Hi Matt,
Could you tell us how you’re getting on with the new Arc Editor ? Is it coming soon ?
Siso
1 Like
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The Overview tab has been replaced by a new Places tab, that does monthly and yearly views of all the Places you’ve been to in the date ranges, counting numbers of days in individual countries and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…
6 Likes
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.
5 Likes
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!
4 Likes
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.
3 Likes
where2testflight link plz
1 Like
Haha. TestFlight hopefully coming very soon! I just started testing the old database importer on real data yesterday. So far so good. But it might take me a few more days to just check everything over and make sure there’s no major rough edges that’ll make the first public beta troublesome for anyone.
1 Like
Please forget to implement the low battery screens, should save you some time 
I hate those annoying popups, and then it bans me from the ui altogether, even though my Pro Max has plenty of battery life left…
And the inevitable question: does the new version has dark mode?
1 Like
Hah! That feature doesn’t exist yet in Arc Editor, but will eventually in some form. It’s necessary to disable at the very least the map during low battery situations. The map is the largest consumer of battery by far.
Though this time around I’ll do my best to make it much less annoying. I’ll also be ensuring that the timeline is still visible, just not the map.
Yep! Dark Mode is all there and working. Though dark mode map views are always problematic in apps - it’s often much harder to read details on the maps, see overlays, path lines, etc. Over time I’ll iterate on colours used in Dark Mode, to improve readability.
1 Like
Consider that, as a location tracking app, disabling the map alltogether is somewhat unsafe? Especially in wilderness / hiking scenarios where users may be using Arc to keep a log of where they have been so they can get out. I have personally spoken to Arc users that have had close calls due to features being disabled at low battery levels!
Dark mode looks quite nice! 
1 Like
Arc has never been marketed as a wilderness or off-grid survival or navigation app. There’s other apps that are much better suited to that (my preferred one is AllTrails, though I don’t love it, but that’s another story). I don’t think anyone should be relying on Arc (as it stands now) for those kinds of real time safety uses.
But if there’s interest in that kind of functionality, I’m all for discussing it!
That is actually something I’ve long wanted to do - adjust the UI depending on the current mode of movement. Like, if you’re cycling, the UI could be cycling focused; if you’re in an airplane, there’s plenty of cool flight specific UI things that could be done; etc.
1 Like
I get the disclaimer, and my friend has since switched to Guru for these use cases for that reason, but — as I’m sure you’ve noticed — users will always find a way to do things you don’t intend them to! It’s a failure mode that I would put a little bit more thought into personally.
Does displaying the map itself use more battery / CPU or is it the updating of the timeline? I always figured it was the latter.
I would say “just displaying the map” but really it’s updating the map. If you just have static data and present a map for that static data and nothing changes after that, that’s not too energy expensive. But if the user then pans around the map, zooms, etc… if the timeline data changes and then the map is updated… if that happens every 6-30 seconds (eg not in sleep mode, and actively recording)… it adds up very fast.
The timeline list view is energy cheap. Which is why I don’t see any harm in it being in the Low Power Mode. And plausibly a map view could also be included so long as it’s not interactive or updated frequently.
But once that map starts getting interaction or regular updates, battery life can drop very fast. If someone’s stranded in the wilderness and only has 5% battery left… I’m not sure I can say what they should be doing with the phone, but if it were me I’d be minimising my map view use to preserve that remaining battery for as long as possible. A bit of a catch 22 - you want the map for navigating yourself out of the situation, but using the map will quickly drain your phone’s remaining life.
Seems like a reasonable compromize could be to pause recording or timeline / map updating while the user has the app open at very low power levels? For this use case of backtracking to find an exit, seeing where you have been before and are currently is important but the real-time path (where you’ve been) isn’t nearly as high priority.
Right now Arc notably does make that decision for the user! Allowing them to override the warning is another path that could be helpful. Currently you can do that in low power mode but I’m not sure about very low?
I think auto pausing recording would be unpleasant for most people. Most people want primarily to avoid data gaps - they want a complete timeline. We’re dealing with a specific edge case here, that’s not the most common use cases.
But perhaps the app could offer to pause recording, to help preserve remaining battery life. Though now that I say that… recording isn’t actually expensive. Recording is actually surprisingly cheap. (A new phone with healthy battery could record for 2-4 days continuously, if that’s the only thing it were doing).
It feels like we’re starting to dig in to a new feature discussion now. Probably best to branch off in a new thread. But it does feel like there’s some really cool stuff to explore here. Fleshing out what a hiking / back country / off grid UI might be, and what specific features would be most useful to have.
And that is one of my favourite wishlist items, as I said above. Arc is very general purpose timeline, as it stands now, but there’s a bunch of use cases it overlaps, and comes close to doing quite well, but because it’s a general purpose app it doesn’t excel in any of those niches. It would be cool to pick out some of the more fun ones and attempt to do better at specifically those, with features and UI tailored specifically to them.
2 Likes
Fair! Really it’s the map updating that I think could maybe be tweaked in low-power states to offer a better performance / battery tradeoff? You’d know better than me though!
I try to be mindful of how much wishlist stuff I mention on here… I know how it is as a small / solo dev with a seemingly infinite backlog haha. That said, noted.
1 Like
Oh on that, yeah you’re correct. There’s two stages to Low Power Mode. I can’t remember the exact conditions and thresholds, but there’s the warning-style one, where it switches into Low Power UI but lets you opt out, and then there’s the no-choice one, where it won’t let you opt out.
I think the latter is something like when battery is below 10% or thermal state is at critical or … that might be it.
1 Like
I mean, I’d love to still have some map view in Low Power Mode. And if it’s static (or mostly static) then it could potentially be energy cheap enough.
I’ll keep this all in mind for when it comes to building the Lower Power UI in Arc Editor. Which could be a while away actually. You might get your wish for a bunch of months: no Low Power UI at all 
I’ll be working for a good while yet to just fill in all the main missing features (fleshing out Activity tab, the new Places tab, a bunch of less interesting but still commonly used bits and pieces).
The pain of it is I love brainstorming new features or improvements. There’s so many cool possibilities. But yeah, typically most things go into the ever growing backlog of doom and never escape.
That said, with AI coding assistants now, it’s much easier to churn through the backlog like never before. There’s so many wishlist things that I’d in the past classified as “I’d love that, but it’ll never happen”, that are now more like “You know, Claude and I could churn that out in an afternoon”.
1 Like
For a Pro Max user, 10% is still a lot of battery time, so please consider opting out of being blocked from the map (and in a less intrusive way than it is now).
Oh and I love the dark mode!
2 Likes