1 Comments:

 apeterson — April 28, 2013 8:48 PM

Unfortunately I find your product very frustrating to use and am on the verge of ditching it. At the moment I'm using it to try and get a better handle on the chronology of a novella I'm writing, and again and again Timeline 3D keeps throwing up roadblocks to what I wish to accomplish.

In Screen View:
I’d like to be able to define the chronological start and end points of a timeline (say, March 1, 2013 through March 30, 2013) up front, before adding any events.
I’d like to be able to set row tick mark spacing as "Days". Or even "Hours".
I’d like to be able to set a zoom level so that all my events are visible on screen at one time.
I’d like to be able to drag an event with the mouse freely along the timeline.
I’d like to be able to use date-picker and/or time-picker pop-ups for individual events. I can't. Instead I have to type them out.
Since Timeline 3D forces me to type out dates & times, I’d like it to understand that "10p" means "10:00 PM", and not force me to type out all those extra characters after pressing CAPS LOCK or holding down Shift.
I’d like to be able to right-click in a timeline & choose "New Event" from a contextual menu.
I’d like to be able to double-click in a timeline to create a new event.
Barring that, I’d like the "New Event" button closer to the timeline. Right now, on my 27" iMac, I have to move the cursor back & forth, back & forth, all the way to the top of the main window to create a new event, then all the way back down to the bottom of the main window to edit the event. Over & over, up & down. It gets tedious really fast.
While adding notes to individual events, Timeline 3D abruptly, unexpectedly, decided to repaginate the timeline and change the zoom level. One moment I had all my events, with their notes, visible on the screen. The next moment half my timeline was outside the viewing window. There was no warning, and it took me several moments to figure out what had happened, and that I had to scroll horizontally left to take me back to where I'd just been. And even then there was nothing I could do to "re-zoom".

In Print Preview:
It’d be nice if the app properly showed the aspect ratio of a piece of paper, be it landscape or portrait, at all times. Most Mac apps I use can do this. In fact at the moment I can't think of a single Mac app that doesn't. Except Timeline 3D.
It’d be nice if Timeline could preview a multi-page doc in the app, instead of forcing me to choose Print from the File menu & then click the PDF button & then choose Open PDF in Preview & even after all that Timeline 3D doesn’t know that this is now a multi-page document. Do I really have no way to see what my timeline will look like printed unless I actually hit print?

In Bulk Edit View:
I’d like to be able to re-order events by dragging them where I want manually.
It’d be nice to be able to right-click below the last event and choose "New Event" from a contextual menu.
It’d be nice to be able to hit Return and have Timeline 3D add a New Event.
It’d be nice if Timeline 3D knew that if I have an existing event highlighted that’s time & date-stamped, say, 5/2/13 8:30 PM, and I then click "Add", that the new event will automatically have the same time and date stamp. Otherwise it just means a lot of repetitive keying in of dates and times (without a time/date picker pop-up).

Do you see why I'm frustrated?
I have no doubt you’re a talented programmer, and I assume you have spirit and guts, both of which you need to be an entrepreneur. Even if I had your programming skills I couldn't do what you do. Timeline 3D is a very good-looking app, too, & I appreciate that. But it took less than an hour to come up with this list of complaints. I wish you success, but right now my allegiance (& what modest buying power I have) are up for grabs. If someone comes along with a better timeline app I'm gonna jump at it.

Thanks for hearing me out.

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