Version 3.2 brings a great new feature for many common timeline styles, enables autosaving and some iCloud features, and fixes some important bugs.
Setting Event Colors by Section
For a simple, consistent look, you can now set up a standard event color for a section, and have that color automatically applied to any event created in or moved into that section. You can set events to match the section header color, or give events their own, separate color, and you can configure point and span events separately.
The built-in document template named “Colorful Weekly” now uses this feature; create a new document from that template and check it out!
Autosave
MacOS autosave is now enabled by default for TimeStory. If you quit (or if the app crashes), all your documents (including untitled, never-saved drafts) will still be there when you reopen it. This also enables version browsing and the File > Revert To submenu, and rearranges several other menus (e.g., Save As is replaced by Duplicate).
For those of us who still prefer the old ways, you can go into TimeStory’s preferences and turn off autosaving; the app will now behave just as it always has.
Combine iCloud with autosaving, and you now have automatic sync of your documents between your Macs. Open the same document in iCloud Drive on two different computers, edit one of them, and a few seconds later, after the file syncs over, that edit will appear on the other screen.
Smaller Features
If you’re logged in to iCloud and use iCloud Drive, you’ll now see a TimeStory folder there, and have the standard macOS options to move your documents to iCloud. (Prior to this, you could always use iCloud Drive for your documents, but there was no special support.)
If you have a section containing some subsections which are hidden, you can now click on that section and use the new Un-Hide All Subsections menu item to reveal them all. (This is a small thing, but many people use hidden subsections to remove completed subprojects or hide archived research, and this makes it much quicker to pull those back into view.)
You can now start a CSV import by simply dragging a CSV file into your timeline window.
Bugs fixed
The app could crash if you typed in an unrecognized date into the Inspector and then, without clicking anywhere else or hitting Return, clicked on the calendar button next to it. (My code didn’t correctly handle showing the error message and calendar picker on the same field. Apologies to anyone who ran into this!)
There was a case where someone created a timeline, saved it, and couldn’t open it again because TimeStory said the file was corrupt. (They sent me the file, and I was able to recover it for them, and add the corresponding recovery code into 3.2. If you have any old TimeStory files which you couldn’t open, try opening them with 3.2. Any file saved by any version since 1.0 in 2019 should always open just fine in the very latest version.)
If you added a point event icon from a PNG or JPEG file, and then overrode its built-in color using the color picker in the Inspector, then printed it or generated a PDF export, it would show up as just a colored square on that printout or PDF file.
The Point Event Icons window didn’t properly handle keyboard tab navigation between its areas.
If you have a document with sections, and you run CSV Import from a file with no section column or with empty section values, the import dialog would say it had imported all events, but any events without assigned sections would actually be lost. The app now correctly assigns them to a default section if they don’t specify one in the file.
CSV Import did not respect your document’s default event style, and always used a built-in default.
When placing a new event, or dragging an existing one, it was possible to drag it into a collapsed section. This worked fine, but looked confusing, as the new event would seemingly disappear until you expanded the section.
