News & Updates

This quick update fixes one bug introduced in 3.8 and 1.4. For people using certain language and region settings on their Mac or iPad, picking a date in the Inspector could actually crash or hang the app. Apologies for missing this in my code and testing, and thanks to the customer who emailed me with the bug report!

TimeStory 3.8 and TimeStory iPad Edition 1.4 are now out! There are improvements across the apps, including a new light theme for iPad, a new dark icon for iPadOS 18, and small bug fixes throughout. People making timelines of ancient history or prehistory will find the biggest change in capabilities, with a vastly expanded date range and improvements to the entry and display of dates. Check out the full (and rather long) release notes for full details.

This update to both apps adds file-level password protection for sensitive timelines. Just choose File > Set Password, give the file a password, and it will encrypt your file’s contents on disk and require that password to open that file in the future. This can be useful when sending sensitive or personal information to others, or storing it on a computer or cloud service that others might have access to. (Take care not to lose your passwords though; there’s no way to recover one!)

It also fixes a few bugs on each platform. Have a look at the release notes for details!

TimeStory iPad Edition V1.2 is now out! This adds new haptic feedback and hover features for supported hardware, like the new Apple Pencil Pro. It’s a nice improvement to pencil-based timeline editing! V1.2 also brings some other smaller improvements, and fixes some important bugs.

Find full details in the release notes!

TimeStory recently received a great review on Lifehacker; go check it out! Thanks to reviewer Justin Pot, who took the time to learn and use the app and write a thoughtful review.

He’s been reviewing a variety of focused indie apps; make sure to scroll through his other articles and check them out as well!

Version 1.1 of the iPad edition is now out! This version adds CSV import and export, so you can move event data to and from other apps. It also adds support for configuring a timeline’s date format and language, overriding the system settings. (These are all features in the Mac edition already.) It also fixes a a few bugs found in 1.0. Find full details and screenshots on the Release Notes page!

Version 3.6.2 of the Mac edition is now out. This picks up a few CSV import/export updates, to support more event fields in the CSV file, along with an SVG icon compatibility fix. It also adds a link under the Help menu to a new page about the iPad Edition, to help Mac users learn about it. Full release notes here!

Today, on the TimeStory YouTube channel, there are two new introductory videos. Each one covers the basics of navigating a timeline and adjusting its timescale and zoom level, one for the Mac edition, and one for the iPad edition.

By scripting and recording these videos back-to-back, I was able to make sure to cover the same features, with the same demo document, making them a nice way to compare the two and see how the same basic concepts were fit into each platform’s way of doing things. I hope to produce future videos in the same way, and hope these will be useful to people evaluating or learning the two editions.

Version 3.6.1 of the Mac edition has been released. A customer reported a crash; after some investigation, it turns out that the last couple of versions of macOS (after 14.2.1) contained a change (made by Apple) which reacted badly to some code in TimeStory. You would only have seen this crash if you ran TimeStory 3.6 on macOS 14.3 or newer, and your document contained sections, and certain other conditions were met, and it appears not to have affected most users.