I have a large orange circle on my map which is a named location. The circle is about 1.5 km in diameter and it’s in the city so every time I breathe in the general direction of the city, the app tags me as going to that location.
Even when I’m not even in the circle, it seems to tag me.
I’ve been to that named location exactly once, on the night I bought the lifetime subscription, and haven’t been back. I’ve deleted every incorrect instance of the named location when it appears in my list.
But it still appears.
I’m not sure whether to keep deleting it as a location, or to try something else. The first option isn’t doing anything so other suggestions are welcomed.
Hmm. Well, the massive orange circle is definitely due to one or more visit being incorrectly assigned to that place. But if you’ve already gone back and fixed every instance of a visit being incorrectly assigned to it, then the fact that the massive orange circle still exists will be due to the daily scheduled background task “update Place models” is overdue, and hasn’t updated that place’s model yet.
Given you’re on the beta builds at the moment, I can send you a new beta build that (amongst other things) improves the speed of updating the place models. I’ll do that now!
Aside: If you ever get another situation like this, where a place has got some incorrectly assigned visits, messing up its stats/location/size/etc, there’s a new feature added a release or two back that’s helpful for finding this incorrect assignments:
Find a visit to the problem place, and tap into the visit’s details view
Scroll down to “Total visits” under “Place statistics”, and go into that
As you scroll down the list, the map will update to show the visible visits on the map
From there, you can easily spot visit circles that are clearly not in the right place, and can then tap through and fix them
You can also go into “Common duration”, “Common arrival”, or “Common leaving”, to find visits that have clearly inappropriate arrival/leaving times or durations. For example if a visit to my home has incorrectly been assigned to the nearby 7-Eleven, I can do to the Common Durations view, then see a bar on the graph that’s clearly for a much too long duration (I never stay at 7-11 for more than a few minutes), tap on that bar, then tap through to the visits list for that bar.
Oh, I should note that when you install the new beta build (I just sent it through on TestFlight now) you’ll temporarily see worse activity type classification results. Like, it might for a day get worse at detecting walking/etc.
The reason for that is the new build now has the new Core ML classification system properly integrated with the old system, to get the best of both systems, but that integration needs to recreate the Core ML models on your phone.
It should come right within a day, if all is working correctly!
Hi @matt I’ve previously been deleting the wrong visits though that doesn’t seem to be working quite as expected.
I was tagged as going to that place yesterday so I looked at the place visits and it says the total visits is 13 (5 days). However, when I click that, I can see there are actually 31 visits spread over 14 different days.
I had previously deleted all except the correct single instance of going to that location, but more visits have subsequently appeared on dates that are retrospective (in addition to seeing new visits being added in more recent days).
By deleted, do you mean tapping the Delete button? If so, yeah that won’t have the desired effect.
In Arc there’s not really any concept of deleting things. Nothing gets deleted from the database (except some excess data during Sleep Mode, to avoid bloating the database too much).
When you delete a visit, what happens is all of its data gets merged into the adjacent timeline items. So for example if there’s “walking → Cafe → walking” and you delete the cafe visit, it will get merged into the surrounding walking items such that there’s one big walking item, with the visit’s data mingled within. That’s probably not the outcome you want.
What you instead will want to do is look at the visit and correct its place assignment. For example if it’s been assigned as a visit to Cafe and really you were at 7-Eleven, then you should edit the visit to assign it to 7-Eleven.
Though if the visit is just something brief, for example getting stuck in traffic for a few minutes, and you actually do want it merged into the surrounding “car” items, then tapping Delete on it will get the desired result.
Hm. That sounds like the Place model updates are backlogged. You should only really see those numbers mismatching by one or two (ie a single day’s data, pending the Place model getting updated overnight).
Luckily you can actually check for this, because you’re on a private beta build! Go to the Settings tab then down to System Debug Info, then scroll down to the bottom where you’ll see “placeModelUpdates”. It should say on the right of that row how overdue the task is. If it’s less than a day or two overdue that’s fine, but I’m suspecting it’s overdue by quite a few days, which would suggest a problem (or at least a backlog, that iOS isn’t allowing Arc to catch up on).
Oh, but yes, you do want to go through that list of all visits to that place, and correct them one by one, to fix the problem! If there’s 31 visits assigned to the place, but you’ve really only ever been there once, then you’ll want to go through and correct 30 of those visits, assigning them to whichever place you really were at.
I’ve been deleting them only, thinking that would eliminate it as a place. I usually can see only the circle and it’s not easy to work out where I really was. I don’t see anything else on the map that I can see to indicate the location of where I was at the time that the incorrect named place has been indicated, and I don’t necessarily remember where I was for 10 mins on a date in the past.
I will now try re-naming them as best I can. Often the place that I went is not in the list by default or by searching so I’ll just add street addresses.
I know that feeling well. It’s a big reason why I created Arc App! I have quite significant memory problems, so depend on Arc quite heavily for recalling what happened even just today, let alone a week or month ago. It certainly makes it a struggle to fix old data that’s been misclassified!
For very brief visits (eg only a few minutes) that have been assigned to the wrong place, it’s fine to outright delete them. That’s not going to mess up your data much, and it could easily be that it was just a brief stop in traffic, or pause during a walk, or some such. So having that visit merged into the surrounding trip items is no big deal.
It’s really just the visits of reasonable length that you’ll want to correct the place assignment of, rather than delete outright.
Because I use my main phone for development and testing of things like the backups system, I’ve periodically lost all of my place assignments due to accidents during backup system development. So as a result I’ve ended up with some visits left over that I could never figure out the correct place assignment for. Things where I have absolutely no memory and also no useful context to deduce from.
For those visits I’ve taken to using a different trick, to avoid having them assigned to an incorrect place and messing up the orange circle: I give the visit a custom “one time visit title”, usually some title like “Nope, no idea what this place was” That means the visit won’t be messing up the place data, and it’s also easy to spot in the timeline view as a mystery, rather than it remaining as a misleading mistake.
In case you haven’t used custom titles yet, you can find them in the visit’s Edit view, at the top, tap “More options”, then “Set a one time visit title”.
I think what @moo meant is that you actually can’t see the location of the recorded data on the map next to the huge orange circle in the visit details view. I have this issue with one location that keeps coming up repeatedly with new stops and places being associated with it automatically. I haven’t really tried to sort this issue out yet with my own timeline. But I think the recorded data and its location is actually presented on the map, it’s just hard to see since most of the time it’s around or next to the orange circle, but very small, while the orange circle can be huge. So the map automatically zooms out so much to show the whole orange circle and the actual data as well that you don’t notice the actual data on the map. (Usually the orange circle is in view, but not centered in these cases so that’s an indicator for where to look for the miniature actual recorded data on the map next to the orange circle.) I think this is the conclusion of my experience with this big orange circle thing for now.
Probably the map UI shouldn’t prioritize showing the whole orange circle on the map in view instead of the actual recorded data and its area.
Although it was mentioned earlier in different topics, I still think it would be useful to be able to switch between different place name sources/lists and have alternatives, or merge different sources into one list in a smart way in the UI. (For example showing all close place names from different sources sorted by distance/relevancy in one list while indicating the different sources for each place name or being able to filter them based on source/choose in the settings which source(s) to use.)
Yes, that’s the issue. I know the circle is wrong but I can’t find what’s right - I have to zoom in and that takes me away from the interface where I can choose the right location, so I then need to move around and find the name of the true location, remember it, and then restart the process of going back to the big circle to then correct it
Unfortunately the “best” zoom level is very much context dependent. The app can’t know what zoom level to show, because the contextual information you need to identify it is only known to you, not the app. It might be better to zoom in more, or to zoom out, but that’s not something the app can figure out on its own (or at least I haven’t found a clear set of heuristics for determining it yet).
So we’re stuck with sometimes having to tap on the map and zoom/pan around, to figure out what’s going on
Two years later and I’ve never really resolved this to my satisfaction. It probably doesn’t help there’s a big parkland in it which all gets the same name, but it’s sucks to be anywhere in a 4km diameter circle and getting the same suggested location.
In the upcoming Arc Editor app I’ve rebuilt the Places scoring/classification system. And I’m hopeful that I’ve improved this kind of situation! Though it will take real world testing to know for sure.
But the new system is … more resilient? Less stupid? More refined? Not sure of the right adjective. But basically it’s better code and better maths. So there’s a some hope that this particular kind of nonsense will disappear once migrated to Arc Editor.
I’m still not sure when I’ll have Arc Editor in beta though. I’ve ported over a whole lot of the UI so far, and it’s feeling like an 80-90% complete app. Though there’s still some essential views/features missing before it’d make sense to use it as a drop in replacement for Arc Timeline for editing and viewing timeline data. And there’s a handful of performance/efficiency issues I need to work through too, before I’d be happy having it run on everyone’s phones.
That means the visit won’t be messing up the place data, and it’s also easy to spot in the timeline view as a mystery, rather than it remaining as a misleading mistake.
