Lately whenever I’ve had data gaps that start and end in the same location, the app has been adding 30 seconds of an activity to the end of the data gap. Ideally, I’d expect these to auto-consolidate as they start and end in the same place. It’s also worth noting that my phone was stationary in all these examples.
Figured I’d report it on the off-chance it’s not yet known behaviour!
Yeah that’s not very pretty! You’d expect it to automatically clean those up. Odd that it hasn’t.
My usual pattern is to go into the data gap item and set its type to “stationary”. That should convert it to a Visit type item and then result in it being merged in.
If that doesn’t work… I’m not sure what to try next…
To be honest I hardly use Arc Timeline anymore, so my instincts on how to deal with its timeline processing quirks are slipping away! I spend almost all my time checking Arc Editor’s timelines these days, because it’s just so much better. And hopefully I’ll have the first public beta of that live in the next few days!
Arc Editor doesn’t have any of these weird timeline processing quirks. And it records better quality data too, so there’s less mess to clean up overall. But yeah, that means I’m starting to forget how to deal with old Arc Timeline’s quirks. Which makes me not super helpful in this case 
Looking forward to it 
Are you planning on publishing Arc Editor as an update to Arc Timeline or as a whole new standalone app?
It’ll be a separate app in the App Store.
It’s a complete ground-up rewrite, with new database schema etc, and requires an import from the old app’s database (which takes about 35 mins for mine!)
It also won’t initially have all of Arc Timeline’s features, so it’s not a drop in replacement. It does have some new features that Arc Timeline doesn’t have (calendar sync, uh … several others that I’m forgetting). But yeah, until it’s got feature parity with the old app I can’t really treat it as a drop in replacement.
So during that transition period there’ll be the choice of moving over completely to Arc Editor or continuing to run both of them. With both of them recording to their own separate databases - not ideal, but having them both write to the same database/timeline just wasn’t going to be possible in the end.
At the moment I’m playing whack-a-mole with it, in the sense that every time there’s a feature missing that Arc Timeline has but Arc Editor doesn’t have, I prioritise adding it. But once the public beta is out there’ll be more people saying “hey, it’s no use until it has Thing!”, so that’ll help to prioritise the work to better suit all of us instead of just my own whims.
Makes sense. Without derailing the thread too much do you have plans to move over “lifetime” purchases to the new one?
Yep! Lifetime purchases cover the whole “Arc Family” of apps, ie Arc Timeline, Arc Recorder, and soon Arc Editor.
In principle I think it should cover any “location timeline” apps that sensibly fit into the Arc Family. Though I don’t have any planned yet. But if for example there were a timeline viewing app for iPad or Mac or some such, that should fall under the same umbrella too.
