TimeStory 2.3 Release Notes

October 30, 2020

Hiding All Dates

When presenting a timeline, you may want to show the visual layout and relative sizes and orderings of events, while omitting specific dates. This can help focus conversations during early planning or while scoping out uncommitted projects.

With version 2.3, simply choose View > Hide All Dates, and TimeStory will remove the time index across the top and any dates automatically added to event titles (if enabled), and won’t even show the date tooltip as you drag or resize events. (If you enabled vertical gridlines, you still have those to help you visualize weeks, months, or however you set them up.) The dates still exist—every event is saved in the document with a concrete date—they just aren’t visible.

Panning around the document

Press and hold the space bar to enable the panning tool. The mouse pointer will become a hand; click anywhere on the document to grab it and drag the document around. This can be quicker and easier than using the scroller controls, gestures, or arrow keys.

(In the above video, you can see when the spacebar was pressed and released by when the mouse pointer turned into a hand and then reverted.)

Filtering by section

If you maintain timelines with many parallel sections, and use the Event Filter to filter down your document, there’s a new syntax that lets you filter down to specific sections, or to sections whose names match a given term. Combine this with the other filtering options, like event titles, event dates, and Boolean operators, to quickly zoom in and see just what you want.

Have a look at the filtering help in the updated User Guide for full documentation on this feature.

Preferences, including new Paste and Match Style default

When pasting text into TimeStory, it will now by default just paste in that text, not any fonts or colors copied from the origin.

This operation used to require choosing Paste and Match Style; it’s now the default behavior for plain old Paste. If you want to keep the copied styling, just choose the new command Paste and Keep Style.

If you prefer it the old way, however, the new Preferences dialog offers an option to switch it back. This new Preferences feature also collects and exposes a couple of other settings.

Configurable “Today” line width

This is a minor change, but one requested several times: you can now adjust the Today highlight line’s width. This is especially useful to increase visibility when presenting documents on screen, or when using a light highlight color with vertical gridlines enabld.

Grouping sections into subsections

Extending the subsection support introduced in 2.2, you can now select one or more sections and group them together, making them subsections of a new, higher-level section.

This new feature makes it much easier to restructure existing section layouts, or to start using subsections in existing documents. See Working with Sections in the 2.3 User Guide for more details.

Other fixes and improvements