I’m Making a New App
Long time no see! If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know about this: I’m making a new app. It’s called History Book, and it automatically saves the content of your browsing history for full-text searching later.
A lot of my searches are looking for things I’ve seen, so…
By default, History Book only saves “readable” webpages, so you won’t see pages like www.google.com littered around. You can also configure it to save every webpage or disable autosave altogether.
The app uses a Safari extension to save webpages, so it only works if you use Safari as your main browser.
There are no “Trash” or “Archive” folders because I don’t want to impose any folder structure on you. (Initially, the app didn’t even have folders.) But you can create and name any folders however you like.
Also, if a saved webpage contains an embedded YouTube video, History Book will replace it with a minimal HTML <video> tag. Because uhh, why not.
Caveats
- The app uses readability.js to check whether a webpage is “readable” and extract the text. It is likely to produce both false positives and false negatives.
- The app is written in SwiftUI, which means there are some not-quite-standard behaviors and UI bugs that I can’t fix.
- For privacy reasons, I’m using iCloud for syncing. I’m a bit worried about the reliability, though.
I’m now putting the finishing touches on the CloudKit stuff, and I should announce a TestFlight very soon, so stay tuned!