Arrow of Time Journal

Arrow of Time is a journal that draws your days as a spiral of light. Every entry you write becomes a point on that spiral — placed by its date, coloured by which book it belongs to, brighter if you marked it. A month of entries reads as a coil. A year reads as a long ribbon running off toward the future. You can turn it, zoom into a single week, or pull back and see the whole span at once. WRITE IT DOWN, KEEP THE PICTURE Add photos and video to any day, straight from your library or from the camera. Write as much or as little as you want. Nothing has a required field and nothing nags you about a streak. TWO BOOKS A Scrapbook for the days that were mostly things — places, meals, light, people. A Diary for the days that were mostly thinking. They sit on the same spiral in different colours, so you can see at a glance what kind of year you've been having. Move an entry between them whenever you change your mind. SERIES Some things run across months: a trip, a habit, a project you keep coming back to. Group those entries into a series and they stay findable without you having to remember the date. CUT THE BACKGROUND OUT, ON YOUR PHONE Tap the scissors on a photo and the subject is lifted off its background — on your device, in a second, with no upload and no account. Drop it onto grid paper, ruled paper, punched loose-leaf, plain colour, or any background image of your own. Your own backgrounds are kept for next time. READ THE TEXT IN A PHOTO A sign, a page, a receipt, a handwritten note on a wall. Open the photo and tap Read text, and what it said is added to your entry. English and Simplified Chinese. HEAR YOUR YEAR Press play and the timeline becomes a short melody — one note per entry, pitched by where it sits on the spiral, with a different voice for each of the two books. A year of ordinary days turns out to have a shape you can hear. FULLSCREEN Hide everything but the spiral. It's still live: turn it, and tap any point to read that day. IT STAYS ON YOUR PHONE There is no account and no sign-up. Your entries and photos are stored on this device and nowhere else. The app has no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party code of any kind — only Apple's own frameworks. It works with no signal at all. If you run your own server, you can point the app at it in Settings. That's the only situation in which it makes a network request, and the destination is a machine you control. English and Chinese, switchable in Settings.