It would be great to see my timeline on a web browser on the pc? Is something like that possible in the future?
That’s something I’d like too, but unfortunately not something that’s easily possible.
Because of Arc’s strict privacy focus, none of the data is sent to any remote servers - it’s all kept on your phone. A web based view of the timeline data would require the data to be stored on or copied over to a remote server. Which is very much against the rule of “don’t send sensitive location data off into the cloud”.
However that doesn’t make it entirely impossible, merely a lot more difficult to do. So it’s something that I’ve never given up on, and do want to make happen someday, one way or another.
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Hi matt, do you have news about web browser version? It would be so great, to see the datas on a Online timeline in the future.
Unfortunately no update on this. Right now I’m still working hard on getting Arc Editor shipped, which is the ground up rebuild of Arc Timeline, using most modern technologies. Which is now extremely close to going into public beta.
For a web interface… that’s unfortunately a much lower priority. It will become more plausible and possible over time, but I couldn’t give you any prediction for when I might be able to get started on it.
I actually remember a while ago WhatsApp had a web browser version that essentially just connects to your phone to grab all your chat history. So no data leaves your phone. Sending messages on the web browser version that sends it to your phone, which then encrypts it and actually sends it.
Personally I don’t feel very strongly about the web browser version. But I would feel better if there is an option to export a high resolution image of the timeline and map view. I suspect folks just want to see the map on a bigger screen, so it might be easier to offer users ability to export the map as an image at various desktop resolutions.
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Hah. What a hack. But… I mean, it’d work. Though I’d worry that it’d churn a lot of energy, such that iOS would punish the app later in terms of background time. Still, certainly not impossible.
Yeah that’s also my primary desire when it comes to iPad / desktop. The map views could really do with a lot more screen space to play with. And once there’s that screen space, there’s a lot more features it’d make sense to explore with the map views.
So from my perspective, I’d want the iPad / desktop app to have ideally the full data available, rather than just a flat exported image. Although yeah, just being able to export a larger map image from the iPhone app would be good too, and something that’s been on my todos for literally years 
. It’s surprisingly more technically difficult than you’d think.
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Hi @matt,
Long time no see​
I’ve used Arv Timeline for years, and still- until today, where I first got the knowledge of the new Editor Beta, and installed it right away 
Back to the this subject, are you aware of any opensource projects (to be run privately) that would be able to present all Arc data, pretty much like here in the app?
As in the chat here, I’d love to fly around in all my Arc data on my 40” screen in my private lab​
If you have any ideas, I’d be grateful to hear about them?
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Yep! @zzGordon’s web app is glorious! Well worth giving a try.
I still haven’t had a proper play with it myself. But from what I’ve seen so far he’s built something quite comprehensive.
To see the Arc timeline datas on the web would be so great and for such a feature I’m waiting so long. Is it with the Arc Diary Reader v3.0 importer possible to see the datas on the big screen?
Yes exactly - and it even looks great, so give it a try.
Said that, I personally would like to get a self hosted solution with a database and the whole thing, but think this great
Looks great, it would be great if this will show my datas automatically. That would be a great addition to the app.
Hi,
Warning: potentially incoherent mind-dump, but mostly on-topic!
Let me introduce myself. I am the developer of Arc Reader aka Arc Timeline Reader. It is primarily a Claude Code project (but also an OpenAI Codex Project when (a) Claude needs help getting out of a spiralling programming hole (b) I’ve run out of Claude Time or (c) ChatGPT is brought in as an AI consultant to audit the code base. Being in a virtual meeting with two leading AIs discussing detailed coding strategies is quite an experience! Despite this being an AI-assisted project, it has still taken months of regular and very long programming sessions to get it to the current feature set.
I am a recently retired clinical science lead, so this has been a personal project to keep up with developments in AI coding, now that I have the time! It contains every mapping feature I could think of. It even has basic trip-planning with waypoints as of a few days ago!
The Arc Reader (AR) is a HTML browser-based utility, so has to work within the restrictions imposed by browser standards. Something like a scheduler, in addition to unsupervised file access is not permitted in that environment. A big advantage of using HTML and Javascript is being able to run on any platform with a modern browser and access to the Arc backups. On Windows OS, iCloud for Windows can be used - iCloud - Free download and install on Windows | Microsoft Store . For Linux users, things get a bit more complicated with no easy path to iCloud files. Perhaps this could be a feature suggestion for Arc Editor; support main backup exports to other online locations? But how many Arc users are running Linux desktops?
Your imported timeline data never hits the internet. It is all loaded locally into your browser’s IndexedDB and other internal browser storage. It is largely sandboxed in the browser; if you switch to another browser, you have to re-import the whole timeline backup archive again. Since Arc Reader is a read-only program, that’s not really an issue.
Arc Reader supports Arc Timeline JSON exports, Arc Timeline Backup (more complete), and now Arc Editor Backups (significantly faster). During the development of Arc Reader, I think I’ve done hundreds of backup imports but finally Arc Editor Imports are fast enough that updating Arc Reader is no longer an issue (although I am working on an Apple Studio).
Arc Reader does try to optimise the process across all three formats, but since users can edit any past timeline, this is a lot more complicated (mostly for Arc Timeline Backups). Significant differences in File support between Apple Safari and Chrome-based browsers didn’t help!
I hope you find Arc Reader useful. It should be reasonably stable even for large archives. My own Arc Timeline goes back to 2013 when I originally used the MOVES App. In all those years there are only 12 missing days!
Regards
Gordon WIlliams
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Praise you Gordon, you have done an amazing job, which we’re a lot who will benefit from.
And thanks for the through update here​
I’ve got an MCP set up so that if my Claude ever needs a second opinion it can ask ChatGPT or Gemini. The experience is entirely scifi. It all gets a bit spooky at some points!
I’m still having periodic “this is all very weird” moments, even though I’m working with the AIs full time every day these days.
This is definitely on the todos! Also valuable in general - not everyone wants to pay for extra iCloud storage, while they might already have Google Drive space free or some other cloud service.
The reason why it’s siloed to only iCloud Drive at present is because of past weaknesses in the filesystem APIs for cloud storage on iOS. The third party providers have to provide their own interconnect, and when I last checked (probably a couple of years ago) none were supporting one of the required pieces.
But I’m hopeful that the landscape is different now, so that we can get out of the “iCloud Drive only” rut.
Thanks again @zzGordon for this amazing app! It’s the realisation of a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to do for many years but never had the time to even start thinking about let alone building. It’s extremely cool.
Sadly I still haven’t even had time to properly play with it. The irony of the Arc apps is I built them to satisfy some feature desires I had for old Moves app, but once I started building the apps it was such a large and ongoing task that I never got to do any of the cooler extra things I wanted, even years later. But Arc Reader realises a whole lot of them now!
I’m searching for years for such a possibility to see my Arc Timeline datas online like Arc Reader. Thanks for developing this.
It would be so great, if this would work automatically without manually Import.