A study becomes a shared project
Local history is rarely one person’s work. There’s the person who knows the old shopfronts, the one with the family photos, and the one who has spent years in the council archives. This week Suburb Historian started treating a study the same way, as something a few people build together. On the walking side, the iPhone app got ready to leave TestFlight.
For historians: invite people into your study
A study can now be shared. The new Share dialog in the workspace lets you invite someone by email, and they can then edit the study alongside you. Shared studies show their owner’s name in your studies list. The person you invite gets an email with a link straight to the study, and replies go to you. If they don’t have a Story Trail account yet, the link takes them to sign-up and the invite waits for them. You can resend or cancel a pending invite from the same dialog, and it expires after 30 days. Collaborators can leave a study whenever they like, and only the owner can invite or remove people.
Studies also got easier to look after. You can rename a study, delete one that’s still empty, and move a trail from one study to another. If you’d rather work from your own notes than from AI research, you can start an empty study and add trails by hand. Stopping a study partway through no longer counts as a failure. It keeps its place, and you can pick it up later on the research review screen, with no research paid for twice.
For historians: a QR code poster for every published trail
Every published trail can now print a QR code poster. The code opens the trail’s public page with any phone camera, so a poster in the library, the historical society rooms, or a café window is a way into the walk. Once the apps handle app links, the same poster will open the trail in the app. On the Story Trail side, a trail that has gone back to draft is now hidden from its public link, so an old poster can’t keep showing a trail its author has unpublished.
For historians: a workspace that fits the window, and your phone
The region workspace has a new layout. The study and trail pickers fold into a breadcrumb above the map, and the page now fits the window: stops on the left, the map in the middle, and the trail overview or the selected stop’s details on the right. Pins are numbered, clicking one selects that stop, and the map now centres on the selected stop every time, even when it was already on screen. On a phone the map sits on top with a sheet underneath, and you move through the levels one at a time with a Back button. Before, the columns were squashed until trails were cut off and the map ended up off screen.
Stops that the address lookup couldn’t find got two fixes. Research often names places descriptively, like “560 Church Street, Richmond VIC (Bryant & May Factory)”, and the lookup used to give up on them. It now tries simpler versions of the name first and rejects any match more than 30 km from the suburb. 40 of 55 stops that had previously failed now resolve, and they’ve had their approach stories drafted too. For places that no longer exist anywhere on a map, like “site of the former Orbost railway station”, you can now choose Place on map and click where the stop belongs. You can also paste in coordinates or a Google Maps link.
Smaller things from the same week:
- Photo candidates are saved as photo search finds them, so thumbnails appear while the search is still running. A grey “photos found” badge now sits alongside the green “photo chosen” one.
- Clicking a candidate opens a larger preview before you choose it.
- Saved paragraph breaks in narratives now show up.
- “Set as trail hero” works again for Wikimedia Commons photos.
- Searching for “Williamstown, Victoria” no longer drags “Victoria” into the suburb name.
- If you’ve blocked location, there’s now a button to try again instead of a warning that never goes away.
For walkers: honest distances, and getting ready for the App Store
Every trail card used to show ★4.5, 200 metres per stop, and ten minutes per stop. None of it was real. The rating is gone. The distance is now the sum of the distances between stops, in order. The time assumes an easy 4.5 km/h walk plus three minutes at each stop, rounded up to the nearest five minutes. That’s a much better guide to whether a walk fits between lunch and a nap. Distances are shown in kilometres everywhere. The iPhone app, the Android app, and the website all now work out these numbers the same way.
Behind the scenes, the iPhone app is getting ready for its first App Store release. Its App Store listing is drafted, it declares what it stores in a privacy manifest, and it targets iPhone. It also now installs on iOS 26.0 and later, not only 26.5, which brings in walkers who haven’t updated in a while. The AR Board Lab testing tool is now visible only to admins. Sharing walk diagnostics from Profile stays open to every tester.
Deleting your account in the walking apps now deletes your data as well. Your progress and completed trails are removed with the account. If you’ve written trails, they stay up for the families walking them, and your name is removed from the author credit.
Under the hood
AR now lives only in the iPhone and Android apps. The old in-browser AR and VR viewers have been removed from the website, the first step towards making the web a place to browse and preview trails before you head out with the app. The GPU box that generates 3D models had a habit of switching itself off for being idle while a long job was still running. It now counts a running job as busy, even when the worker is too busy to answer. The 3D and Animate tabs now keep checking a job’s status for up to a minute before reporting a failure. AI writing assists sometimes saved their raw reply, formatting marks and all, as the story. All of them now share one parser.