This month the rubber has hit the road with actual, semi-random people using the application. Every bug that emerges is both a pain in the arse and an important discovery that will improve the system.
If you are interested in being a tester for Mnemograph, you can sign up for a free beta account here.
It’s exciting to see that even though we’ve put no effort into SEO (search engine optimization), we’re top of the heap for “web-based timeline software”. Coming up on Google’s p.9 for “timeline software” isn’t so bad yet either.
The other major presence on the web for timelines is an MIT project, simply called “Timeline” which is part of a suite of ajaxy experiments called SIMILE. It’s drawn the attention of a lot of hackers because it’s pretty easy to configure with XML or JSON data. The average person would have to go to The Encyclopedia Britannica’s Timelines, which is a modification of the SIMILE project — the only one to build a decent user interface.
This CSS/Javascript/XML model has lots of advantages: it’s pretty zippy. It also has severe limitations in terms of scaling and other important interface elements. If there are too many events stacked vertically, there seems to be no way to access the events the break through the upper part of the frame. I look forward to seeing someone adopt the SIMILE project and take it farther. Many others have built Simile “mash-ups” with various data. The nicest one I’ve seen goes back into geological time.