Monthly & Yearly View Incorrect

Hi guys, I love this app. However, when I try to use the Monthly or Yearly view for the timeline it doesn’t show everything. For example is shows everything correctly except for a trip I made last night. (Even today is added in the Monthly and Yearly view). When I look at weekly view it shows the week correct (including last nights trip) but then last nights trip disappears when I switch to yearly or monthly view. Help?

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Hi @Thehouseholder! Thanks for your kind words :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Luckily there’s an easy fix for that problem!

I’ll give a little bit of background info first: The monthly and yearly map views rely on different versions of the Timeline Items than are used in the weekly and daily views. (Timeline Items are the Visit and Trip items you see in the timeline view, eg Home → Car → Work = Visit → Trip → Visit).

Because yearly and monthly requires much, much more data displayed at once, they instead use “Simplified Items” to avoid slowing the app to a crawl and potentially crashing due to using too much memory. You’ll be able to spot the difference when you zoom in the map - you’ll see the trip/path lines have much less detail in them.

The Simple Items are created / updated each day during one of Arc’s many scheduled background tasks, that iOS will run when the phone is plugged in to power and idle. It’s up to iOS to decide when it actually runs those tasks - Arc can only ask politely, and wait and hope. And unfortunately what often happens is iOS doesn’t let the tasks run for long enough to get them finished, and each day they get a bit further behind.

Because that happens a lot with the Simple Items daily tasks, I’ve set them to also get updated when you view the monthly/yearly maps, if the phone is plugged in to power at the time. So you can reliably get missing ones / outdated ones built and updated by plugging the phone into power, then switching to monthly/yearly view, and waiting a minute or two. When the view loads, if plugged in to power, it’ll do a scan for anything missing, and queue them up for immediate creation/update. So you might notice the app get a bit slower for a minute or two, if there’s a big backlog, but it will churn through that backlog and get them all filled in soon enough.

Let me know how you get on!

Let it run for a few hours as you suggested on mains power and screen always on. It crashed a few times but no new month view appears😢. Tried with month view and year view.

Tried again: closed all apps and shutdown and restarted to maximize free memory. Still nothing and it crashes after about half an hour (restarted everytime). After about 3 hours still nothing for March and beyond.

@WimN, make sure you’re on the latest version of Arc - the foreground updating of SimpleItems was added only one or two updates ago.

Other than that, I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t work. It should only take a few minutes to see results, if swiping back and forth with the monthly timeline view. Switching to yearly will queue up all missing SimpleItems for the entire year period, so it might be spending time filling in much older gaps first. But with monthly view, it’ll do just the month you’re viewing, so swiping between a couple of months should get those two months finished within a few minutes.

Hello Matt,
I’m using version 3.4.4 which should be the latest version. Tried again, but still no luck :slightly_frowning_face:, it just shows a map without any travel paths on it. I’m using an iPhone X with 256GB memory and the latest iOS 14.6

Hmm. Odd.

The only other thing I can think of is that trips that don’t have a confirmed activity type or high confidence automatic type (ie they’re shown as “transport” in the timeline, which indicates low confidence) won’t have SimpleItems built for them.

I’ve fixed that in the next update, which should be arriving in the next few days (I’m just in the process of submitting it to the App Store now). But yeah, worth checking to see if there’s a lot of “transport” items in the daily timeline views.

This post is similar to mine at Monthly timeline view missing for recent months - #5 by matt
I’m on 3.4.4 also and leaving it running doesn’t seem to be achieving anything. My monthly views still stop in mid-February (I can tell that February is incomplete from missing locations). I’m fastidious about maintaining my logs so I’m pretty sure I’ll have minimal ‘transport’ type trips. Certainly I have no days highlighted in grey on my calendar for February…

I’m now on v3.5 and it’s caught up on the missing monthly and yearly views so this seems to be resolved for me!

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Unless the foreground SimpleItem updating wasn’t in the 3.4.4 release? Hmm. Surely it was. Checking the changelogs now…

Aaaaargh. Yep, it wasn’t in 3.4.4. Damn. It’s been so long since the last release that I guess I completely lost track. Sorry about that :smirk:

The smoking guns: Code added 10 April, after build 340502 (which was a 3.4.5 build, since renamed to 3.5.0 due to the scope of the backup system changes).

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With 3.5 it works as you advised😀
Also automatic detection of transport types works better, nice!!

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