What Is a Time Capsule
Update: I have put the development of Time Capsule on hold because there’s not enough interest. Sorry!
It’s a bit hard to explain what Time Capsule is in an easy-to-understand sentence, but it’s like a… time capsule for web pages. In more technical terms, it saves web pages as HTML files with all the assets embedded. You can then search and view your saved pages, even without an internet connection.
It solves 2 problems:
You’re trying to remember an article you saw a while ago, and your Google-fu didn’t turn up anything.
You want to save pages that are unlikely to be crawled by the Wayback Machine, such as social media posts.
Now you might ask, “Surely there are existing apps that do this, so why making your own?” Because my app is same-same but different, and don’t call me Shirley:
Instapaper and Pocket are “read later” apps, Time Capsule is more like a “usefulness later” app. They’re also not optimized to save non-article pages like Stack Overflow questions or GitHub Gists.
Pinboard with the archive account subscription is pretty close to what I want. But it doesn’t have a first-party iOS app.
The Wayback Machine is like a public library; Time Capsule is like your personal book collection.
Safari’s Reading List won’t let you search the content of the saved pages.
I never really tried Evernote. I tend to avoid big, VC-funded apps, if only for privacy reasons. At a glance, it seems like it does too much (Note-taking! Document scanning! Organizing your zen garden!), and I want something simpler.
The Time Capsule iOS app is free. Optionally you can enable sync, share your saved pages, and desktop browser usage with a $3/month subscription. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and it’s pretty good.