Future Arc Editor

How to rrquest for adding to testflight?

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@o1x I’ll put up a public invite link on the forum here once it’s ready :+1:t3:

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True. And also true for most new iPhone models even if not Pro Max. As long as the battery is relatively young and it’s a new-ish phone, 10% can still be some reasonable time.

Though the map updating will turn that “reasonable time” into possibly less reasonable surprisingly quickly. The Lower Power UI is helping you. If it weren’t there, you’d see that 10% disappearing much faster than you are now.

But yeah, the “no choice” setting could be nudged down to 5% perhaps.

oh I thought it’s already post the TF. Hope we can get to test asap. Like thr Exist beta, we want to provide bug and help to let the developing moving faster and easier.

Yep, I’m keen to get a TestFlight build out very soon!

The import from the old LocoKit / Arc Timeline app database is working smoothly. It takes about 25-35 minutes on my database with 9 years of data.

I’m just doing some more work to make sure nothing is breaking after all that data is imported. I’m noticing some slowdowns, and maybe some other subtle weird things. So I’ve got to do some testing to make sure it’s all good.

If it checks out fine, then basically the current state of the app is what will be the first public TestFlight beta :tada: Will see how today’s testing goes…

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I still think it is MY iphone and I should be in control of the usage even in low battery situations.

My use case: when I go to bed I cleanup my timeline. I don’t care the battery is almost empty, it will be on the charger when I go to sleep.

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Apps make 1000 decisions for you before leaving you with the remaining 10 for you to decide. UX design is a balance of deciding which decisions the user should be bothered with, while the app takes care of deciding the remaining 99% itself (mostly without you ever being aware).

When Arc was designed to remove that choice (when battery is below 10% or thermal state is “critical”) iPhones had much less battery power, so that 10% could disappear in a handful of minutes if the full UI was visible and then used intensively. That situation is a bit different now, so 5% would make more sense.

I’m not totally against changing it so that it’s always optional. Although it is one of the many cases where most of the time “the app knows best”, I’ll concede that there are cases where the user does have legit reasons to override it.

Anyway, all of this will get redone in Arc Editor when I rebuild Low Power UI there. I’m definitely going to keep all of this in mind when I come to that work! And yeah, most likely you’ll get your way and I’ll concede :wink:

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That is really great news. :smiley:

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Glad to see the new version is progressing.

Not sure how different people use the app yet for me I use so far only the timeline. As you mentioned weekly monthly yearly views I hope someday it might be sort of like Calendar: I prefer the infinite scroll of list view and Fantastical. Easily scrolling thru days really is useful. In such a mode maybe it could display city as subtitle and not even show a map until one selects location. And maybe some color differentiation or something to indicate unconfirmed.

For general lists whether daily or other, I have felt such takes up a lot of space and maybe can be condensed. Non places such as walking or car maybe they can use icons and be one line perhaps with an option to not even display time and perhaps distance if time can be determined from places themselves.

I’ve also felt the font size is a bit large. Perhaps dynamic type can be supported such that it uses a standard font size and adjusts according to setting to improve accessibility?

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Screen shot of a list view of Calendar that I hope Arc can have something similar. Even if you’ve seen such a visual reminder perhaps helps. :slight_smile:

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Yeah I want to get both kinds of calendar view / navigation in. Right now in Arc Editor there’s the little iOS-standard calendar widget for navigating to a different day/week/etc. But I also want an infinite scroll calendar, with day colour annotations, like how Arc Timeline has.

There’s a lot of UI presentation ideas to explore there, with different timeline lists etc!

Arc Editor uses all default/standard systems fonts, so Dynamic Type is supported everywhere! I’ve tried my best to use all the built in title, headline, body, caption etc standard styles, so that it’s as close to iOS standard UI patterns as possible.

Ah I see what you mean!

Yeah, I think there’s potential to do something more like that on the weekly or monthly views. Also with the potential for the infinite scroll you mentioned.

I’m probably initially going to just go with copying over the Arc Timeline UI designs mostly unchanged, just to avoid change aversion when people migrate to the new app. But Timeline tab’s various presentation styles is an area where there’s a lot of room to explore different approaches.

any news on the first TF? Ikm already on iOS26 and still no arc tf news :joy:

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@o1x It’s coming any day now!

I’m happy with where it’s up to as the first public beta. It’s very rough around the edges, but having the public beta out will result in me focusing on cleaning all the most obvious rough edges.

I’ve been delayed a couple of weeks because it’s my yearly 2 week holiday with my mum :joy: But I’m heading home in a couple of days, and already starting back on work today. Though I might wait until I’m properly home before sending out the TestFlight build. Don’t want to be dealing with potential problems while in airport lounges!

Anyway, I’ll update with a link to the TestFlight some time in the next few days!

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Mat,

Have you implemented the “Manual Edit” on data that doesn’t get overwritten by ML?
The most problems with ARC I have with it overwriting my edits.
For exmple I move 10 minutes from Trip to Stationary, because I know that walk didn’t last 20 minutes but only 10. Arc moves that time back to Trip unless I make a dummy Place.
That is not acceptable workaround because it screws up the stats. That often happens with Home and Work, but it randomly happens at places I have never been, like on holiday.
Another editing waste od time is cleaning up Apple Location nightly drifting when I put my iPhone to Airplane mode.
It would be really nice to have a tool for quick cleanup of Trips: I did not leave this Place.
Here is an idea for UI implementation:
When I select a Trip that begins and ends at the same place, a new menu could be added under “Extract brief visits”: Staying at the same Place.
The current method of changing Trip to Stationary takes much too long. Almost every time I’m left with random strange places that I have to delete or set as the Place as was at. And ML takes a long time to go through all the garbage data that I want gone.
There should be a quicker way to to that cleanup. I don’t want to waste 5-10 minutes every day just to clean up the nightly mess.

Another functions I’m sure a lot of people would like is: UNDO. Edits in ARC are destructive and sometimes not fixable if mistake is made.
If it is not easy to make a general undo last edit, I would suggest: Undo This Day.
That would undo all edits done on this day. It could even be a Setting for Daily Undo (if performace is impacted). If it is ON, when editing starts, you could just make a backup of that day’s data to a separate table. When moved to another day in history, backup table would be purged and filled with that day’s data only if editing is started. Undo particular day could me limited to before today. I seldom do tricky edits on todays data.
Ability to restore a day would give me courage to test editing knowing if I mess up I can restore that day. I would be happy even with completely manual method: Back Up One Day before Edit. An Restore if I’m not happy with edits.

Hi @Jani!

For manual override, unfortunately that’s not really possible, with the way the underlying recording engines work, both in Arc Timeline and Arc Editor. But the good news is that Arc Editor’s new recording engine (LocoKit2) is much more reliable and accurate. So there’s far fewer cases of bad data that can’t be cleaned up nicely.

And the processing engine is also much faster. So while in Arc Timeline you could often see the timeline needing cleanup, and have to sit there while the processing engine chips away at it, in Arc Editor that’s much more rare - the processing engine will have cleaned it all up before you even notice there was any mess. It’s many times faster, and because the underlying data is better quality (more of it, and more accurate), it also does a better job too.

So in practice what I’m seeing when comparing Arc Editor and Arc Timeline each day, recording the same timelines on the same phone, in Arc Timeline I have to do the usual amount of cleanup while in Arc Editor I have to do much less. And when there are things I still need to do cleanup on myself, the data in Arc Editor is more detailed and accurate, so it’s usually much easier to do. Where as with the same situation in Arc Timeline, it’s often harder or impossible, because there’s less data and/or less accurate data.

So overall the timeline editing and processing situation is greatly improved.

This also helps with Visit start and end times being more accurate. Though there’s a new feature I do want to work on at some stage that will enable sort of the thing you’re describing, to deal with the problem of trying to move some data back into a visit then having the processing engine reject your change. I have a solution in mind for that, which hopefully I’ll get time to work on soon.

Unfortunately this is one of the feature requests that forever will be in the “not going to happen / impossible to do” basket :disappointed_face: An undo feature would depend on the data only changing from your own actions. If the data is static, and you make a change, then it’s possible to undo that change. But with Arc the data changes both from your own actions and from the actions of the processing engine and the recording engine. It’s almost constantly in flux, with new data arriving, automatic changes to existing data, and manual edits. So any edit action you take can’t be guaranteed to be reversible.

I still think you’re going to be happy with Arc Editor’s new processing and editing though! It really is much better. With the greater accuracy and detail and faster processing, it’s a much more enjoyable and intuitive experience. I almost never get caught in situations now where the data is in a state where I need to do extensive cleanup, or can’t find a way to get it in the shape I want.

A quick Arc Editor update:

Apologies for not getting a TestFlight build out yet! In the last few days of my trip I caught some bug, and have been sick for a week. Nothing serious, and I’m mostly fine today, so back to work. But it’s meant I haven’t really had the mental clarity to get serious work done.

Hopefully today or tomorrow I can get a TestFlight build out. I might spend today working through a Release Plan checklist, then send out the build tomorrow. Or if the checklist turns out to be simple enough, maybe a build today. Fingers crossed!

If you don’t do anything else to protect manual edits, just give us a possibility to lock confirmed data.
It’s extremely frustrating to go back in calendar and find days marked grey, when I’m convinced that I checked and confirmed everything.
Why is it so hard to understand that I don’t want ARC going years back and messing up my cleaned up and confirmed data,
I’m a data engineer working with databases and I lock data from accidental corruption with all sorts of constraints on tables and triggers not allowing updates on data that has been confirmed and locked.
I have lost my star marked dates on ARC upgrade to v.3. Since then I don’t trust it won’t happen again.
Also when I went to Korea last month, every timeline shifted (it’a a 7 hour differece) and stars in calendar were gone again.
Fortunately they came back when I got home.
So you need to do something about date/time handling.
I think every timestamp in ARC should be in local time and traveling around the globe should not influence old data.

Please check this. Just move iPhone Timezone to your timezone + 7 and see what happens with old data.

As for UNDO:
I don’t expect it to work for Today when new data is comming constantly.
But yesterday doesn’t get any new data stream and is fairly static except for data cleaning.

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That’s already there. Once you confirm an activity type or place, that’s locked in. The processing engine isn’t able to change that.

I recommend using the “Timeline Cleanup” view to “Confirm All”, to lock in all the automatic assignments so that they won’t be changed later.

All recorded data is marked with UTC timestamp as well as secondsFromGMT ie the timezone. So there’s always full knowledge both of the absolute time and the timezone within which it was recorded.

I live in 4+ countries every year, moving between Bali, Japan, Thailand, Nepal throughout the year. I’ve got a lot of different timezone data in my db :wink: There’s no known bugs with any of that stuff (except for the “favourite” day stuff, which is known and on the todos to be fixed!)

The beta is live! First public beta for Arc Editor!