News & Updates

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.

TimeStory now has a version for the iPad! Containing almost the full feature set of the Mac app, TimeStory iPad Edition has been designed and built to fit the modern iPad experience, from touchscreen gestures to toolbar and menu layout, from Apple Pencil to Magic Keyboard, from Split View to Stage Manager.

Timelines can be moved freely between the Mac and iPad editions, including via Handoff. You can even open the same document stored on iCloud Drive on both at the same time. There is no difference in file format; every timeline document will look the same on either platform. Going forward, all major new TimeStory features will arrive on both editions at around the same time, and they will always remain fully compatible.

The iPad edition is a single download from the App Store, and can be used two different ways:

• Just need a read-only companion to the Mac app? Use it for free to open, view, or export any timeline document, including all Handoff and iCloud functionality.
• Want to use your iPad to create and edit timelines as well? Unlock these features with an in-app purchase. (This is separate from the Mac app, which remains an up-front purchase.) There’s a free trial available, and you can choose a one-time in-app purchase to unlock it forever, or an annual subscription to pay one year at a time. Learn more on the Get TimeStory page.

An iPad version has been in our plans since day one, and it’s exciting to finally have arrived! Go check it out!

We’re starting off the new year with version 3.5.3 and a couple of bug fixes! One of the bugs affected the point icon picker; the other caused select SVG icons to draw incorrectly, covered with shapes and such that the icon designers had intended to be hidden.

I also neglected to post here back in November, when I released 3.5.2. That one fixed a couple of bugs which only affected very specific cases, one causing timeline editing to fail on certain OSes when your timeline header was hidden, the other causing certain users to see the wrong default template when they did a simple File > New.

Most of these issues were found with the help of customer bug reports; as always, thank you for taking the time to drop me a note!

V3.5.1, which I released yesterday, Halloween, in between handing candy out to kids, fixed a few bugs. Some of them had to do with changes in Sonoma I didn’t handle correctly; some of them had been wrong before Sonoma. They were all cosmetic, dealing with how timelines looked or how parts of the app looked; there are no functional changes in this build.

V3.5, released last week, was all about one key feature: adapting automatic title colors as they pass over different backgrounds. The original automatic option just picked one color for the whole string; it tried to pick the best one, based on what was behind it, but if your text passed over a mix of light and dark backgrounds, it would always end up less readable (or unreadable) for part of it. Text now changes colors within the string.

With this in hand, the app was then also able to relax some of its rules prohibiting text from flowing out of a span event (which usually contrast with the document background), so you’ll now also see fewer cut-off span-event titles as you scale down!

Find examples and details in the full 3.5 release notes.

Two key new features: weekend colors, to help you manage and view your day-by-day project timelines, and the ability to visually connect images to the events they’re attached to. You’ll also find some bug fixes and smaller changes; check out the full 3.4 changelog for details!

I released version 3.3.2 yesterday evening. People with large timelines might notice a visibly smoother and faster experience; people exporting CSVs to open in Excel won’t run into messed-up characters if they use Excel’s default settings; and there are a couple more small updates.