Arc App v3.10.0 is almost live on the App Store (pending Apple’s usual review process, which takes about a day). What would you like to see in the next update?
I’ve included in this poll all the highest voted features from the last poll that didn’t make it into 3.10.0, plus a bunch of things highly voted on the Changemap site.
Just a heads up: Arc 3.11.0 should be arriving tomorrow, but it doesn’t have any of the features voted on. The reason being, I wanted to start work on the top voted feature, ie a Places tab, but it felt wrong to dive into that before ever having finished the Overview tab!
So I’ve finally added photos to the Overview tab. Which makes that tab much more useful now - it’s quite pleasant to use!
And now that that’s out of the way, I’ll get back to the top voted features, for Arc 3.12.0
Here’s an example of what the Overview tab looks like now:
Just stating to think about such. As with various calendar apps, i hope for someday more easily being able to see various visits. For example perhaps long hold some entry and seeing all visits in some improved visit view.
Integration with calendar and showing events that went along with some visit? Not sure.
Swipe down for search field? In general how to search and navigate in interesting ways as with some calendar apps?
Some confirmation screen? Such as a list where one can merely tap or swipe an entry to confirm? With some context info such that it is indeed possible to know location or place within series or time. Not sure to explain.
Some alternate view that is more of a scrolling calendar, perhaps showing only places such that one can see visits and imagine them more as some activity or place history? Same for Overview and Activity. A history in some sense over weeks and months maybe more useful than by day.
You can do this now, from the “Place Details” section on a visit details view. Tap on “Total visits” to get a list of all visits to that place, or tap on “Common duration”, “Common arrival/leaving” to get bar charts of common visit durations and arrival/leaving times, then you can tap on the bars to get lists of visits that fall within that range.
Though I’ve already started working on a new Place view, which will initially be this “Place Details” section split off into a new view, allowing for adding more Place details and functionality into a dedicated view. Which will then lead into building the “Places tab” feature, which is the highest voted!
Coincidentally this new Place view is where I’m putting the new button for the second highest voted feature in the poll - moving all visits to another place. So the two top voted requests are going nicely together
I’ve got in mind a very advanced search/AI chat feature in mind, to add soon. I’ve already started building it as an experiment in one of my other apps (This & That). Basically it’s ChatGPT/GPT-4 but with it knowing how to fetch data from your Arc database. So you can ask “what places did I visit most in January, and how do those numbers and places compare to February?” Then the AI chatbot knows how to fetch that data, it’s presented in the chat interface, and the AI intelligently interprets the results for you, with any insights it thinks valid.
Here’s a not particularly insightful example from This & That app:
One other thing. Not sure what to think of it or possible options. I’d like to retain backup yet not on iCloud, or perhaps have the app retrieve and move backup to iCloud only when needed such as for restore?
Understand such may be problematic and not so great such as using Dropbox.
The main issue is that I heavily rely on iCloud for reading PDFs or using numerous other file types. As such, recent files isn’t usable since there could be hundreds of files in the past day from Arc.
I recommend hunting out similar feature requests on the Changemap site and voting for them. The more votes, the more I will be able to justify spending time on building it.
Though supporting third party cloud services are a significant development time burden, because each third party service would need to have service specific code written for it, which would then require ongoing maintenance separate from the existing iCloud Drive based system. So it’s quite an undesirable option in that sense.
Earlier versions of Arc actually supported doing this! But it was only one photo at a time, so it was quite tedious. And building out some UI for doing multiple selections of photos for bulk location data updating started to look like it would be falling outside Arc’s purpose, doing something that’s better suited for doing in a dedicated photo management app (eg Lightroom).
Instead you can export a day’s location data to GPX from the timeline view, then use that to bulk update the location data in photos in Lightroom (or other similar apps that support doing so from GPX files).
I wonder if there are future plans for some somewhat significant changes to the UI. Not sure what at the moment but I am thinking of search.
Perhaps search could be more accessible, e.g. swipe down to reveal search bar. Perhaps results could be similar to Maps, such that it remains a bottom drawer one can easily return to, to see and navigate other results. Perhaps results list, as well as day list, could optionally show city and perhaps adresss as commercial places of any type eg store, restaurant, café, gas station etc. could be a chain or company such that name doesn’t really help know where was that visit.
Overview could perhaps be infinitely scrolling like a calendar list of events, as one can easily scroll over days weeks and months, with some UX elements to navigate a calendar perhaps like Fantastical. I think the font sizes and table row spacing could be reduced and perhaps make use of dynamic type. e.g. font sizes as used in Calendar app list view I think are sufficient. If one wants to make heavy use of overview in a way like Calendar to see a history of visits, perhaps some reworking as such would indeed be helpful.
Minor thing. As not all have Sunday for start of week, perhaps day labels in calendar view woild be helpful. Fitness app for viewing rings completion has a view header. Perhaps that works and is why they do that instead of using a month header above each month.
@agastya, the calendar view will use your phone’s system settings to determine first day of week. So if you expect Monday to be first day of week (and your phone is likewise configured), then that’s what it’ll show.
Though eventually I want to replace the current calendar view with one that uses iOS’s built in calendar widget, for simplicity’s sake. But as it stands right now the built in calendar widget doesn’t support things that Arc needs, notably highlight colours on individual days (which Arc uses to indicate favourited days as well as days with items needing confirmation).
