Yes I know that I can download arc mini but I don’t see the point like what’s the difference. Can we just have dark mode on arc so that when it’s midnight and I want to see what happened that day I’m not blinded by how bright it is???
In one of the next updates (probably not the next one, but one soon after) I’m going to add some Dark Mode support, by dimming the background colour from white to something a bit softer.
Any idea of when the next update will land?
And clues on what delights you have in store!
Should be before the end of the month. The main new feature is finished, so I’m just doing some other less interesting bits of housekeeping before sending the release out.
The main new feature is the ability to import recorded workouts from Health, if those workouts contain location data, for example walking/running/etc recorded with a wearable like the Apple Watch.
So for example if you go for daily runs and record the runs with a watch while leaving your phone at home, you’ll be able to import those into Arc, and see them in the timeline and on the map, the same as data recorded directly by Arc.
You can use one of the official map box themes it’ll go a long way for dark mode even without an official implementations
I really like using the following custom map box
mapbox://styles/mapbox/dark-v9
That’s cool! And how can I get more Mapbox style links?
mapbox has a list of defaults which I pulled that from
That one specifically was the mapbox dark theme
If you want more customization, you can also make your own theme if you make a mapbox account, I did it for myself a while ago for ARC since I wanted a darker map and couldnt find the default theme link, but I don’t remember exactly how I did it do you’d have to play around yourself
Nice tip @Hutima! Thanks
I’m also planning to it possible to specify separate custom map style URLs for Dark Mode and Light Mode, so what when you switch between Light and Dark Arc will also switch between your preferred light and dark Mapbox styles.
I think someone else has also asked for the option to add a list of custom style URLs, so that it’s possible to easily switch between a few favourite styles without having to paste their URLs in each time. Not sure if I’ll get that into the same Arc update, but hopefully I can get it done while I’m fiddling with that same code for Dark Mode.
I really like the satellite map which I just found in the map settings (instead of dark map after the update today)! …but I can’t find support for dark mode like in Arc mini (for the rest of the app beside the map), dark mode like in Arc Mini would be much appreciated!
Today’s update adds full Dark Mode support. It doesn’t use the typical white-text-on-dark-background style that most dark modes do. It instead uses an off-white background (#EDEAE0) instead of the Light Mode’s pure white background.
I’m disappointed with the way Dark Mode has been implemented. It is not like what Dark Mode is in every other iOS app. I was hoping it would look more like the Dark Mode in Arc Mini. More options to customize the Dark Mode would be nice, some of us want it really dark.
@MattSuda, I have done Dark Mode this way so that I can get it shipped.
Building a Dark Mode that is light-text-on-dark-background requires a complete UI redesign, with every element in the app being changed, and the related UI code modified or rewritten. It’s a lot more work, and takes a lot longer.
Doing it this way meant that I mostly only had to switch out the background colour and switch the map style. It meant I could get Dark Mode support built and shipped in less than a month.
Is it ideal? For many people, probably not. But it does make the UI less intensely bright in dark environments, and allow for setting different custom map styles for Light and Dark Mode. So it is at the very least a step forward.
It also allows me to do it as an iterative process, with this step laying the foundations for a potential later light-text-on-dark-background version. There’s now functionality for handling different map styles in light and dark mode, for example.
I could have held back this step and not shipped it, to continue leaving people with no Dark Mode support at all, until I eventually got time to finish a full light-on-dark version. But ultimately I decided it was better to ship something now than to continue delaying Dark Mode support indefinitely.
@matt Thanks for the explanation! That makes sense.
I agree that releasing this version of Dark Mode is the right move until more work can potentially be done for a full Dark Mode theme.
Looking forward to more updates in the future!
(Just as a fun fact: you could actually turn on in the iOS Accessibility settings a Per-App Setting for Arc app to have smart invert turned on for it, which mostly inverts the app UI and its elements in a “smart” way, for example it isn’t supposed to invert photos.
However some things might seem weird or bad, iOS seems to be not handling correctly the colours of the status bar above the app for example which could result in unreadable status bars (black or white text/icon on the same coloured black or white background, and screenshots might be inverted compared to what you actually see on the screen sometimes so it’s a bit buggy, especially in combination with real dark mode and also per-app settings at the same time. (At least on iOS 15 that was the case not sure about iOS 16.)
But that’s the closest thing to turn a completely light/white app dark/black if it doesn’t support dark mode I think. You could use smart invert all the time without the per-app setting as well, and I think it wouldn’t do anything to the app if there is an actual dark mode support and it is already dark.
However it seems like that with the current Arc app dark mode smart invert doesn’t do anything with it because of the dark mode support when dark mode is enabled, while if you turn off dark mode, it does invert the white UI of the real light mode Arc app to black. So in this case, smart invert doesn’t invert Arc app’s dark mode when you use everything in dark mode, but in light mode it would turn everything dark, as well as the light mode Arc app. I guess you can’t turn off dark mode only for Arc app currently manually to instead use smart invert per-app setting and light mode Arc app UI (but smart inverted) when everything else is just in normal dark mode.
This smart invert per-app setting workaround probably would work much better if you could just set up the app to always be in light mode regardless of the system dark mode setting and while the system is in dark mode have only the light mode Arc app smart inverted with pre-app setting.)
By the way I wanted to suggest a setting to be added eariler to be able to choose Arc app’s UI mode manually. Other third party apps give you the option to set that specific app manually to always dark, always light, or automatic (which is the only current option, that follows the system setting.)
I recommend submitting that on Arc’s Changemap site as a feature request. If there’s enough interest I’d be happy to add it!