Hi everyone! So a little background first:
Arc Editor is a ground up rebuild of Arc Timeline app, and also the underlying recording engine called LocoKit. The reason for doing this is to get rid of the almost decade of cruft that’s built up in the Arc Timeline app and underlying LocoKit. Over the years the codebase has become more complex, and sometimes more challenging to work with, which has lead to more bugs, and more mysterious behaviours. As new versions of iOS arrive, the “best practice” techniques and tools have changed, and Arc has become layered with generations of those, feeding into that growing complexity and potential for things to break or go weird.
So in comes LocoKit2 and Arc Timeline Editor! Everything fresh and new, all shiny and clean and simple and easy to maintain and build on top of. Yay!
So far Arc Editor has the daily timeline view and timeline editing views all built out, largely complete. But other parts of the app are either missing entirely, or in the very early stages of development.
Timeline view doesn’t properly show weekly, monthly, or yearly views yet. Overview tab has been replaced with a Places tab, for gathering statistics about places you’ve been over the chosen time periods. The old Overview functionality is intended to be rolled into the timeline tab.
The Activity tab is partially built, but some of it is fake data, standing in as placeholders until the job of building it all out is done. It also has a lot of weird quirks, due to being quite incomplete code.
The Settings tab is currently a dumping ground for various debug tools and views, useful for the private and public beta periods. Over time I’ll flesh it out with more sensible stuff, like in Arc Timeline app. Though all those debug views, this time I’ll keep those in instead of hiding them. Lots of people find that stuff useful or interesting!
For feedback and testing: basically the goal is to get feedback on anything you find missing but important, or present but broken (and also important). Anything you want to do in the app that you either find doesn’t exist yet or isn’t complete enough to do. Anything you find that looks like it’s meant to be finished but is acting weird or poorly. That kind of thing!
I’ll be prioritising work based on the feedback from the public beta. So if there’s something you care about and it’s not there, or it’s there but kinda broken or incomplete, that’s important stuff to know, and I’ll focus on filling in those gaps first.
Now for how to get started with it: On the Settings tab at the bottom there’s a Database section. Open that up and choose “Old LocoKit database import”. That will start the import from your Arc Timeline app data. It’ll take 30-60 minutes or so (mine took 35 mins on my 15 Pro). You’ll probably want your phone plugged in during that time.
Once that’s done, all your Arc Timeline data will be in, and you’ll be able to browse around it in the timeline views and edit it as normal. You’ll want to keep both apps installed and running. Arc Editor isn’t finished enough yet to quite take over - there’s a bunch of things missing that you’ll probably still want, so you’ll want Arc Timeline around for a while yet.
The two apps record to separate databases, so they don’t share the recording role like Arc Timeline and Arc Recorder do. Eventually once things are far enough along, Arc Recorder will be changed to act as a backup for Arc Editor instead of old Arc Timeline. But for now Arc Timeline and Arc Recorder live in their world, and Arc Editor off in its own separate world / database.
Arc Editor doesn’t interfere with or interact with Arc Timeline at all. So there’s no risk involved in installing it. It’s siloed off in its own space.
Alright, time for the link!
The beta group is limited to a small number of people at the moment. But as long as nothing goes wrong in the first couple of days I’ll expand it out to a much higher limit over the following days. And I’ll likely be shipping updates quite frequently, based on the feedback here.