14 DAY TRIAL // Time goes by slowly for those who wait, say the lyrics of some Madonna song. Today is Monday and I'm not exactly among those who wait, but for me, time today goes by kind of slowly, as I'm reviewing this Mac OS application that should "create nice timelines to convince and educate other people", as the producers say.
For those who are skilled in project management, this looked to me a little like a Gantt chart; the software allows the user to write down events that will begin at a certain point in time and will end (or not) at another moment in time. For each event, the user will set a label, keywords and personal notes, along with the time and, possibly, the ending time.
The events will be displayed in some bubbles placed on the timeline, for a better view of the overall flow of events that were, are or that will take place. This could prove to be a great tool for learning history, and it is said to accept BC dates.
For each of the event bubbles, you can set the width and height of the bubble, the border color, and the color of the bubble background and text. Text can be edited in rich text format. The events can be added and deleted (with no notice whatsoever, too bad if you click Delete by accident...), and every event can be edited for further modifications. The Label of each event allows the pasting in of images.
The software allows for a so called "opposing argument" view that would enable the user to put up a presentation and show one "side of the story" at a time, using keywords. The timeline can be customized with various color and font options for the added events, and it can be zoomed between 1/5x and 2x.
The timeline and all the added events can be viewed both in a two-dimensional graphic and in a 3D animation that brings towards the front the "flying" events. Again, I see this as useful perhaps in learning history, or for a better comprehension of complex events that include numerous actions. The time format can be changed, to better suit your needs. This feature is actually pretty good; just write down your desired form. Sadly, there are no presets to choose from.
The events you've recorded can easily be searched through, and the timeline will only show those particular events that matched your search word. As you type in the search phrase, the software dynamically removes from sight the bubbles that do not match the search. The ability to export the work to PNG, PDF and mov video file is also a mentionable feature.
I'm usually pretty satisfied with the applications I review, and I usually get a pretty good idea about what the software should be like from the producer description. This time I was disappointed, I did expect more from this timeline-tool. From the rather poor feature list, to development mistakes, I should say this little utility needs much more work. I don't see it worth the 25 US dollars the producer charges. But that's just me; perhaps I didn't manage to discover the true potential of TimeFlyer.
The Good
TimeFlyer is a tool that allows you to chronologically view events on a timeline. The viewing can be done in 2D and 3D, the events can be searched and the work can be exported as image or video. The interface is friendly and it is easy to use.
The Bad
Sadly, this will be a long section today. It's obvious to me there's still much work to be done where TimeFlyer is concerned. I should say the feature list is too poor (at least for that pricetag) and the 3D viewing is childish. Furthermore, two things bothered me while editing an event: first of all, the software allows the entering of an event that has the finish date prior to its beginning, this leading to functionality issues.
Secondly, the size of the bubble can be manually set, but the software does not verify to see whether the written text is visible with the set size. When it is not, it doesn't provide a scroll bar (or anything to allow the viewing of the whole text). The idea behind this software is interesting and TimeFlyer could prove to be a very useful tool, but many aspects were neglected or treated superficially in this version of the software. Looking forward for an improved one!
The Truth
This software allows the user to write down events on a timeline and view this timeline several ways, including in 3D. For now, I consider it work in progress. Still, it could be successfully used to learn some history in a more pleasant way.
NOTE:
TimeFlyer's V1.4 is out, changes were made and we have a little "thumbs-up". Here's what's new: a list of suggested date/time formats is provided, event height is automatically set to wrap around the event text (in Grace and Vertical Grace documents), the user is prompted for a style when creating a document (TimeFlyer allows three different document styles) and the GUI was improved.
These are the TimeFlyer screenshots:
