The four Life Line views

The four Life Line views

Life Line is the one part of my-id.ca you do not have to fill in. It reads what is already in your account and draws it as a timeline.

Life Line overview introduces the idea. This page covers the views themselves and what the insights are telling you.

Where the events come from

Life Line does not have its own database. Every point on the timeline is projected from something you already have:

Two consequences follow. First, a fuller profile makes a better Life Line — a sparse timeline usually means sparse data, not a broken feature. Second, you fix mistakes at the source: every event has an Edit at source action that takes you to the document or profile field it came from. There is nothing to correct inside Life Line itself.

Events are grouped into categories — birth, work, education, family, health, travel, achievement, document, other — and each category has its own colour, used consistently across all four views.

The four views

Chronograph

One clean horizontal axis, with semantic zoom: pull back to see your whole life, zoom in to a single day. Use it when dates matter — checking whether one thing really did precede another, or reading a dense stretch of a single year.

Subway Map

Each thread of life gets its own lane: work on one line, family on another, travel on a third. This is the recommended starting point — it is the most readable of the four and the easiest to filter down.

River of Time

A vertical flow where your years run downstream as glowing moments. Less precise, better for reading your history as a narrative rather than auditing it. Good on a tall screen.

Constellation

A 3D night sky where every event is a star; drag to orbit. The most exploratory of the four — better for noticing clusters and relationships than for looking anything up.

All four are drawing the same data. Switching views changes how it reads, never what it contains. If a view struggles on your device, you can drop back to a simpler one; the app offers the fallback for you.

If you have reduced-motion enabled in your operating system, Life Line honours it and stops the ambient animation.

The insights panel

The Life Line landing page summarises your timeline:

• Age and span — the range your recorded history covers
• Events — how many are on the timeline
• Categories — how many different threads of life are represented
• Busiest — your most eventful year

Underneath, it flags the "so what":

• ⚠️ "X expires in N months" — a document with an expiry date coming up within six months
• 🔴 "X has expired" — already past its date
• "Quiet stretch — nothing recorded 2014–2017" — a gap of two years or more
• Your biggest year

The expiry flags are the practical payoff. A passport or permit that lapses quietly is an expensive problem; seeing it on a timeline months ahead is how you avoid it. If a flag surprises you, click through to the source and check the date is right.

Getting more out of it

• Fill in dates you skipped. Employment start and end dates, education years, document issue dates — each one is a point on the timeline and a field autofill can use later.
• Treat quiet stretches as a to-do list. A three-year gap usually means records you never got around to storing, not three years where nothing happened.
• Check the expiry flags every few months. That is the whole feature, in one habit.

Related

• Life Line overview
• Keep your profile accurate
• Calendar and Google Calendar sync