TimeStory 2.4 Release Notes

This version adds tagging of content, summary text for images, a new span event shape, visual and usability improvements, and more!

Tagging support

You can now tag events and sections, to add small attributes and quickly filter the display.

The Inspector has a new Tags field where you can add and edit tags on sections or events, or you can also simply tag them by typing #TagName in a title or description field. TimeStory keeps track of any tags you add, and provides completion suggestions as you type. Tags can then be used in the Event Filter, as seen above, to quickly limit your display.

See Tagging in the User Guide for more!

(Note that if you have existing documents containing #-style tags in their title or description fields, they will automatically work as tags in the new version; some users have been using a similar technique for a while, and it will now just work better.)

“Jagged” span-event shapes

Span events can now be assigned “jagged” right or left ends; if you have two jagged ends next to each other, they fit together.

Tweaks to timeline presentation

This release sees a few small improvements to the overall appearance of timelines:

• Some recent bugs which could make text a little blurry (anti-aliased) have been fixed.
• Spacing around the top of the timeline, between dates, gridlines, and the first section header or topmost events, has been widened out a bit.
• The border drawn around a selected span event now follows its outline more exactly, when that event’s start or end shapes aren’t simply rectangular.
• Point events now position their title text based on the actual width of the event’s shape, eliminating extra visual gaps next to narrow point shapes.
• Event shapes are now crisper on non-Retina screens; the app adjusts the placement of certain lines based on the actual pixels available.
• Row Height can now be adjusted to smaller or larger values than before.

Info for attached images

Attached images can now be assigned a text summary (which shows up as a tooltip for the image), and you can now place the source of the image and any copyright info if you’d like. If you paste a complete image from a Web browser, TimeStory will often be able to automatically populate some of these fields.

Updates to the Mars Exploration example document

The Mars exploration timeline has been visually refreshed, but more importantly, has been updated with the successful arrivals in 2021 of the UAE’s Hope orbiter, China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter, and the US’s Perseverence rover!

This document now also uses the new tagging feature to tag each mission by country or agency (e.g., #USA, #ESA, and #India), and uses the new Image Info feature to tell you where each embedded picture came from.

Updates to the Event Details popover

Under Preferences, you can now choose to “Show the Event Details popover when hovering over an event”. This makes it behave like a tooltip: just pause your mouse over any event, and its details will appear; move your mouse away from that popover, and it disappears. (The default is still to require a keypress, like before; I welcome any input from users on this topic!)

In addition:

• The section or sections containing your event are now listed within the details
• Multi-line event titles are now presented a little more nicely, as a single line joined by “/”
• The new event tags are now shown
• If you used the keypress ? to launch the popover, just press it again to dismiss it (you can still dismiss it as before, of course, for example by pressing Esc or by clicking away)

A few other minor usability updates

• When entering full-screen mode, TimeStory can now keep the toolbar visible. Find this option on the Preferences window.
• The PNG Export dialog is now properly resizeable; you can stretch it out to see its image preview more clearly.
• The document icon has been updated to match the current app icon.

Bug fixes

Finally, 2.4 includes a batch of bug fixes:

• Images could temporarily disappear when increasing the time scale towards its maximum value (they would reappear after scrolling).
• Clicking in the Event Filter or Quick Entry bars could sometimes register as a click in the date area below them, causing unwanted date highlighting.
• If you saved a document with one time unit, then switched to another time unit, then quit without saving again, then re-opened that document, events would be temporarily misplaced. Part of the code used the last-saved time unit, while another part used the last-closed time unit.
• When selecting multiple events or sections with different descriptions, the Description field in the Inspector was just blank. It now shows “multiple values”, so you don’t accidentally edit it and replace your descriptions.
• When performing a CSV import, with column headers in the first row of the CSV, the preview table in the import dialog would skip an extra row. (The import worked fine, however.)