Timeline 3D: Education Edition 4+

There was once, many years ago, a great program called “Timeline” by some artisans called BeeDocs. It did timelines, and it did them amazingly well. I used it frequently because it was good. Then it changed. The newer versions, including the current one, don’t even print a bar showing how long an event lasted. That’s one of the main functions of any timeline: to allow you to show not only single events but also ranges of time, to indicate easily and quickly to even the most untrained student’s eye that this overlapped with that, or that this happened during or outside of that. Timeline simply is no longer useful for making timelines.

Other features have been dropped over time as well. Timeline used to be able to import other data sources and do cool things like make a timeline of your calendar from the Calendar app or of RSS feeds. Gone. All gone.

I don’t doubt that much work and love has gone into some parts of this app, like the algorithm for displaying the most appropriate string for a given date and the algorithm for positioning events on a 3D canvas. If only the program had kept the basic functionality it had in 2008 or so, those improvements would have been appreciated.

I used this app a few years ago and it was awesome. It had great features and was easy to use.

Now it’s just a dumb timeline maker with a useless 3D component to it that serves no useful purpose to it. It has links in the data entry, but they don’t show up anywhere in the timeline for you to click on. Totally useless. The tags are useless too since they also don’t appear anywhere in the timeline view and don’t appear to be searchable there either. What’s the point?

In past versions, I liked the bars showing the length of the events. I liked the text editor tools to change color. I liked the ability to edit directly in the timeline. But all that is no longer here!!! What happened?!?!?!?!?!

I am super annoyed and disappointed by this app now. It used to be great, but now it just is not worth much.

Purchsed this crazy expensive ($24.99) app for may daughter’s computer for school. It worked for about the first 6 or 8 entries and then it just kept giving error messages. A friend had the exact same issue. Hers resolved itself after turning the computer off and back on. Ours did not! I contacted tech support explaning this and they told me to restart the computer. Which I did AGAIN. Still did not work. I emailed them back and I have heard nothing else from them. After 6 weeks into the school year trying to plug everything in is not feisable. This is a complete waste of money.