I’ve been getting emails from people wondering “Is Timeglider still being developed?” A clear sign of “blog anemia”…
Yes! A brand new Timeglider is on track for release in April. We’re redesigning it from scratch, re-building the back-end, and making the HTML/Javascript front end as tablet-friendly (focusing on iPad compatibility now) as possible. Some highlights:
- Most Plus features (like legend creation, calendar integration, and list editing) will be integrated into the app for a more seamless experience. (Importing data and managing users will remain as separate interfaces.)
- One will be able to zoom much farther out, to the scale of millions and billions of years.
- Published timelines will be able to limit the scope of zooming or even hide the zoom-slider completely, opting for a “static”, non-zooming type of timeline.
- Video and Audio files will play inside the timeline interface, and events will be able to have multiple web links (with custom labels) associated with them.
- You’ll be able to create events from the legend by dragging a legend item onto the timeline interface.
- Importantly, all customer data will move from “old” to “new” in a seamless fashion.
- Later in 2012, the entire Timeglider app (front end, back end, database) will be available for purchase/download as a freestanding package.
If you’re interested in testing out the “alpha” version (which I’ll make available to a small list in March), please let me know: michael@timeglider.com
This blog, with its new WordPress theme (basic maths) is in transition to become the new timeglider.com site. You’ll start to see pages forming here, but in rough form.
In other news, progress is moving steadily forward on the new Javascript (jQuery) plugin, which you can see here. Soon, the developer documentation will expand with some information about the widget API, how to structure data, and how to work with things like customizing icons. Meanwhile, I’m working slowly away on a new “slimmed down” API for timeglider (using the Slim PHP framework). By early in 2011, there ought to be a javascript widget as well as an installation package (php/mysql) for creating a stand-alone timeline application on your server. This will be free for educational and nonprofit use, and there will be a license (in the works with legal team) for commercial/enterprise use.
We’ve built the start of a timeline explorer using the New York Times Article Search API. It’s pretty fun, especially since you can search for, say, Mark Bittman’s seafood recipes. Please let us know what you think at feedback [at] timeglider.com.
Thanks to TG user Steve Duncan (and other earlier feedbackers), I finally embarked on creating an importing system for iCal (Google and Apple calendars mainly). From the Plus tools, you’ll be able to sync multiple calendars onto a timeline, each calendar with its own assigned icon. The first stages are mostly complete: a decent parser of the iCal format, and a little management tool for adding/editing. Now, if there was only a way to build “importance” into this… Stay tuned for more developments about calendars. After this, a better way to sync timelines to RSS feeds…
Now that we have over 12,000 users, I’m sure that there are scads of marvellous timelines in our databases that would be great to feature — both to shine the light on our own product, but perhaps also to help spread the word about what you’re working on.
Do you have a timeline you’re proud of that you think would do both? We’re going to rotate featuring six or nine timelines on the home page, and we’ll also have an extended list of all featured timelines on a separate page. Send me a little information about yourself, your project, the timeline — and the please provide the public timeglider URL — by emailing us at info@… History timelines are of course fantastic, but we’re especially keen to see example from business, planning, law, marketing, medicine, and other unexpected use cases.
Thanks!
On August 8, 1809, John Quincy Adams wrote, “Thick fogs all day. No observation. Saw a Schooner. Read Langhorne’s Life of Plutarch, and began with Theseus.” You can now follow Mr. Adams’s 200 year old musings (twitterable versions) by following him him on . . . Twitter thanks to the Massachusetts Historical Society.
![]()
The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (www.masshumanities.org) also has a nice daily dose of history, at their “Mass Moments” site: www.massmoments.org. Today’s moment, from 1765: “Boston Mob Protests Stamp Act”. MassMoments publishes their “moment” on an RSS feed, too.
Many recent TimeGlider sign-ups have found their way here from Dick Eastman’s prolific daily (+) newsletter about history and genealogy: Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter. If you’re a family historian, it should certainly be in your bookmarks.
On the more mass media side, the History Channel has a daily dose of history (which comes with a dose of commercials) here. Today’s piece mentions the East Coast blackout of 2003. I was in Brooklyn, NY. With no lights or electric stoves, and on a very hot night, I hung out with our neighbor, drank beer, and roasted hot dogs over a camping stove out on the sidewalk. Thousands of others were out likewise all across the city. The biggest blackout in recent history was also the biggest block party.
Wanted to send special thanks to all the people who have been writing in recently to report bugs, suggest features, and so forth. We’re a very small development team and we really do rely on the dialog we have with our users. A number of you have recently reported bugs and then helped in the testing of solutions. So: Thanks to Alyssa, Llonard, Steve, Josie, and others.
We’ve quietly been offering our “Plus” tools to anyone who inquires and to people who have provided serious feedback. One of the features that’s long been on our to-do list is a legend. Since the beginning, one has been able to assign small icons to events: Now you can label entire sets of icons with a legend or key.
Currently if you apply a legend to a timeline, you can also click on a key icon and filter the timeline, and view only events with that symbol.
![]()
This is the beginning of another dimension for TimeGlider: more “meta information” about timelines. This will lead to other nice ways to organize data within a timeline. Many people have requested being able to have horizontal bands or “lanes” on which specific categories could be found. This legend system is an inroad to that.
A few of you have already written in to suggest improvements for workflow and usability. We’ll keep working on it. Some other features to come: adding RSS feeds to published timelines, photo sets, and more.
Again, legends are available to people who sign up for our Plus tools. If you’re an existing member, you can upgrade here, or if you’re new, you can sign up with plus tools by going here. Please, if you use these “beta” tools, make sure to send your feedback, for pete’s sake.
Mnemograph is now TimeGlider! After months of (failed) “naming powwows”, scouring the available domains, coming close to choosing other names, and so forth, we finally agreed that TimeGlider is a perfect name, and we were able to secure the .com domain for a pretty good price.
Certainly “Mnemograph” was close to our hearts, and was a perfect “Latinate” expression of what we’ve been after: it stood for time, memory, and visualization, and provided some mythological depth. But no one could remember it accurately, or at all. Whenever I would call MediaTemple, our hosting provider, and tell them which domain we were dealing with, I would have to say “M as in Mary, N as in Nancy, E, M as in Mary, O-G-R-A-P-H”.
As we go through this name switch, it will certainly create some confusion and tangles on the server, but so far, it seems to be relatively seamless.
