It wasn’t so long ago that I reviewed Bee Docs’ Timeline application. In case you didn’t catch that review, it followed my general survey of OS X timeline applications and I found it the winner for the ease of use and the outstanding final product. I still use it often in my day job to great result.
Timeline is the brain child of Adam Behrenger. I have to admit I love using software developed by small companies like Adam’s. As a user, I know my comments and suggestions are going directly to the guys writing the code. As a result, the software seems tighter and you can feel the sense of pride in the final product that you often don’t get with software designed by committee.
As an example of this, Bee Docs has recently released Timeline 3d. The big difference with this new version is 3d presentation. A universal problem with using timelines is that you either have to dumb it down to a minimum number of events, or it gets too crowded and difficult to read. This is especially true when rendering in two dimensions. Adam came up with a way to take your timeline to 3 dimensions by virtually tilting it on your screen.

Once you drop your timeline into presentation mode you can press the spacebar that essentially tilts the timeline at an angle in a perspective view. You can then see much further down the page. It all looks very impressive, like something right out of CNN. You can then manually move forward or backward down the timeline and it advances the page and three dimensionally pops out the current event of focus.
These very advanced effects are stunning. Just a few years ago, this would have required some serious programming mojo. Using Timeline 3d, you just press the space bar.
Timeline 3D also will export your timeline to Keynote. It doesn’t draw out the animations but does allow you to snap between each step in your three dimensional timeline. I haven’t had an opportunity use this in the trenches yet but I’m thinking I’ll probably just leave the timeline active in Timeline 3D and command tab to it from Keynote when necessary. I like the more fluid transition and the ability to easily go backward and forward.
Timeline 3D can be found at beedocuments.com and is sold as a separate product from the standard Timeline application. You can download a trial and, if you have use for this sort of thing, I strongly recommend you give it a try. The standard edition costs $40 while the 3D version costs $65. There also is an excellent video at the BeeDocs website explaining how he came up with the idea for Timeline 3D on the Beedocs blog.

This week I’m reviewing a timeline program. Now I know right now a lot of people are rolling their eyes but I love timelines. I actually get excited about them. I think I like timelines because they are visual and a lot of times you see relationships and ideas on a timeline that don’t jump out at you any other way. Until recently I always made timelines using brute force and even on occasion (Dare I say it?) graph paper and a pencil! This changed when a reader and friend turned me onto an excellent application for OS X called, Timeline published by Bee Docs.
Timeline is a simple little application that does nothing but make quick, jaw-dropping timelines. My review is of version 2.0 that just recently was released. When you first load up Timeline, it presents a simple interface that allows you to pick a theme (I like gradient style “Pleather” theme) and a data source which can be any one of several applications or your own custom data set. Setting up a new Timeline is that simple.

Choosing the custom option allows you set up your own timeline that can cover the past 10,000 years or the past 10 minutes. Each entry is made by simply hitting the little “plus” sign and filling in your data. The data can include much more than the obligatory name and date fields. It also supports date ranges, description, photos, and links. This gives you the ability to easily create rich timelines with little work. One of my favorite parts of this is how the program makes room for every entry. Before Timeline, I always found it tedious when I decided to add an event to a timeline and ended up having to scooch everything over to to make it fit.

As an example I prepared a timeline for a client on a dispute I’m involved with where I included images of key contracts and letters throughout a transaction. It took me all of about ten minutes to prepare and looked very professional. Even more importantly, it was critical in conveying important information. Following the meeting I emailed a PDF of the timeline (accomplished with one click in Timeline) and the client and I still refer to it in our phone conversations.
If you don’t want to make a custom data set, Timeline will pull its data out of your iLife applications as well as a few others. Timeline even found Skitch on my machine as a source of timeline data. Using the iLife integration I made a timeline of my most recently played iTunes songs, birthdays from my address book, and photos from iPhoto. I was able to incorporate photographs and links with almost no effort.

The software developer, Adam Behringer, is a fellow Mac enthusiast with whom I’ve been trading email. Adam explained he turned software developer when Apple released OS X. He has now released version 2.0 which adds all the picture and link goodness I descried above. Adam explained the vision for Timeline has always been to create an application where the Timeline can be generated as fast as the entries are discussed and he has succeeded brilliantly.

This application would be useful for more people than geeky lawyers though. I can see this being used in education, business, marketing, and anything else that requires either future planning or summarizing past events. You can download a trial of Timeline at www.beedocuments.com. There is also a very nice (and short) video demonstration. A full license will cost you $40. However, the developer has generously given a discount code for MacSparky readers. If you type the code MACSPARKY at checkout, you will get 15% off. This discount is good through the end of January 2008.
——-
You can listen to the above review on The Mac ReviewCast Episode 139.

Technorati Tags:
MacSparky, timeline