Alto

A connector for Claude Desktop · v1.9.185

Alto interviews you about material you already have — a course, a novel, a research project — and builds it into an interactive, filterable timeline or outline. Cards on colored bands, chips, connection lines, detail pages using your own headings, highlights, notes and freewriting, a phone layout, and a single offline file you can send to anyone.

The suggested route: have Claude build it from your own notes, outlines or readings, then make small adjustments and revisions by hand in the page. You can build everything by hand, but Claude does the main build best. It never invents content. Alto organizes what you give it and nothing else — sparse notes make a sparse timeline, on purpose.

Download

macOS Apple Silicon — M1 and later 64 MB macOS Intel 68 MB Windows 64-bit 74 MB

Installing

  1. Download the file for your computer.
  2. Open Claude Desktop → Settings → Extensions → Advanced settings → Install Extension… and choose the file you downloaded. (Double-clicking it works too, if your system opens .mcpb files with Claude.)
  3. Restart Claude Desktop. Alto appears under Extensions.
  4. Start a chat and say “I want to build a timeline in Alto — interview me.”
Do I need to install anything else?

No. Each download carries its own copy of Python, so there is nothing to set up first. That is why the files are around 50 MB. When Claude sets up your private site, Alto fetches the official Node and Firebase command-line tools once, in the background, into its own folder (about 450 MB; nothing is installed system-wide).

Where do my timelines go?

Onto your own private Alto site — a free Firebase project that Claude sets up in your Google account the first time you build a timeline, never one of ours. You click Allow and Continue with Google in your browser; there is nothing to install or configure. Only your Google account can open what you publish there; to show a timeline to someone, you make a share link from your homepage.

Every timeline is also produced as a self-contained file you can open without any server, and it lives in ~/Documents/Alto until your site is ready. See the privacy note.

Verifying your download

SHA-256, as GitHub publishes it for the v1.9.185 assets — the same files the buttons above download.

e21582705356e2871d1ac5a7fb4f096947fdb6098b59ba207a11513ecff5ed48  Alto-macos-arm64.mcpb
f53efed2919ff6077662ac5831d1dc6eb6c75234e71b32a2f1b86a63e0a69cec  Alto-macos-x64.mcpb
48ded69975db870c3bad5aa965407d799235231c4980f7146d0f2c4170a07f1e  Alto-windows-x64.mcpb