I love Arc but my main frustration is that I have to manually search for all the places I visit. A few days later, I’ve often forgotten the name of the place I’ve visited.
I remember in Moves it used to give me a list of nearby places when I viewed the unknown place.
I recall seeing in a past post that you don’t do that because the Google Places API is too expensive. I’d be very willing to pay for a more expensive subscription that would automatically look up places names without me having to search.
Good news: most of what you’re describing is already in the app.
When you open a visit for editing (tap the visit then Edit, or long press it in the timeline and choose “Edit visit”), the list that appears immediately is exactly that — nearby places, ranked by how likely each one is to be the right match. No typing needed. It includes your own places plus venues already known for that area. If the right one isn’t in that first list, typing just the first few letters fills in fresh matching venues nearby, so you only need to recognise the name, not remember it.
And Arc learns as you go: once you’ve assigned a place, later visits there get assigned automatically. So the manual effort is mostly just for first visits somewhere new, and it reduces over time.
On the cost side, the venue lookup pricing shapes when fresh lookups happen (they run when you search, rather than for every visit viewed), but the nearby-suggestions interaction you remember from Moves is there today.
Ah — to clarify how those two parts fit together: the instant list only shows places Arc already knows about within a couple of kilometres — your own confirmed places, plus venues it learned during previous searches. Searching is how Arc learns venues it doesn’t know yet: type a name (or even just “cafe” or “hotel”), pick the right result, and from then on that place shows up in the instant list for future visits nearby. So an empty list at a spot you haven’t assigned places around before is expected — it fills in as you use it, and quickly: the first search at any location teaches it the neighbourhood.
Two questions to make sure nothing’s actually broken though:
When you do type a search there, do results appear?
Is this spot in your usual area, or somewhere newer to you? (At home turf the list should already have your regulars; somewhere new, starting empty is normal.)
Somewhere new. In places I usually am it correctly shows existing places.
The reason I would like it to do the search is because it’s the new places that I can’t remember the name of. Particularly when traveling and I’m visiting 10 new places, or whatever.
@paperclip Makes sense, and the travel case is a real one — that’s exactly when the names are hardest to remember.
The reason Arc doesn’t auto-suggest names for places it doesn’t know yet: accuracy. In a dense area there can be dozens of venues within GPS error of where you stopped, and Arc guessing between them would pick wrong a lot. A wrong name silently baked into your timeline is worse than a blank one, so for unknown places Arc asks for that one search-and-tap from you, and only auto-fills once it actually knows the spot.
One travel tip that helps more than it sounds: each search primes Arc with matching venues around that area — search “cafe” once and the nearby cafes start showing up in the instant list for later stops. And it all works best as-you-go: a quick minute of assigning places at the end of each day, while they’re still fresh, is a couple of taps each — much easier than a week’s worth of archaeology after you get home.