TimeStory 2.8 Release Notes

TimeStory 2.8 has been released, with a couple of key new features, a handful of fixes, and a ton of behind-the-scenes improvements.

Document backgrounds which adapt to light/dark mode

When styling a document, you now have a new option for its background color: “Use System Theme”.

If you choose this color, your document background will now automatically switch between light and dark colors, following the rest of the system (and the rest of the app, which always supported dark mode). This is especially useful if you set your Mac to automatically switch between light and dark modes.

Per-document language settings

Normally, TimeStory formats all dates, weekday names, and month names using your system’s current language and region settings from System Preferences, and updates your timeline’s display when you change them.

But sometimes you’re preparing a timeline for another audience, and want it to use their conventions, without adjusting your system settings. This is now easily done, on a per-document basis:

If you choose a language on this dialog, that’s how your document will be formatted on screen or in PDF/PNG exports. This is independent from other documents, or from your system settings, and is saved within the document itself.

Fixes and other changes

• The “Details” view is now available on section headers; the popup includes the selected section’s overall event count and date range. (Prior versions only enabled event and image details popups.)
• If you change your system’s language or region, the document now immediately updates on screen to match (unless you’ve used the new feature above to prevent it). Previously, you may have had to close and re-open the document to reflect the change.
• If an event’s title starts with an emoji, and you enable date labeling on that event, the date label now gets the correct font. Previously, it would try to copy the font from the emoji, which doesn’t work well as emoji come from a special Apple font.
• If you copied two events from two different sections and then pasted them into the same section, there would be one or more extra rows between them (because the app treated the section border as a row).
• When you duplicate an event, it no longer gets “Copy Of” pasted in front of its title. I had thought this was a good idea at the time, but it really wasn’t.
• When dragging or moving events which are attached to today’s date, the app now preserves that attachment when possible. For example, if you have a point event whose date is set to “=today”, and you drag it vertically, it remains set to “=today”. Another example is if you have a span event whose end date is set to “=today” and you drag its start date; this will no longer affect the end date.
• Fixed the drawing of certain SVGs when used as point-event icons. (Specifically, more types of embedded style information are now correctly processed. As an example, some of Twitter’s brand SVGs didn’t render correctly on the prior version, as I discovered when using them on a private timeline.)