TimeStory 3.0 Release Notes

September 26, 2022

Create and update timelines with clean, flexible new options for headers and events. Import and export CSV files with far more power. Manage your document with a more consistent and cleaner user interface. And more!

Configurable Units, Headers, and Grids

3.0 introduces a ton of new ways to customize how your timelines are labeled and divided.

A stack of four TimeStory screenshots showing a variety of timeline heading styles, including background colors, different time units, and a Chinese-language example

You still have the same five built-in views: years, quarters, months, weeks, and days, and you can still freely switch between them and scale up or down. But you can now control text alignment, give the header separate background colors, assign horizontal borders, and specify per-time-unit vertical gridlines of varying style and weight.

You can also create entirely new custom views, with your own mix of time units and label formats. A redesigned Timeline Inspector makes it just a few clicks to rearrange, add, or remove time units, or adjust their presentation.

There are new date formats to choose from (finally, including week numbers), a wide range of gridline weights, and more.

Thin Line Span Events

The new line style for span events give a great, lightweight, attractive look to busy timelines.

A screenshot of a TimeStory window with various thin-line-style events

Because their text is outside their graphics, they allow text to freely flow out and down, when you have lots to say.

Seriously. With the new header styles and the new line spans, TimeStory timelines now support totally new, fresh looks. Check them out.

More New Styling Options

You can now tell TimeStory whether to put point icons at the start or middle of a day. You can mark today’s date with a line, as before, or by filling in that day on the timline.

You can set a separate background color for the past, so you can quickly see how much of a project timeline has passed. (Today’s day, and the future, use the document’s main background color.)

You can now choose from a variety of horizontal gridline styles and mix and match them as row dividers, section dividers, subsection dividers, and so on, making your document’s structure much clearer.

And you now have direct control over the default styles used when adding new sections and events. Select an event or section and choose Style > Set as Default Style to update the defaults, and if you want, choose Style > Apply Default Style to replace the selection’s current styles with your defaults.

More Useful Templates

You can now apply a document template’s style to an existing document, in addition to using it to create new ones. You can also change which template to use, by default, for new documents, if you want to use another style by default in new files.

(This replaces the older and less-capable “exported theme” feature. If you have any older TimeStory theme files, just drag them into the Template Chooser and they’ll be converted over for you.)

Much More Powerful CSV Import and Export

You can now more easily import your CSV files and create exactly the exports you need with a thoroughly reworked CSV feature.

The new CSV import and export dialogs, showing data from a MASSIVE list of the Billboard Top Songs from the '50s through the 2010s

Section Editing

You’ll find sections nicer to work with, too. There are new menu actions, improvements to existing ones, and bugfixes, plus clearer and more consistent main and context (right-click) menus. The context menu is now also available anywhere in a section background, and not only from its header.

Specific bugs fixed include the misbehavior of “Paste Events into Section” when pasting multiple rows; specific new features include more powerful “Split Section Here” and new “Select All Sections” action, and more.

Inspector updates

The Inspector has a new, more compact layout, tidying up unnecessary titles so you can see more of your document with it open. You can now see how many events or other items are selected, at the top. Each segment of the Inspector now has its own expand/collapse button, so you can hide things you don’t care about. And several bugs were fixed, including the presentation of some fields when you have a mix of points and spans selected.

Other, smaller, features

Version 3 contains quite a few minor tweaks and improvements. Here are a couple of key ones:

Bugs fixed

Supported platforms update

TimeStory 3.0 now requires at least macOS Catalina, and includes support for the upcoming macOS Ventura.