Navigating the Timeline

A TimeStory document, at its core, consists of events assigned to dates on a horizontal timeline, with the past to the left and the future to the right. There isn’t a “start” or “end” to a timeline; regardless of how large your document already is, you can always scroll to any date you want, and there are a variety of tools to get around quickly and intuitively.

Scrolling Through Time

Move your view around a document using normal Mac scrolling gestures and mouse movements, including trackpad gestures and arrow keys.

At the bottom of each document window is a strip of buttons called the Time Scroller. This lets you easily navigate through time with your mouse, scrolling to the left or the right in smaller or larger increments. (Use View ▸ Time Scroller to show or hide this control.)

Panning with the Hand Cursor

Press and hold the space bar to activate panning—the mouse cursor will change into a hand icon, and you can click and drag the document around, as an alternative to using the scrolling controls. Release the space bar to stop panning.

Jumping to a Specific Date

To quickly move to a date, choose View ▸ Go to Date (or press the G key). This prompts you to type in a date; you can enter a specific date, a year number, or just a year and month, and the timeline will scroll horizontally to this location.

Jumping to Today’s Date

Using the Highlight Today feature, you can quickly locate today’s date. When you show or hide the highlight, using the Today button on the toolbar or View ▸ Highlight Today, the document will scroll it into view if it’s off screen.

Navigating by Event

You can step through each event in your timeline in order. Use the Navigate Events buttons on the toolbar, or Events ▸ Go To Event ▸ Earliest Event and its neighbor items, to jump to the first or last event, or to the next or previous one relative to your current location.

Using Bookmarks

To make it faster to jump around large timelines, you can bookmark any event for quick access. Use Events ▸ Bookmarks ▸ Bookmark Event to set or clear a bookmark on the selected event, or use that event’s context menu.

Bookmarked events show up in the Bookmarks menu. Selecting a bookmark selects that event and scrolls the timeline to make it visible. In some cases, it might even make sense to create point events purely to serve as bookmarks, to jump to known dates where an event doesn’t already exist.

(Note that if a bookmarked event is hidden, because its section is collapsed or hidden or because it’s been filtered out, that bookmark can’t be used, and will be inactive in the menu.)