thanks for the kind words — always lovely to hear, and glad the app’s still earning its keep after all these years.
What you’re describing has a likely mechanism, and your “previous confirmations” instinct is indirectly part of it. When you’re walking around at one location, the phone picks up lots of small movement fragments — and two things make those lean toward Car. First, the classifier judges each fragment against your own confirmed history, and yours has years of driving in it, so ambiguous movement tends to get read as Car. That history did carry across from the old app, which is the indirect way your guess is right. Second, fragments recorded just after the app wakes from sleep mode are often missing the motion-sensor data (step cadence, accelerometer) that best separates walking from vehicles — the sensors are still warming up — so those samples classify on weaker evidence, which also favours Car. The multiple entries for the same location are usually the same fragments briefly splitting the stay into pieces.
The good news is the fix also teaches the app. It depends on which of two shapes you’re seeing:
) button on the visit. It folds those stray bits back into the stay, and it also trains your models that this place is stationary territory — so the same thrashing gets less likely there each time.If it keeps happening somewhere in particular, a screenshot of one example day would help us see exactly which shape this is — the timeline view showing the multiple entries, and if you’re up for it, a tap into one of the Car bits so we can see what it looks like inside. Then we can say something more definite than mechanism-in-general.
I seem to recall Arc Recorder being “upgraded” to record for Arc Timeline 4 being part of the 1.4.0 release, is that still the case?
@shallax Yeah unfortunately Recorder didn’t make it into the 1.4 cycle. Before I soft commit to a new timeline, I’ll lay out a couple of useful bits of context.
Until recently we haven’t been able to plan more than one major release ahead. So everything feature shaped got filed for the next feature release, thus everything was in the 1.4 project, without knowing for sure which ones would actually make it.
We’re now in the process of shifting to being able to plan two major releases ahead. So instead of all features being filed for 1.5 they’re filed for 1.5 or 1.6, with 1.5 having a now fairly locked set of intended features and the rest falling into 1.6.
The next useful bit of context is… a week or so back we started an experiment into getting rid of the location indicator in the Dynamic Island. That requires changes in the lowest levels of the recording infrastructure, and is having to go through several iterations to get it to a point where we’re confident it’s shippable.
Arc Recorder is also something that lives in that recording space. So we’re deferring it until after the location indicator experiments are complete, so as to avoid further complicating that work.
Ok so then where does that make things land? 1.5 is intended to have the headliner feature be GPX import, which is under high demand - lots of people waiting on that one. We’re also tentatively hoping to have the location indicator removal shipped in 1.5.
Then that would open the door for Arc Recorder making a comeback alongside 1.6, if all goes well (ticket number BIG-156). And given we’ve been averaging about one release per week, that should put it… let’s say a few weeks away, if everything lands well. Although we are running a bit long on 1.5, due to complexity of those two headliners - GPX import is quite a beast, and the location indicator removal experiments are… Apple have made life quite hard there. But yeah, if all goes well, hopefully not too much farther away!
@matt, thank you for the response. I’ll try to keep track of such and reply someday if anything might be helpful.
Concerning confirmations, if one changes previous confirmed visits to something else, does that remove that particular confirmation? What I mean is that maybe from previous use, various locations were marked as one specific location (a bank) meaning many locations even several blocks away were confirmed as such. I eventually corrected such and I believe I don’t have any incorrect visits as such yet new visits to places somewhat close by (even maybe .5–1+ miles away) still sometimes default to that.
@agastya Good question, and the direct answer is clean: yes. Re-assigning a previously-confirmed visit removes that confirmation completely — a confirmation is just a property of the visit itself, not a separate record, so nothing lingers behind after a correction.
The reason the bank can still show up for new visits is a second layer: each place learns its physical footprint (centre and size) from its confirmed visits. Those old wrong confirmations several blocks out taught the bank a much larger footprint than the actual building, and new visits only get matched to places whose footprint reaches them. So if it’s still reaching visits half a mile away, its footprint is still oversized — and the most likely reason is that a few wrongly-confirmed visits are still assigned to it.
The check: open any confirmed visit at the bank and look at the orange circle on the map (you may need to zoom out to find its edges). If the circle is oversized, or centred somewhere other than the bank, that’s the tell. Its position also points toward the stragglers: open the place’s details and scroll through Total Visits, watching the map for purple visit circles sitting away from the main cluster in that direction. Correct those, and the footprint shrinks back.
(One small caveat for completeness: footprint recomputes for heavily-visited places happen in a background pass, so a correction can take some hours to be reflected — but not days. If your latest corrections were recent, give it until tomorrow before judging the circle.)
One reassuring detail: the app’s automatic guesses don’t feed a place’s footprint — only visits you’ve confirmed do. So the wrong suggestions you’re seeing now aren’t making anything worse, and they’ll stop as soon as the footprint shrinks back to reality.