(As I write this, our world is in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. I’m happy to be able to release this new version, and I hope you will find it enjoyable and useful. But as I do so, I am mindful of what’s actually important right now. Please take care of yourself, and of others.)
TimeStory 2.0 is here! The version increment from 1.x to 2.x signifies some key updates, as well as the beginning of a 2.x journey with some great plans in store. But, as always, the focus remains on simplicity—on the ability to capture your events with a minimum of ceremony and complexity, and refine and grow from there. Read on for the full details!
You can now illustrate your timelines with photos or other images, directly pasting or importing them into your TimeStory documents!
Images are positioned relative to events, and manipulated using direct drag and drop operations. (That presenter icon is one I drew elsewhere and pasted in; you’ll find it in the Example Document titled “Release and Rollout Plan”.)
When moving events or dates around with your mouse (or with the arrow keys), you can now freely pick any day, even when viewing your timelines in a week, month, or year view. (The start and end of each month, week, or year still act as guides, and your mouse will “snap” to them if it gets close, unless you hold the Command key).
The little date tips that show up as you drag have also been improved, including showing up even when you use the arrow keys, and the included User Guide now provides a full breakdown of dragging actions from the mouse and keyboard.
Often you’ll have a large timeline, but want to capture only a fixed part of it for presentation or sharing. When doing an image export (Export to PNG), it’s now possible to request just the visible area in the window, saving you the trouble of cropping the image or making a screenshot.
Event titles can now contain line breaks, so that you can put more details into the visible parts of your documents.
(As always, TimeStory will cut off text as needed to avoid overlapping other events, other text areas, or section headers.)
You can now choose the font used to draw date labels across the top of your document. TimeStory will use variations on this font by size and weight automatically to add other context as needed.
(Event and section title fonts were already configurable. Previously, however, this date-label area across the top was always drawn using your Mac’s system font; if you have existing documents from before 2.0, when you first open them in 2.0, they will be assigned the new default font.)
Throughout the 1.x series, TimeStory continued to use the menu layout set up in 1.0. As its capabilities grew, this buried several important tools for event and section management down inside the Edit and View menus. The menus were reorganized in 2.0 for clarity and discoverability.
