Timeline and Summaries

Timeline structure

The timeline is your main workspace in pinakea. Every item you’ve added — documents, web clippings, emails, notes, RSS articles — appears here in chronological order, grouped by day and then by daypart (morning, afternoon, evening, night).

This grouping gives you a natural rhythm for reviewing your content: you can see what arrived today, what happened yesterday afternoon, or what you were reading last Tuesday evening.

Smooth scrolling during heavy processing

When pinakea is processing a large batch of new or changed items, the timeline stays responsive. Updates arrive in the background without freezing or interrupting your scrolling. If you’re reading something, that content updates first. Any manual actions you take (like regenerating a summary) always take effect immediately — background processing never blocks what you’re actively doing.

What you select drives what you see

The summary pane adapts to whatever you’ve selected in the timeline:

Click a single item to see its AI-generated summary and original content side by side.
Click a day header to review summaries for the items that arrived that day.
Click a daypart to focus the timeline on that time block.
Commit a search and then click a day or daypart to focus the summary pane on matching items within that time period.

This makes it easy to zoom in and out: scan the day, narrow to a time block, or inspect one item when you need detail.

Citations and traceability

Every summary includes numbered citations linking back to the items it drew from. Click a citation to jump to that item in the timeline. Option-click (Alt-click) a citation to open the original source directly — the file, web page, or email that the item came from.

Summaries run through OpenRouter with your key. pinakea asks for Zero Data Retention routing. You pick Background and On-demand models in Settings → AI.

What counts toward the Free monthly limit

The Free monthly limit covers item-processing admissions after the trial.

Quota by plan:

Free: 30-day full-feature trial, then 15 item-processing admissions per month
Pro Monthly: unlimited item-processing admissions while active
Pro Lifetime: unlimited item-processing admissions under the lifetime terms

Processing means the AI enrichment pipeline for a new item: embeddings, AI title, automatic summary, and AI tags. Chat prompts, opening existing summaries, failed or canceled requests, Web Server, MCP, Raycast, Shortcut clipping, copy, and export do not spend the monthly processing limit. Full item summaries, tag summaries, on-demand day/daypart summaries, and uncached Clean view generation are free while monthly processing remains, but new generation pauses at monthly exhaustion. Existing cached Clean views and tag summaries remain readable.

When the limit is reached, new items remain visible and readable. Their original title and raw content stay keyword-searchable, while AI title, summary, and tag surfaces show the Free-limit placeholder until the next reset or a Pro upgrade.

For the complete list, see Paid Features.

Summary actions

Every processed item gets an automatic summary for scanning. The automatic summary is part of the new-item processing pipeline and is what appears first for a single item.

For a deeper single-item pass, use Generate full summary or press ⌘R when a single item is selected. This creates a detailed full item summary, stores it separately from the automatic summary, and does not overwrite the automatic summary.

Day and daypart summaries are on-demand summaries for a time window rather than for one item.

Automatic summaries, full item summaries, tag summaries, on-demand day/daypart summaries, and Clean view are free on all plans. Failed or canceled attempts cost nothing. Full item summaries, tag summaries, day/daypart summaries, and uncached Clean generation pause at Free monthly exhaustion, while existing cached Clean views and tag summaries remain readable. Summary generation requires an internet connection and a valid OpenRouter API key. Automatic summaries, full item summaries, and day/daypart summaries all use OpenRouter.

If regeneration is blocked for an AI/provider reason, pinakea tells you why in the summary pane and preserves any previously saved summary instead of deleting it.

Copy and export

Nothing in pinakea is locked behind the app. You can copy or export from any pane:

Copy summaries as Markdown, with or without citations
Copy original content or plain text
Export chat transcripts as Markdown, with or without source references
Drag items out of the timeline as Markdown files

These options work on every plan: Free, Pro Monthly, and Pro Lifetime.