Timeline 3D: Education Edition for Android

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.

After having used earlier versions of this app, I decided to re purchase the program and install it on a new Android mini (El Capitan 10.11.5 OS). We needed to prepare a timeline presentation for an art related book chronology The initial data input went well and the timeline rendered the 3D version flawless on the first day. I continued to add data for three consecutive days. After most of the data was in place we tried to render it in 3D as this was the whole purpose of the presentation. When rendered in 3D format the time line became unreadable, with the rendering shown far from the screen. The written input was all in one line and far, and when pressing the space bar to zoom it, the timeline went even further which made it impossible to read. When trying full screen version, the widow showed black lines across the screen, the borders were edged and the timeline froze. I wrote numerous times to technical support receiving not only a poor response, the answers received where those I had already tried after following the FAQ’s trouble shooting section of their app, but every plea for help took at least a day to be responded. I tried everything, from fully erasing the app and then re installing it, to adding again a full set of data. A week’s work was fully wasted and the presentation had to be cancelled. The last straw was when I asked for further help or a refund, they suggested a refund with their final line being "Thank you for giving Timeline 3D a try. I hope you are able to request your refund without difficulty.” I wasnt giving it a try, I was a fan of this app before, I even uploaded a film of my first timeline in youtube, for which I have received praise. Yet, this last version is full of bugs, seemingly unfixable by their customer support base and a complete waste. I hope they fix all the problems, it is a beautiful program when it does work well.

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.