I wanted to export a long timeline of a busy day with lots of activity to make an archive record.
Long timeline exports as empty PNG picture.
I managed to successfully export the PNG size of 1179 x 8100. Then I went out again and one more trip, stay, trip and back home was aded to timeline. When I wanted to Export timeline as Image again, I got a blank picture.
Please check if you can export longer timelines. I don’t mind if you split them or make a PDF or multi page PDF. I would save that PDF as a file or send it to Day One Journal.
Yeah this has been a bug for literally years It’s a bug in iOS itself, though that doesn’t help with getting it fixed.
Basically the problem is that Arc is asking iOS “create an image of this view” and iOS comes back with the image data. Except if the view is too big in some way (not necessarily in pixels, but perhaps if there’s lots of image thumbnails in the timeline), iOS comes back with a blank image. It doesn’t say “oops, I couldn’t do that!” or some other error, it just acts like it succeeded, but provides a blank image (albeit with the correct pixel dimensions).
That leaves Arc in a difficult position, because Arc doesn’t know that it’s been handed a dud. From Arc’s perspective it looks like a success.
So what I’ll have to do is proactively have Arc request the images in small chunks somehow, then stitch them together. That adds quite a lot of complexity to a feature that otherwise is very simple. So it’s something that I’ve been putting off doing for a long time. But yeah, it really does need to get fixed.
I’ve bumped the todo up in my lists, and will hopefully get a chance to have another attempt at it soon.
For anyone else with this issue, I’ve started using the app Tailor (iOS, don’t know about Android) to get my Arc timeline screenshots. It has the bonus of including the map and the date, and you can immediately see if it worked or not. It’s been working well despite middling reviews on the App Store.
If apple did have a bug for over 3 years. Then developer should actually try to find another way or library to do the screenshot. All other apps that have this function seems works well, means there definitely a lot of ways to export a screenshot
@o1x Apple’s OSes have thousands of bugs that have existed for 10+ years. All software is shipped with long lists of known bugs. If the releases were held off until all known bugs were fixed it would be impossible to ship anything ever. Instead difficult decisions have to be made about which bugs must be fixed before release (ie “release blockers”) and which can wait.
As to this specific iOS / UIKit bug, I already know how to work around it. The catch is that the current code is almost literally a single line (ask a UIView object to output a Data object that contains its bitmap image data) but the alternative that works around the bug would be potentially hundreds of lines of code. It would be orders of magnitude more complex, which means putting in a big chunk of time to build it, when there’s only a handful of Arc users who have ever noticed the bug and mentioned it.
Just like iOS (and macOS every other software product) Arc has a long list of known bugs, and each one has to be prioritised based on how much impact it has on how many people, and also how much resources it would use to fix it. If the bug does significant damage and/or affects a large number of people, then it needs to be fixed urgently, regardless of how much time it would take. But if it does little or no damage and affects very few people, then it’s not worth prioritising it unless the fix is simple and quick.
In this case: The bug does little damage (other than causing justifiable annoyance) and has been noticed by very few people, but the fix would take a disproportionately large amount of time and add considerable complexity to the code. It fails the test. I don’t like that - it’s annoyed me for years - but that’s life.
That’s also why I say to speak up / vote in the polls I post here and on Changemap.
It’s a bug in iOS itself, though that doesn’t help with getting it fixed.