Timeline 3D - Reimagined for OS X Yosemite
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
I am pleased to announce the release and immediate availability of Timeline 3D for Mac (v5), a significant update to our award-winning timeline software for Mac OS X. Completely redesigned for OS X Yosemite, Timeline 3D provides a new interface to support the creation of larger and more complex timelines. Timeline 3D helps present chronologies and historical events in full screen and with a 3D perspective.
We also launched our new website and updated help documentation to support the new version.
I encourage you to send feedback to me at support@beedocs.com. I look forward to hearing what you think of the new version. Cheers!
New beta update: Timeline 3D v5.0 b2
Monday, November 10, 2014
This weekend, I released the second beta for the new Timeline 3D for OS Yosemite. Please replace the previous beta and give it a spin. I appreciate your feedback at support@beedocs.com!
Timeline 3D v5.0 b2 —
FIXED: Layout was crashing for 3D renders of large timelines
FIXED: Crashing bug when timelines were exported prior to naming document
FIXED: Movie export help text reflects current settings
IMPROVED: Timelines display sharper text and images when zoomed in 3D renders.
IMPROVED: Code signed so that you won’t get Gatekeeper warnings during first launch.
Labels: beta, timeline 3D, Yosemite
Timeline 3D for OS X Yosemite Beta
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Last week, Apple released OS X Yosemite and I published the first beta of new the new Timeline 3D for OS X Yosemite. After you upgrade your Mac, please try the new Timeline 3D.
www.beedocs.com/beta
The beta will be free while I iron out the bugs and put the finishing touches on the iOS 8 product that goes with it. This is a good time to send me feedback about any bugs you find.
Why the rewrite?
The new version is an almost complete rewrite of the code base (the last rewrite of this scale was the “T2” release back in 2007). I have been working on this release for about three years. Some of the features have found their way into the iOS releases during that time.
A few people asked for more details on why a rewrite was necessary. The main reason is that the iOS version and the Mac version of Timeline 3D shared about 5% of their code base and the other 95% was different for each platform. This is because the Mac version was written before iOS existed and many of it’s technologies are not available on iOS. It is difficult for me to develop new features and fix bugs when the products are completely different behind the scenes.
The new versions have about 85% of the code in common. All of the date parsing, document storage, layout, rendering, and exporting code is now common. For example, when I recently improved the way date parsing works in Chinese, that improvement was applied to both platforms.
In this effort, and also in the effort to remove my dependence on technologies that have been deprecated or fallen out of favor, I swapped out many of the core technologies for newer technologies.
Here are some of the frameworks that were major components of Timeline 3D and have now been removed:
- Core Data
- Quartz Composer
- Garbage Collection
- Quicktime
In their place, I have added modern Apple technologies such as:
- iCloud compatibility
- Auto-saving with versioning
- OpenGL
- Automatic Reference Counting (ARC)
- AVFoundation
- Sandboxing
Obviously, the user interface has changed quite a bit too. I’ve discussed some of those changes on this blog. The main idea behind the changes is to address the most common issues customers have as well and standardizing on a user interface that can scale from phones to 5k iMacs.
If you have any questions or concerns about the new version, please send me an e-mail. I realize that it will be a transition and will cause some inconvenience, but I hope that the new architecture will serve us all well for the next 5-10 years.
Labels: beta, icloud, os x, quartz composer, timeline 3D, Yosemite
Editing - New Interface for Timeline 3D
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Here is a comparison between the legacy Timeline 3D (v3) interface for editing timeline events and the new design that will be released soon for the Yosemite update. The new design gives much more space to your content and makes it easier to see and edit multiple events at the same time.
Note the new “Color Category” feature. This allows you to quickly categorize your events with a single click. The actual colors change with the theme so you can adapt your timeline to different outputs (like printing) and still retain the category information.
Labels: editing, timeline 3D, Yosemite
Development Log: Content and Presentation
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Ten years ago, Bee Docs Timeline was born out of the idea that a member of a legal team could record events as a witness was describing them and then show the resulting timeline chart to the witness for confirmation. Two main parts of this challenge appealed to me as a product designer. First, quick real-time entry of the data. Second, a clear and professional presentation of the data that did not require lots of tweaking.
Both of these activities remain central to the design of Timeline 3D. The upcoming release will have a new interface design that further clarifies and reinforces these features. In order to understand the coming changes, I first want to review the design of the software as it exists today.
Here is an image of the current version of Timeline 3D for OS X (v3.9):
The main layout of interface has stayed basically the same for the past ten years. A layout of your timeline fills most of the window. This graphical presentation dynamically adapts to the contents of your document as well as the size of the window.
Double-clicking an event reveals an edit form that allows you to add or edit information like the event title, date, and media. You are responsible for that information as well as the date formats, colors, font size, and image sizes. The software is responsible for finding the best way to position everything in the timeline based on the these settings.
This structure had many advantages over timeline product that came before it. Notably, it removed the time consuming task of arranging event positions and tick marks. It also looks nice and works great for timelines where most of the events fit on a single screen. In the beginning, before event notes and media were an option, most of the timelines that customers created did fit on a single screen.
However, there are some down sides to this arrangement. It muddies the division of responsibility between the software and the user. When you want the timeline layout to fit more compactly, it involves changes to the timeline elements so that the software can change the timeline layout. This is confusing to many people at first.
The whole structure of editing your data within a dynamically changing timeline chart also does not scale very well. If you have one hundred events, for example, changing the date of an event may cause it to move completely off screen as the layout adapts. Then you need to go scrolling to find it.
Furthermore, the layout logic is complex behind the scenes and may take a few seconds to computer for a large timeline. The software can feel sluggish when it is constantly calculating the layout as you edit your content.
Finally, screen sizes on Apple products were fairly predictable when I introduced Timeline 3D. Now, the screens you work with every day can cover a huge range. Everything from a 3.5” iPhone to an 11” MacBook Air to a Mac Pro with multiple 4K displays.
The existing layout works well for very large displays, but it involve lots of side scrolling on the smaller displays which represent Apple’s most popular devices.
In the next Development Log, I will introduce a new design paradigm that addresses these issues in the upcoming version of Timeline 3D for OS X Yosemite.
Labels: design, Development Log, timeline 3D, Yosemite