Rebuilt graphs on item details view (larger, more readable)
Ability to import Arc JSON format
Ability to import GPX
Ability to import KML
Weather data shown on item details views
Improvements to workout importing
Improvements to Dark Mode support
Add Arc Mini’s debug views to Arc App
0voters
This is a semi-random selection of my higher priority todos, excluding various bug fix todos. If there’s anything not in the list that you’d really like to see, please reply! Also if there’s any specific bug fix you’re waiting on, please mention that in a reply too!
A whole days’s speed view. In this view the vehicle lines are merged into a continuous line, where colors are defined by speed.
People can check their paces of run/bicycle or even a plane journey by places.
Custom activity types would be amazing! I realized while putting together my 2022 numbers that it was a massive pain trying to calculate long-distance bus data (between cities) vs local bus data. I had noted on each trip segment if it was long-distance, but it was still a pain. Plus I had a smattering of transit types applied that I’ve never actually used in real life but was just using to separate out data and I can see future me getting very very perplexed about what in-app mode corresponds to what real-life mode.
This sounds really interesting! I’m trying to visualise it, and think it’ll be worth drawing it up on paper to experiment with some layouts.
I think this would also fit nicely into the future goal of having more tabs for analysis, beyond just the current Timeline, Overview, Activity. There should at least be one for Places, to give a similar breakdown of Place data similar to how it’s done for activities in the Activity tab. But I think it’d also be worthwhile having another tab for more varied analysis like this speed view you describe, which wouldn’t fit neatly in either the Timeline, Activity, or Places tabs.
Definitely! I wish I’d remembered to add that to the poll. (It’s not allowing to add new items to this poll now. Sigh). Custom activity types have been my pet favourite feature idea since forever, but I’ve just never had the mental space to get around to building it.
I’ve added the task to my project board now, so it doesn’t get lost again. I think I should also do a new poll next week which includes the “Planned” features on the Changemap site. Silly of me to forget to look there in the first place.
I vote we just call it the winner! I voted for the current winner which would be awesome for fleshing out Arc’s data from before I used Arc (and perhaps for correcting data? Eg my phone died but I had another device that recorded location / travel data). BUT custom types would definitely make the biggest different for actual current day-to-day use.
I also find myself wishing for a bulk edit feature. Eg there’s a segment from today that Arc called bus then bike. But the “bike” is actually bus then walking then stationary then walking. The quickest way to fix that seems to be to call the whole segment one mode, then split it into two multiple times (never mind that calling a snippet “stationary” only sometimes pops it up to the main timeline and to go into mini just to do that is a pain). But I’d much rather go into the original individual segments, bulk select (with a swipe option perhaps so it’s not so many taps?) all the many snippets then assign them to the correct mode and repeat. Right now it feels like mowing down all the internal data to say it’s all one mode then splitting it by sight.
Would like to see the ability to bookmark specific dates, like a specific 3-5 days, as a “trip”. This would allow to look back on special vacations, etc. The current timeline views just allow to go to days/weeks/months/years.
A few people have asked for this over the years. I’ve been avoiding it because it’s the kind of UI that happens when the developer can’t fix the underlying problem so the problem gets pushed to the user, then gets normalised to the point where the developer ends up making improvements to the UI for handling something that either shouldn’t have needed UI in the first place or shouldn’t be enough of a usage burden that even more UI is needed.
Basically I should fix it so that we don’t end up in that situation, needing to clean up lots of small segments. But that’s much easier said than done!
Every day I do the same kind of individual segment cleanup in my own data, to make sure I never forget that it’s still a problem. But yeah, maybe it’s gone on long enough that I have to concede, and add some extra UI for making that work easier/faster.
This was actually the core idea of what was meant to be Arc v4! In design and development we ended up kind of renaming it Arc Journal, and then Covid stalled development altogether. There’s not much point to (or motivation for) working on a trip journals app when you can’t travel anywhere.
But now that people are travelling more again, maybe it’s time to resurrect Arc Journal. Something to look forward to!
On editing, I’d love a quick way to add a stop to a trip. If I do errands, some stops are quick enough to not register as a stop, and the current split, scrub, mark a bit as stationary, then pick a place is painful enough I seldom do it.
On workouts having an “Import and Add to Timeline” as a single action would be great.
What I would like to see the most are the map visualisation improvements discussed in detail earlier in another topic.
Other than that, I would like to be able to select multiple items for editing (and not necessarily only the ones following each other in the timeline) and to be able to add subcategories to the already existing activity type categories. (I have some transportation mode/activity type/vehicle ideas that may be too specific or rare to add them to the app separately, probably the list would be too long.)
Also I’m curious, could the weather data be used for the learning engine to more accurately guess the activity type? Similarly to time of day, day of week, month of year, seasons, holidays, work days vs. weekends, altitude, etc.
I’ve never been able to make “edit individual segment” work. I split, nudge, change, confirm and then the timeline will show whatever it was before. It’s super frustrating. The whole feature needs an overhaul IMHO.
I’d love to never see again the interface change under my hands because I confirm something, that changes something else, and I get pushed out of the confirm flow without knowledge of what happened. Sometimes I also get an empty “confirm” screen.
A way to edit place names/categories that are wrong, flag closed places, or add new places
Good point. This is actually why I almost never use the main confirm view for activity type confirmation, and instead go straight to Individual Segments, so I can avoid losing the stationary segments that I might want to keep/use.
Aside: When you confirm the activity type of a trip with the main confirm/edit view, it does retain stationary segments, if the classifier confidence score for “stationary” for the samples is high enough. Meaning that if the classifier is at least 50% confident the sample was stationary, then that sample will be left as stationary instead of being changed to the confirmed type. But in practice lots of stationary samples don’t reach that confidence threshold and get clobbered, leaving you with the annoying segment splitting dance you mention.
Yeah this would be handy. I think the reason I didn’t do it that way in the first place is because you don’t necessarily know what the workout’s location data looks like yet, unless you checked it first in another app (eg Apple’s Activity app). So it might import and add something that’s a total unusable mess.
I think a possible workaround would be to do the import step automatically, so that you can view a preview of the workout without having to first tap Import. That would reduce it to a single step.
And Arc already has a housekeeping task for cleaning up imported but unused workout routes (workout data that’s not been added to the timeline within a couple of days since import). So the cost of auto importing the workouts would be minimal in terms of space consumption. Though there would be a cost in energy use, which will need to be considered / managed.
I’ve added it to the todos to investigate further!
This would fall under the “custom activity types” that @Fly mentioned. It’s definitely high on my personal wishlist! I’ll do a new poll shortly, with all the things I missed in this poll.
In retrospect / later reclassification, yes certainly.
At the moment the classifier relies almost solely on real time data. For energy efficiency reasons samples are only automatically classified once - at time of recording. So data that gets added later isn’t used (eg heart rate, or whether once it’s available).
But when you go into the edit view for a timeline item the samples are reclassified at that point. Which means that late arriving data could be used to get better classification results at that point.
Of these, time of day and altitude are already used. I do have it on my todos to add day of week too. Aside: the places classifier already uses day of week.
There’s probably one last step you’re missing. When you split a segment, it doesn’t promote either of the parts to the timeline view, they still stay within that timeline item. If you want one of the segments promoted to being a separate timeline item, you need to tap on it again and set its type to whichever type you want (even if that’s already the type it is). That will then split it out as a separate timeline item.
Arc Mini has better UX for this, in that it has a button “Promote to timeline”. That button does the same thing - it just sets the type to the same as it already is. But in Arc Mini’s case at least it isn’t hidden functionality! It’s on my todos to add that button to Arc App too.
This is also on the todos - to fix the problem of getting kicked back to timeline view. The reason it happens is because the item you’re looking at has been deleted. But what really should happen is it updates the view to show you instead the item that previous one was merged into (Arc never really deletes anything, only merges). I’ll nudge that todo up the list a bit!
If they’re Foursquare places, you can do this in the Foursquare or Swarm app. If they’re private places you’ve added yourself, you can tap “Edit private place” to edit the name.
If I visit a new place that isn’t in the Foursquare database yet, my typical workflow is to first add it as a new private place in Arc, then go into the Swarm app and add it as a new place in their database too. Then come back later and point Arc at the Swarm/Foursquare place once their database moderation system has approved the addition there (that might take minutes or hours).
I voted for the current winner which would be awesome for fleshing out Arc’s data from before I used Arc (and perhaps for correcting data? Eg my phone died but I had another device that recorded location / travel data). BUT custom types would definitely make the biggest different for actual current day-to-day use.