Frequently Asked Questions

Yes! The iPad edition of TimeStory is now available on the App Store. Support for iPhone is planned for a future update.

Yes. Any document created by the free trial for Mac, full Mac App Store version, or iPad edition can always be opened by any other current or future version.

Not currently. I rely on the App Store for payment processing and software updates. If your business requires purchases without going through the App Store, please send me an email.

There are no plans right now for any non-Apple platforms, although anything can change.

The Export function, under File, lets you save your timeline as a PDF or PNG. PDF is usually your best bet; it comes out as a single-page PDF file, which has the best display quality, can be searched, can be scaled up or down, and which preserves any hyperlinks. PNG, on the other hand, is a good choice for posting on Web sites, or for embedding small timelines or parts of timelines into other documents.

The iPad Edition can also be used, completely for free, to view any TimeStory timeline. If you want to share a timeline you've created with someone who has an iPad, just ask them to install it. They don't need to start the free trial or make any in-app purchases.

Events are assigned to dates, not times, which makes sense for most project plans and historical documents. (This also means that you can share timelines with people in other timezones without worrying about your event shifting around.) Support for hours and minutes is planned for the long term, but not presently supported.

With limitations. The iPad version doesn't support choosing dates before AD 1 in most date pickers in the current version, because it uses a standard iPadOS date-entry control with that limitation. It can freely scroll into BC and drag-and-drop events there, however. The Mac version works fine for both AD and BC date entry. Both versions, however, have a hard lower limit of 4700 BC, due to a limitation of the date functions of macOS and iPadOS. These will both be fixed in future releases; please contact support if you'd like to provide more input or get updates.

No, although this feature is under consideration for future releases.

Yes. Use Option+Return to insert a line break when editing any title. (Note that, if the title becomes too tall to fit within its assigned space, TimeStory will truncate it as needed.)

In the Print dialog, the “Fit to page(s)” option has a few features that help you tune the printout of a very large timeline, or one which is far longer than it is tall (which is common).

You can enter a number into just one of the fields; place a 1 in just the “page(s) tall” field to fix the timeline height at one page but allow it to span as many pages horizontally as you'd like. Disable page margins and switch to landscape, if desired.

If the timeline much longer than it is tall, however, the normal proportional scaling (which shrinks both horizontal and vertical equally) may be a poor choice. Make sure to set both the height and width in pages, and then enable the “Adjust time scale independently” option. With this option on, TimeStory no longer preserves the aspect ratio between horizontal and vertical, and automatically adjusts the time scale to fit.

For weekends, this is directly supported; just set an alternate weekend color in the Document Inspector! TimeStory uses your local calendar settings to figure what days are weekends (e.g. Sat/Sun, Fri/Sat, or other); you can't change this directly in the app.

For anything else, create events representing the desired time ranges, select them, and in the Event Inspector, set Time Range Highlighting Color to some value other than None. If you're on macOS Monterey or newer, you can use the Shortcuts app to make this very simple; check out this example shortcut for a starting point!