Thank you for all of the positive feedback and kind e-mails so far! Knowing that people are excited about the new features makes up for the late nights Gary and I have been spending trying to hit this deadline.
The most frequently asked question so far is "How do I upgrade to the 3D Edition if I already have a Bee Docs' Timeline license?" Here is how:
Download and install the 3D Edition.
Confirm that your existing license is entered in the Registration Panel (should transfer automatically)
In the Registration Panel, click the "Upgrade to 3D" button.
The upgrade will cost $25
Alternatively, you will be offered an opportunity to upgrade if your standard license is installed and you attempt to use a 3D feature that is restricted (such as export to Devices).
In December 2007, Gary C Martin sent some feature suggestions to me regarding Timeline 2.0, which was still in beta at the time. As I often do, I followed the links in his e-mail signature because I can see what kind of people are using Bee Docs' Timeline. Turns out Gary is a 3D artist and made a very sophisticated Asteroids game using Apple's Quartz Composer technology.
I've always thought that it would be great to be able to hire some customers to help me develop Bee Docs' Timeline and here was a great opportunity. I sent Gary the 3D design concept that I made using Motion and asked if he would be interested in helping me make the feature a reality. Within days he started sending me working prototypes of 3D timelines and we have been collaborating on it ever since.
Doing a mock-up of a 3D timeline was relatively easy, it took about a day. Getting it to work for the huge diversity of timelines that are possible with Bee Docs' Timeline is a much greater challenge. Timelines and events can be different sizes, aspect ratios, fonts, etc... Performance and interaction issues are tricky too. Gary has been doing the Quartz Composer programming and figuring out the calculations for zooming, rotation, movement, and performance while I have been doing the associated Cocoa programming and leading the design.
All of our communications have been via e-mail (Gary lives in Edinburgh, Scotland) and it has been fantastic working with someone who does amazing work and has also been a customer of Bee Docs' Timeline since May 2007.
I look forward to hiring more customers in the future, so if you'd ever be interested in working with me, be sure to let me know what you do! At the moment, I could really use some help with PR...
When I designed the first product (a web-based document management system) for Bee Documents back in 2002, I started with pen and paper and then used Adobe InDesign to complete the prototype.
Since that time I have used Apple's Keynote software to do design and prototyping for dozens of websites and desktop applications. For me it has several advantages over Photoshop, which is the classic tool of choice for this kind of work:
I find it much faster to draw and make adjustments with Keynote.
The effects (rounded corners, tinted fills, gradients, drop shadows) are all very Mac like.
I can link up the Keynote presentation and add animated actions to simulate the interactive behavior of the application.
People who are not designers can participate in the design with me since it is intuitive to drag things around and make changes using Keynote
As an example, see the following two screenshots. The image on the left is the Keynote file I used to design the "T2" website. This was one of several possible designs that I can created. When I played the Keynote file, I could interact with the links and videos as if it was a real website. The image on the right a screen capture of the real website.
However, as well as the current process is working for me, I keep thinking about cinematic software, touch interfaces, animation, motion, and "No Limits Design". The technical barriers are falling for this kind of software. I'm concerned that prototyping tools that encourage page-by-page designs may limit creativity.
To that end, I have been experimenting with video as a prototyping tool as well as some motion graphics tools such as Apple's Motion.
I wanted to be able to test readability of the timeline at distances and get a sense for whether this would be a useful feature that helps solve the challenges of presenting timelines or if it was only eye candy.
One of the most challenging aspects of working with timeline charts is presenting them to an audience. Timeline charts often have fractal like complexity, with both the entire context of a large chart as well as the individual event details being of equal importance in digesting the meaning behind a chart. Printing can be a challenge as fitting a complex timeline on one page makes the details very small, but spanning many pages is not a good solution either.
Presenting timelines on a projected screen can be challenging for the same reasons. Either you need to show the timeline so small that there is no detail visible, or you need to zoom in and lose the context.
Last summer, while I was attending Apple's WWDC developers conference, I was pondering this problem and drawing sketches in my notebook. During the conference, folks from Apple where showing some of the amazing new graphics capabilities in Leopard and encouraging developers to make their software "cinematic."
I was inspired by the thought that I might allow customers to create cinematic timelines while, at the same time, solve the issue of presenting timelines to groups using a projected screen.
My idea was to treat the timeline as a physical object that could be viewed in 3D perspective. If you looked down the timeline on edge, you could see many events off in the future and the events near the "front" would be nice and large. If each event was also a little door that could swing out parallel to the screen as it was selected, it would solve the distortion problem for the selected event as well as making it clear which event was highlighted.
Here is the sketch I drew back in June 2007:
However, back in June I was hard at work preparing the release of Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. and didn't have time to add any major new features. So the idea had to remain in my notebook along with all of the other "big ideas" that live there.
Adam is the creator of Bee Docs' Timeline, the first (and best!) timeline software designed for Mac OS X. He is currently hard at work on the next major release of Timeline, called "T2".
