Hi Matt and fans,
Would it be possible (or economic) for there to be a subscription for all three of your apps (LifeBalance, This and That, Arc) so that someone could subscribe to all of them at a discounted rate?
I’d love to get a lifetime subscription to all of your apps together, assuming that as they change and mold into new apps, that same subscription carries over. Buying them all separately is simply too much to justify currently.
Any advice or suggestions are much appreciated. 
Hi @DotKern!
I’m surprised to hear anyone interested in Life Balance 
That one’s always felt like a personal project, with a customer base of one (ie me). The productivity market is so flooded that it feels like it’s an app that can’t possibly hope to compete.
But This & That does feel like an up and coming app! So leaving aside the value proposition of Life Balance, I do think what you’re proposing has value - a subscription (or lifetime purchase) that covers two worthwhile apps, with one less valuable app thrown in as a bonus.
And curiously, Arc Timeline (and soon Arc Editor) and This & That do work together in a slim way. This & That can optionally use Arc’s timeline data to determine sensible locations for fetching daytime and nighttime daily weather reports for those data types.
This bundle isn’t something I’d considered before, so I’ll have to put some thought into it. But at first glance, yeah it does sound like a good idea to me! I’ll set aside some time for doing the numbers and figuring out what might work and what might make sense. Thanks for the nudge!
I think in reality I would love all three of your apps being one, or at least sharing a lot of information between them. Life Balance could be implemented quite easily into Arc, but I understand the reasons why it probably won’t be. It would be incredible to have it as a separate app and then have your timeblocks show up in Arc though. It would be even MORE incredible to have it all worked into the same app, and would significantly lower the work you’d have to do on interfacing, although of course force many hard decisions.
It ties into one of the most requested things I’ve seen from my perusing here: different stationary activities/priorities. I think I’ll write a longer post laster about all my thoughts over the last week of the app, but for now my thoughts are:
Stationary activities, priorities, etc can be implemented quite easily in a very simple way: note markdown extensibility. You already let notes be attached to events, by simply allowing them to have two titles, one that is a single time, and one that is an activity type, you’ve already built backwards compatible time blocking tied into Arc events. The secret to making it work is very easy, autocomplete based on previous “activities” or “priorities”. The app already has quite beautiful autocomplete in the form of place names. That works great.
There is an alternative method where the UI for movement types is copied and used for activities, but that is less appealing to me.
These can be represented on the timeline subtley, maybe an additional colored bar next to the ordinary one, and then a bolded activity title where the notes go.
Right now the app has “Where” “When” and “How”, all the app needs is “What” and it is perfect. Another way the app could do this is by displaying linked calendar events in the timeline, but this seems like more work than perhaps it would be worth? Perhaps I’m mistaken.
I fully believe that this would easily let Arc surpass Life Balance, because it ties location to action. So regularly our schedules mirror our location. All too often I’ve been timeblocking and turned to Google timeline (or Arc in the past week) to check how long I was somewhere. This makes that built in. It could even become part of the system in the far future, where it recommends activities based on location (or set in settings)
For the other functionalities of LB, I think the setting targets can easily be relegated to settings, bar charts and statistics could be neatly lined up in the notes and statistics themselves, as well as getting it’s own timeline/esque page.
Oops, I seem to have written far more than I meant to. I know that right now Arc Editor takes priority, so I am very content with watching to see how it grows organically, but I am very curious to hear your thoughts.
Sorry for the long reply! I’ll pull this out to another post if you’d like.
Yeah this is a personal goal too. Though I’d like to keep them as separate apps, because management of different kinds of data has different UI/UX patterns. But the more the apps can share and benefit from each other’s data the better.
For activities in Arc’s timelines, there’s also workout importing. Though of course only workout relevant. But I’m working on getting that built into Arc Editor at the moment, with much more advanced functionality than the bare minimum that old Arc Timeline has.
For non-workout activities, yeah Life Balance has a lot of crossover with calendar apps/services. Arc Editor has the ability to add its own Visits to a Calendar automatically (check the Place Details view for any visit in Arc Editor - there’s a toggle to turn on auto calendar syncing for that place). But for syncing the other way, that’s something I haven’t explored yet. It’s probably a popular feature request on the Changemap site though!
I think we’re thinking along similar lines with a lot of potential feature ideas and future directions! Though yeah, my preference will be to keep the apps separate, but to have them increasingly share data and reuse it in context relevant ways. Each app benefiting from what it can learn from the others, and surfacing relevant data in the right places and right ways.
You’re right that Arc Editor does take priority at the moment. I really need to get it finished up to a point where it can confidently take over from Arc Timeline, satisfying the majority of use cases so that most users can transition over to it.
But part of the work on Arc Editor is frequent consideration of what it could be doing better and different. While yes primarily I have to focus on just getting it to feature parity, there’s also always the question of “did I do this feature right the last time? could it be done better this time?”