Increased battery usage

Hello, it looks like that the battery usage has increased since the last update. I’ve not changed the usage of the app or my daily routine.
I’m using an iPhone 13 Pro, IOS: 16.3.1

Hi @WimN!

Nothing changed under the hood in the most recent update that would affect battery life. The changes were almost solely within the UI, with new UI features such as the upgraded graphs on item details view. So the only expected energy use change would be from perhaps spending more time with the app in the foreground (which is the most energy expensive time for any app, due to the cost of the screen/backlight counting towards the app’s total during that time).

I wouldn’t put too much trust in the Battery view in iPhone’s Settings app, or at least not in day to day changes in percentage. I often see quite considerable changes, in both directions, that don’t correlate with anything different in the app nor what it is doing.

And the percentages are relative to the other apps, not absolute (a long time annoyance of mine that I wish Apple would change). So if you stop using another app that you were previously using heavily, then the percent for other apps will all go up. That makes the percentages mostly unusable for comparisons over time.

Though if you see Arc sitting consistently higher in the list over a period of days/weeks, especially on the “Last 10 Days” view, then that’d be worth looking into. By higher in the list I mean how many (and which) other apps are showing higher energy use above it in the list. For example for me Arc Mini sits around 8th in the list, below Health app (Arc App’s position isn’t useful information for me, because I literally have it open all day while doing coding and debugging work, but I use Arc Mini fairly normally, so that still tells me something useful).

If it changed such that Arc Mini were for me consistently in the top 3 instead of top 10, I’d want to dig deeper. But it will also matter what other apps I’ve been consistently using, and whether I’ve changed my usage patterns of them or not.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for you reply. I’ll keep an eye on it!

BTW, any progress on the function for batch changing locations? I’ve got 2 locations ‘Home’, I’ve renamed one to ‘Home old’ but I would like to combine them into one location ‘Home’. I’ve seen more requests for this function but could not find it on your ‘to-do’ list.

Keep up the good work!

With kind regards,

Wim Nagtegaal

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It’s still high on my todos! Always in like the top 5 or so.

Problem is I’ve always got too many things to do, so some important ones keep slipping and not making it in. I’m getting more efficient this year though, with iOS being much more stable in terms of energy use, battery life, and less random app terminations, so I can focus more on improvements instead of putting out fires (eg app stability issues with new iOS updates). So hopefully this year I’ll churn through a lot of the long standing issues!

Hello Matt,

When you want to split a track you get a slider and a map. On the map you can see a small indicator that is positioned on the track corresponding with the position of the slider. When you move the slider the indicator will move. But sometimes the track is so small that you cannot see the indicator. When you click on the track to zoom in the map will fill the screen and you can not use the slider any more. The problem is that when you go back to the slider the display will zoom out and you cannot see the indicator on the map any more. Is it possible to change this behaviour so that the map will automatically zoom in that the indicator is always clearly visible.

And talking about splitting, it would be great of you could add a location on the map. Now sometimes when there is a ‘Stationary’ part in the track you can change that into a location. But when the whole track is walking e.g. you cannot add a location.

With kind regards,

Wim Nagtegaal

It already does that :wink: Tap the < > nudge buttons instead of moving the slider. The nudge buttons move the split point by one sample at a time, and when doing that the map will automatically zoom in to the split point.

It doesn’t zoom in when using the slider because the slider is best used for large movements, in which case it’s best to be able to see the full context. But when doing sample by sample nudging it’s most useful to have it zoomed in, so the nudge buttons will do that zooming.

You can achieve this now by using segment splitting, albeit in two steps. First split the segment at the start of the point where you want a stationary segment, and set the second half to be stationary. Then do a second split on the new stationary segment, splitting it at where you want the stationary segment to end.

So for example if you start with 10 minutes “walking” and want to insert a stationary segment at the 5 minute mark, split it so that the first half is waking and second half is stationary. Then split the new stationary segment so that most of the second part is walking and only a brief first part is stationary. Then you’ll end up with [walking → stationary → walking] and can extract out the stationary segment as a visit.

Hallo Matt,

Thanks, those little gems in your program!! Always nice to know about.

The nudge buttons do the trick! Almost too good, sometimes it zooms in to almost micro level so you cannot see where you are, a little less zoom would give you more overview.

Adding a location also worked very well. Maybe in the future you might add a function that a long press on a point in a track presents a pop-up menu with the choice for editing that track, splitting at that point or adding a location on that point in the track.

Thanks as always!

With kind regards,

Wim Nagtegaal

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This part was tricky to do. What I ended up with was having it zoom so that something like 5 samples either side of the split point are visible (I forget the exact number). This makes the zoom depth depend on the surrounding context, which worked better than a fixed zoom level. But it still isn’t perfect, because sometimes the samples will go from being clumped to suddenly spread out, which can make the zoom depth a bit hectic when nudging back and forth near those spatial changes.

Yeah I was hoping you’d mention this! That’s something I want to add too. It would also b cool if it could automatically identify those points in the path where the samples cluster, even when the sample types aren’t stationary. Then it could intelligently offer easy to tap visit extraction points.

That wouldn’t actually be all that difficult to make work, and would be significantly less fuss to use than the current two-splits approach.

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