Hi Matt,
Could you tell us how you’re getting on with the new Arc Editor ? Is it coming soon ?
Siso
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Coming very very soon! I’m tempted to ship a public beta this week!
I should probably make a video demonstrating it. But a lot of the coolness doesn’t really come through until you use it - much better timeline processing, better data quality, more detailed data, no more crashes, everything happens faster and more reliably, a bunch of minor new features that people have been asking for for years, a handful of major new features people have been asking for, … it’s really cool!
Right now I’m working on getting the Activity tab functional, which I basically got done yesterday, but I want to tidy it up a little bit more before the public beta.
The Overview tab has been replaced by a new Places tab, that does monthly and yearly views of all the Places you’ve been to in the date ranges, counting numbers of days in individual countries and cities, and visualising it all on the map. I want to do a sort of “Fog of World” visualisation with that data too - that’ll be super cool.
The Timeline tab is the most fleshed out, with timeline editing being much more enjoyable and reliable and the timeline data being overall just much better. There’s lots of minor quality of life improvements in there - the kinds of little things people have asked for for years. But at this stage it’s still only daily timeline views - no weekly/monthly/yearly.
The old Overview tab, I’m going to merge that in to Timeline tab’s monthly view.
I think before doing the first public beta I should probably add the ability to import your existing Arc Timeline data. Otherwise it’s going to be a bit of a meh first experience. So I’m still deciding whether to keep finishing up the bits of missing functionality in each tab, or whether to add that import feature and ship a public beta sooner rather than later. It’s very much a vibes-based decision. When does it feel like it’s complete enough for people to start using?
In truth I use it far more than old Arc Timeline app myself now. It’s by far my preferred app of the two, even with all the missing features. And I think with the Activity tab being now almost ready to ship (albeit looking quite rough still - I’m still iterating on the updated design for it), that gets its functionality close enough to ready for most people. Which is why I’m toying with the idea of shipping something this week…
If I do ship a public beta this week, it’ll likely be on the weekend. I’ve been pushing out private beta builds every Sunday for the past few months. I’ll probably decide in the next day or two…
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Here’s a dump of a bunch of screenshots to show where things are up to so far. I won’t include any screenshots of the timeline view itself, because that looks essentially identical. The improvements there are in reliability, data quality, processing speed, etc - things that don’t really come through in screenshots.
The first new nicety is that on any timeline view or item details view you can slide up and down the content sheet in the normal intuitive slide gesture, as you would in many other iPhone apps. So if you want to fill the screen with item details, for example:
Oh that one also shows that the leaving time predictions now include multiple future predictions (and the underlying maths is better too).
Place details now has a selector for viewing the visit times for each day of the week:
The places results list when editing place assignment is now much more detailed, with street addresses and visit counts. The underlying maths for scoring the places has also been improved.
Ok so here’s the very basic test UI for the new Places tab (with the content sheet slid up over the map, in these two screenshots):
And one of the countries expanded to show days in each city:
Then here’s the content sheet slid down to show the full map on Places tab. As you can see, the map visualisation is still extremely basic at this point. I’ve only done enough to make it work, not to look cool yet:
But you can start to see the potential. It just needs a lot of design / UI / map visualisation polish, to present the data in more fun and interesting ways:
Here’s the partially complete Activity tab. The graph at the top is still fake, and I’m not completely happy with the new design, but two across makes better use of space than the old one across design.
And here’s a dump of screenshots of the Settings tab, which for now is all debug / system views, for my sake. Though this time around I’m going to keep them all in instead of removing them in public releases. People tend to like to be able to peek under the hood, and often it can be quite useful and insightful too.
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Oh I forgot to mention the calendar sync feature I added to the Place Details view. You can toggle on calendar sync for each place, then any visits to that place will automatically get synced to your calendar.
I’ve been turning it on for basically every place except my “Home” places. Gives another interesting visualisation of the timeline data!
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Wow, this is going to be great! And the synchronisation with the calendar, that’s cool. I can feel the anticipation building.
It’s going to be a long week.
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where2testflight link plz