v3 Beta Update
Thursday, February 17, 2011
I wanted to give you some updates on the Timeline 3D (v3) beta:
We are now accepting pre-orders from all customers who purchased Timeline 3D between 2005 and 2010. We started sending out invitations to our class of 2010 this afternoon.
Several hundred people have been trying out the beta. We have already fixed most of the bugs that customers have reported.
We have decided to provide a free v3 upgrade to everyone who became a Timeline 3D customer in 2011. Once we officially launch the software, we will send new license codes to you via e-mail.
Our worst bug: About 1% of our v3 customers are experiencing problems when they try to register the software. It appears that some of these cases are specific to Leopard and I am working to fix that bug. In other cases, it may be a conflict caused by 3rd party software that changes the way that files are written to disk (3rd party security or search software for example). If you are experiencing this kind of problem, please contact us and we will ask you to provide information on your particular configuration so that we can narrow down these conflicts.
We have not set an official launch date yet, but it will probably be sometime in March. We will let you know as soon as we can commit to a specific date.
Thanks to all of you for your support. This beta process has been going very well so far and we couldn't do it without you.
17 Comments:
Having just installed the latest beta it seems I have been bitten by the registration bug. Entering the new key either manually or via the website link results in my beta being in "Trial Mode", the most noatble problem with being in trial mode is the inability to save my work...
WELL THIS IS GREAT! After 2 hours of uninstalling then reinstalling this product for my daughters project that is due tomorrow (it is now 1 a.m.) I guess that I have to start all over again!!!!! Why did you not just post on your site that you are having registration problems???? Maybe then I would not have spent $65. bucks on a product that is now worthless to me and I would not have wasted the last four hours of my life
I got the registration bug, as well, which is very disappointing. I wish that this had been worked out before the program was available for purchase.
Mike and Julia - I am sorry that you were inconvenienced and frustrated by the registration bug. It should be fixed as of a release that was published 7 days ago (3.0b19).
As soon as we had about 4 or 5 e-mails from customers regarding this bug, we realized it wasn't an isolated incident and began to ask these customers for information on their setup (since it didn't affect our own computers, or most of the beta customers). At this point, I also published this blog post describing the bug.
When we received log files from 3 of these customers I was able to see the pattern of error messages and had the problem solved, fixed, and published within 24 hours of receiving that information. We confirmed that this update fixed the issue for everyone who had e-mailed us.
I am always disappointed when we ship a product with a serious bug like this. I don't want to let anyone down. However, this is why we are doing a beta period, because some of these bugs only show up when a few hundred people are using the software. Thanks to those customers who sent us helpful e-mails and logs files, we were able to fix it quickly.
If you anyone is still having problems, first make sure you are updated to the latest version. If that doesn't resolve it, please send Elise an e-mail describing the problem. We'll do our best to help you and the information you provide can help us track down some of these trickier bugs.
When using the search function is it not possible to jump to the location of the first match rather than having to scroll all over the place (particularly on timelines which have an extended date range)?
Russ, it doesn't work that way now, but that is good feedback. Thanks!
if the bug has been fixed and the update has been launched, why is this still not working for me? don't know about any one else but when I install update from timeline 3d menu it tells me that I am running the newest version which is version 2.11.8 CAN SOMEONE PLEASE FIX THIS????
can someone please tell me why I can not play any of the timeline3d tutorials. It says that the plug in is missing...... does that mean I need to download a plug in or the site is missing a plug in??
Mike, please send Elise an e-mail (elise@beedocs.com) for help with these issues. It is hard for us to provide support via blog comments. Thanks.
Hi Adam, I have been emailing back and forth with Elise since Thursday, with no success.
Hi Adam. Did you succeed with adding the tagging feature to version 3?
Yes, tagging is in v3 as demonstrated in the MILOfest video from 2009. There are no tools for managing tags in bulk, but you can enter tags in each event and search by tags. When you search by a tag, those events are automatically selected so that you can modify those events together or export a movie that pauses on the events matching a tag.
Also, when you publish to the web, you can search by tags in the web browser.
A useful feature would be the ability to make a date "circa". Sometimes we don't know the exact date, and having that visible on the timeline (by having a fuzzy ending rather than a sharp line) would be nice.
etherflyer - Yes, you can label your event dates as "circa" using custom date labels. Please see this blog post:
http://blog.beedocs.com/2011/01/v3-custom-date-labels.html
Adam, that's good but not quite what I wanted.
Suppose there's a king who was born about 270 BC and died in 212 BC. The death date is definite, the birth date approximate. I'd like a way for the two endpoints of the event line to look different. At the moment the event has just a line — I'd like to be able to have one end fade out, to indicate (visually) that that part of the timeline was approximate.
Ethen, I understand. You could list the date with a range of "circa 270 BC —212 BC" but if you want to customize the lines you will need to export the chart as a PDF or image file and then use a 3rd party application to do that.
I couldn't animate that altered chart in 3D, though, which is what I'd like to do.
Call this a feature request: the ability to specify different markers for the beginning/end of a timeline. I can see three obvious choices: none (what we get now), fade in/out, and a short vertical tick at the end of the line.
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