Size=Importance

You can change the size of the event (icon + title) to reflect its relative importance. To do this, click on the icon of the event, and a new dialogue box will appear beneath it:

Sliding the red triangle under the "ramp" left or right will allow you to make the event larger or smaller. The scale of importance goes from 1 to 100.

As you zoom in, events get larger. Zoom out, and events get smaller until they vanish. Thus the least important events disappear first. The sizes of events continue to stay in proportion to each other. Besides being a great way to visualize the information, this feature helps keep timelines from getting too crowded when you're zoomed out.

We use the same scale (from 1 to 100) to express importance as we do for zoom levels. (We will eventually have a zoom level of 100 for cosmic time scales.) When an event whose importance value is 25 is seen at zoom level 25 (about three months of scope), it appears at a "normal" reading size of about 12 pixels. As one zooms in (and lower the zoom level), that becomes larger or visually "more important". This goes with the idea that when you have 3-4 months of scope, events seen are less important than events you would want to see when you have 100 years of scope.

The best way to learn about this is to experiment! Take a look at our History of Idaho timeline to see how we've used size=importance.

If you don't want to bother with this feature, you can turn it off for any timeline. Simply click the green options button next to the timeline title (on the timelines panel), select "edit timeline settings", and uncheck the "use size=importance" check box, and hit "enter".