TimeStory 1.6 Release Notes

Events which keep up with today’s date

To show an ongoing or current event, you can now set an event’s end date to “today”, and ask TimeStory to keep it updated as today’s date changes. You can also create a point-in-time event which tracks today’s date.

Just type =today into the Inspector for the corresponding date field. TimeStory will follow the date, updating your document around midnight or whenever you next open it.

Multi-touch (pinch to zoom) for time scales

If you have a trackpad, you can now use the two-finger “pinch” or “expand” gesture to smoothly adjust the time scale up or down.

(The existing methods, using the toolbar buttons or the menu, still work as before.)

Automatic text colors for events and section headers

Select “Automatic” as the color of an event title or section title, and TimeStory will automatically select black or white based on the background it’s being presented over. This takes into account your document background, your section background, the graphic color, and where your title is positioned.

This lets you choose your background and graphic colors more freely, and be assured that you can read your title text regardless of position.

Automatic is now the default. If you need to achieve a specific color for an event or section, you can still always pick specific colors, as always.

Refreshed color picker

The color picker has been extended, with a broader and more useful set of default colors, and with a visible selection of the current color, if any. (It also introduces Automatic for all text colors, as noted above.)

Refreshed default theme

The default theme for new documents has been refreshed, offering a cleaner and more contrasting look, and taking advantage of automatic text colors. The new default theme is visible above in the color picker screenshot.

(Existing documents will retain their current appearance. If you’d like to update an existing document to the new defaults, you can choose Style > Revert to Default Document Theme from the main menu.)

Other fixes and improvements

• The CSV Import function did not previously detect when an input event had an end date before its start date. Events like this would be “successfully” imported, but would appear as one-day span events. CSV Import now detects and rejects such rows.
• The CSV Export function previously exported point events as if they were span events with an end date one day before the start date. This has been changed; now, a point event simply has no end date. (This matches how CSV Import expects point events to be represented.)
• If the entire toolbar does not fit across the top of your window, due to the window size, previous versions produced a non-working spillover menu on the right side. This spillover menu now works as expected.
• If you selected multiple events with different dates, causing TimeStory to show the “multiple values” indicator in one or both of the Inspector’s date fields, and then entered and exited one of those fields, the Inspector would report “Unrecognized date format:”. This has been fixed.
• The Date Picker which shows when you press the calendar button next to a date input field would sometimes show the incorrect date for today’s date, due to a timezone offset calculation error in prior versions.
• When viewing a timeline labeled by Months, if you created two spans with the same end date but different start dates, and those start dates were not the first day of their respective months, the length calculation of the event was incorrect, causing the end dates not to line up.