I’ve noticed this a few times - when I go to split a segment and mark the before and after as two different modes, it does not reflect on the main timeline.
I’ve waited few minutes and restarted app few times to no effect. However when I click on the location marker it does show the split activities correctly.
Here is example
I rode my scooter to Cut Throat
However I parked my scooter and walked around a bit.
This part got recorded as stationary
I clicked on segment before Cut throat marker on the timeline, which zoomed in. I split the segment into scooter and walk
This reflects in orange for scooter and green for walk. So far so good.
I click on back (that seems only option visible)
I expect when I go to timeline it reflects. But it doesn’t. I still see scooter and right after it cut throat.
The walk segment is missing.
I click on Cut throat, it shows the zoomed view with squiggly green and orange lines.
Also when I change activity type and go back, I expect the previous screen to show the new type but it’s still old (again as a dev myself I understand why this is the case, but as a user I expect it to change)
What’s happening is the Split Segment tool only splits the segments, it doesn’t extract them out as new timeline line items. But I guess I should explain what that means.
What you see on the main timeline view is Timeline Items. Each timeline item is either a Visit or a Trip. Visits can have Places assigned, and Trips have a single Activity Type assigned (eg waking, running, etc).
Inside of each Timeline Item is Item Segments. These are the things you’re splitting on the Split Segment view. When you split one of the segments inside a timeline item you end up with two segments, but both still inside the same timeline item.
If you want one of those segments to be extracted from the item and put into a new timeline item, to make it visible on the main timeline view, you can tap on that segment again in the list and set its type again. This action will extract the segment as a separate timeline item. Whenever you change or reconfirm the type of a segment the segment will be split out as a separate timeline item.
The reason why the Split Segment view doesn’t go that extra step and split the new segments out as separate timeline items is … well, firstly, which segment? Did you want both of them split out? Or only one of them split out? If so, which one? If it automatically split out both of them as separate timeline items it’d probably be a mistake in most cases - you probably want only one of them split out. And often you might not want either split out - you’re maybe just trying to tidy up the insides of a Visit or Trip to better match what actually happened, without wanting to change the outer timeline view.
So that’s why in the Split Segment case it’s left as an extra optional step. Though I do regret that it’s not properly labelled or made obvious! In Arc Mini there’s a special button, “Extract as Timeline Item”, that does the same thing as changing/reconfirming the type of the segment, and splits it out. In Arc Timeline app there’s no such button, and there should be.
