Zhenyi Tan And a Dinosaur

Time Capsule is Dead. Long Live History Book.

This is also a TestFlight announcement post.

Last year, I wrote an app called Time Capsule. Time Capsule saved the entire webpage (including JavaScript/CSS/images) on your devices. There weren’t enough people interested in the app, so I killed the project.

In hindsight, Time Capsule had a few glaring issues:

  1. Web archiving is a niche thing, especially on mobile. Very few people want to save the entire webpage, especially if the saving process is slow.
  2. The saving process is slow. Because the app needs to fetch all the resources, base64-encode everything, and merge them into an archive file. And there are a lot of resources to process.
  3. The archive files were huge. Who would’ve thought an average webpage with an article is about 10MB?
  4. The sync requires a $3/month subscription. I need to rent a sync server to do cross-platform sync. It’s an ongoing cost, and the only way to cover that is to charge a subscription.

It’s not even a good business plan because most paid users will be the people who save tons of data. $3/month may not be enough to break even.

I still like the idea of saving webpages for full-text searching, though, so I gave it another go and created History Book.

Hopefully I got it right this time.

By default, History Book automatically saves webpages as you browse. And it only auto-saves pages that contain an article, so you don’t have to worry about it saving your sensitive data.

Like Safari’s Reader Mode, it extracts and only saves the “meaningful” text. As a result, the saved pages have no ads and are small enough to store in Core Data and sync via CloudKit.

Unlike Time Capsule’s share extension, History Book’s web extension can save pages that require login because it doesn’t need to load the page again in a separate window.

It uses iCloud for storage and sync. Meaning no ongoing server cost. Meaning no subscription.

History Book will be a paid app that costs $5.99 - $9.99 (I’m still deciding) and it will be available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I thought about making it free with an in-app purchase to unlock everything, but I don’t know how to cut features without making it crappy.

If you’re interested in beta testing History Book, send me an email or DM me your email on Mastodon, and I will invite you to the beta.

Update: History Book is out!