The notice board moves into AR
Two weeks since the last entry, and the thread running through most of it is Story Trail Walk’s AR mode going from an untested toggle to something a real person actually walked with — outside, on a real phone, waypoint after waypoint.
For walkers: AR navigation finds its footing
AR turn-by-turn navigation landed as a genuine alternative to the 2D follow-map: a ground path drawn onto the real street in front of you (bright for the current leg, dimmed for the rest), a marker for each waypoint, and an arrival ring that brightens as you close in. It’s a toggle away from the existing map, on any device ARKit can run on.
None of that could be properly tested until it ran on a real phone outside — ARKit’s world tracking doesn’t work in the Simulator — and the first real walk found exactly the kind of thing only a real walk finds: a crash from a nested billboard hierarchy, a mode-toggle icon showing the wrong state, content that swung around whenever the phone merely rotated in place instead of staying locked to the route, and a path that looked like it was floating up into the sky in the distance. That last one turned out not to be a bug at all — it’s just normal perspective on a line drawn 200 metres out — so after checking how Google Maps’ own Live View handles the same problem, the fix was to stop drawing that far: the ground path now only shows the near 20 metres, the way a real walking-nav app would.
With that steadied, arriving at a waypoint in AR mode now opens an AR notice board instead of falling back to the flat sheet — the photo, story, and photo credit for that stop, rendered straight into the 3D scene in front of you, anchored to the waypoint’s own position and fading out once you walk away.
The app also picked up a sense of the whole trail as one story rather than a string of separate stops: tap Start Walking and it now narrates a scene-setting intro before you’ve taken a step, using the same hold-to-wait pattern already built for arrival narration. That, plus new back/forward buttons on the dock card to retarget your current waypoint by hand — going back properly un-marks it, server-side, so it’s as if you never visited — came directly out of feedback from an actual test walk. A Walk Again button, for restarting a trail you’ve already finished, was added the same week so the new AR mode would have something to keep testing against.
One more thing worth a line on its own: TestFlight’s public join link is now confirmed working — three real installs, outside the immediate team, got through Apple’s Beta App Review. If you’ve been waiting to try the beta, that link now actually gets you in.
For historians: watching real people get stuck, and fixing it
Two structural pieces landed in the workspace. A walk score now sits at the top of every trail — a traffic-light readiness read across nine things (photos, locations, descriptions, approach text, a 3D model, a hero image, a route that doesn’t double back, sensible gaps between stops) that tells you, at a glance, whether a trail is actually ready to publish instead of needing a full read-through to find out. It’s now on the admin console too, as a system-wide green/amber/red count, and as a compact badge on a trail’s collapsed header. And the region view was reworked from a stack of tabs into four columns beside the map — studies, trails, waypoints — each collapsible on its own, so picking a waypoint and editing its location now happens on one screen instead of two.
The intro narration walkers now hear (above) has its authoring half here too: a new “Intro narration” field right under Description, closing the loop between what a historian writes and what a walker hears.
A smaller but telling pair of fixes came from watching a session recording of a friend actually using the tool: the research-review screen’s “Research Complete” heading read as “you’re done” when it’s actually a review step, so it’s now “Trails found — anything to add?”; and the button that follows it is relabelled “Continue → Write the full stories”, with a short paragraph above it explaining what the two choices actually do. A related fix from the same recording: a study’s pins now appear on the region map while the study is still running, not just once it finishes.
Suburb Historian also picked up an in-app feedback link, matching the one Story Trail Walk added this round — both routed through the same PostHog survey.
Under the hood
Analytics for the AARRR funnel landed across all three products this round — shared sign-in identity, a trail_completed event, a trail_published event — laying groundwork for understanding where people actually drop off, not shipped for its own sake. And one small calibration fix: a walk score’s “gap between stops” check now caps out at amber rather than escalating to red, since a couple of close-together waypoints isn’t the same severity as a trail that doubles back on itself.