Bee Docs' Timeline Webcast Now Available

Last month I did a live hour long presentation hosted by Mac Learning Environments at Apple along with about 20 minutes of questions and answers.

The archive of that presentation is now available through iTunes U. You can click here to watch the Bee Docs' Timeline presentation in iTunes.

In the video, I give a step-by-step tutorial showing how to creating and style a basic timeline. I also walk through an example of getting a 17-page timeline to fit on one page for printing. Please check it out and let me know what you think, particularly if you are just getting started with Bee Docs' Timeline.

T2 Sneak Peeks: Timelines in Seconds

This may be the most dramatic new feature of T2... You will be able to instantly create timelines based on the media and information that you already have stored on your computer!

The following sequence of three screenshots shows charting of recently played iTunes albums.

T2 Sneak Peaks: Search

Search in T2 was a feature I wanted to get right. It turned out to require a bit more design attention than you might expect. I don't know if you've stopped to think about it before, but search works different ways in different applications.

For example, in iTunes search hides the categories and songs which don't match the criteria, so the list if songs being shown is getting smaller as your search criteria becomes more specific. In a word processor, search does not hide all the non-matching words. Instead, it highlights the found words in context of the document, often sequentially.

When you are looking at a timeline with many events, what do you want to do when you use the search feature? Probably, you want to locate a particular event in order to make a change, or perhaps you are presenting the relationships between certain types of events. For example, take a look at the following timeline based on WWI events as described in Wikipedia:

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are 254 events in this timeline and it spans over 100 pages. Let's say that I wanted to present all of the events related to France. If I search for the word "france", the events which do not match will fade down but will stay in place in order to provide context to the events regarding France:

By contrast, in Bulk Edit mode the search hides all of the events which do not match the search (à la iTunes). This is because the chronological relationships between events are not reflected in this view, so there is no value gained by keeping the events on screen which do not match the search.

Free Download on iTunes

Testing 1, 2, 3... Is this thing on? (sqqquueeeeel)

Oh, I guess so! OK, this post goes out to all my friends who read this blog.

iTunes has been putting some pretty great music on-line for free over the past couple months and I want to make sure that no friend of mine is missing out on free goodness.

You may say, "well I tried downloading the Single of the Week once, but it was a hip-hop track I didn't like." My tip to you is that the Single of the Week is only one third of the free music available each week, and often it isn't the best third.

Besides the Single of Week, iTunes also has a Discover Download track and iTunes Latino track for free each week. Both of these tracks are particularly good this week and a high percentage of them have been keepers recently. There have been classical, pop, singer-songwriter, dance songs... All kinds of great stuff.

The easy way to find all the free songs is to scroll near the bottom of the iTunes music store home page and find the "FREE ON iTunes" box. The free music tracks are usually the first 3 in the list, followed by some TV episodes and misc other stuff that I don't care about, but you might. The new free songs are posted every Tuesday, so put a reminder in your calendar to visit the iTunes store each week and grab the new songs, OK?