Introducing Arc Timeline 4 - the next generation of Arc

Noted! I’ll up the priority of that task a bit. That’s a few people asking for it now.

This is a new one! Don’t think anyone’s asked for this before. We’ve filed it as BIG-477.

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Actually, for me trakt.tv integration would be more meaningful than last.fm. Movies feel more “important” than loads of music tracks

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Noted @Palmin! I’ve upped the priority on that one now. More people asking = higher priority :blush:

Solid goals right here. :rofl:

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Glad to hear this is coming soon, @matt. I was a bit flummoxed when I was using the new app today and found this thread to understand what had happened.

Congrats on the new release. I’m still getting used to some new ways of working but it’s tracking well.

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Thanks @moo!

Yeah the street addresses thing will arrive at some point in not too long. There’s been a lot more enthusiasm for it than I expected.

I tend to either assign a place or set a custom title for all of my visits. Using the street address just isn’t part of my flow (not sure why - seems a perfectly reasonable thing to use in some cases). But anyway, yep, it’s prioritised for soon!

I use it because I may be travelling around the city or state and stop somewhere for a while. I don’t even get out of the car; just park up and appreciate wherever I am. It’s not a private place I’ll return to. It’s not a named place in Google. This makes those locations ideal for street addresses.

Obligatory edit: I am not a serial killer.

Obligatory second edit: The cops haven’t proved it anyway. :rofl:

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For these I tend to go with a custom title, like “Stopped to take pictures” or something. Though I wonder if it might make more sense to set the visit title to the street address, then note that detail in an actual note. Then I’d have both the address and the note in the timeline. Hmm.

Anyway can’t do that until that feature gets back into the app! Hopefully not too long away.

Hi Matt

Congrats on the release, it definitely does feel snappier. Couple things I’ve noticed when editing / confirming items in the timeline compared to 3:

  1. There are much fewer data gaps. Timeline 3 (on my phone at least) used to crash when it was charging, leading to intermittent gaps overnight. Seems to be much better with 4.
  2. It struggles more with metros. I’ve noticed it both marks them as walking, and is more likely to leave them as straight lines. 3 would be better at curving towards the stations on the route, maybe as it briefly got location data. It then sometimes has stationary points instead of metros. All means that my commute has a lot more manual editing required than before.
  3. Downstream of this, splitting segments feels less reliable. I have a metro + walking segment marked as walking, and when I try to reconfirm the individual metro segment as metro to split it out, it doesn’t work. Carving out movement segments from stationary timeline items is also a pain.

I know this is a bit vague but hopefully you recognise the behaviour, ideally I wouldn’t post screenshots of the routes. Maybe all of this gets fixed as the engine ‘learns’ but I have had this for about a month now.

Best

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Thanks @alexkenny57! Yeah AT4 is so much more pleasant to use than the old app, which was showing its age in unpleasant ways.

iOS also seems to like AT4 much more, in that it doesn’t terminate it frequently, if ever. I suspect that’s partly to do with how the new app uses the newest background location session API. I have a hunch iOS is treating that more kindly than the much older API. Though it does come at the cost of no longer being able to opt out of the Dynamic Island / status bar location indicator at all. (We do have a loose plan for possibly improving around that area though, but not sure if it’ll pay off yet. TBD).

Yeah, it doesn’t do great. We’ve got this one filed for working on very soon. Ticket number is BIG-150, and it’s slated for this/next week, while I’m in Bangkok for a couple of weeks. I’m going to dive into doing some real world testing in underground trains, collect data, and tweak it until it’s working as well as we can make it.

Yeah I’ve seen this too. The unfortunate side effect of the poor underground train recording is that the samples are more sparse, making splitting more awkward, and sometimes to the point of being unworkable. Hopefully the BIG-150 work will pay off in that area too.

I’ve also got a separate task filed for this one (BIG-408). Tweaking of visit “gravity” / edge stealing. And some more grand plans in that area too, for things like expanding visit/place models from being merely centre+radius to actual shapes, multi centred, or… well, yeah, several ideas which will get played about with once I get a chance to get into that.

Yep! No worries. I’m seeing likely all the same patterns. And this/next week’s testing should give me plenty of real world data to experiment with too. Hopefully the next update will have some strong improvements in these areas!