Expert invite

Welcome! You have been invited to join our test group for Timeline. We are inviting a group of people we think might find it useful, to try it out, see how they like it and share their thoughts with us.

We’d love to hear your feedback to validate the features we work next on, and help us polish the experience. As appreciation for your thoughts, Testers will have premium accounts – when we release them :).

Browser will take you first to install TestFlight, Apple’s app for distributing test applications. In TestFlight you will see Timeline available for installing in your device.

iPhone only for now

Keep reading below to learn more…

What is Timeline?

Timeline is an app that helps you keep track of events around your activities, interests and tasks.

I started thinking of Timeline while working on my tomatoes’ spring-summer grow. I needed a way to keep track of the things I was doing to the plants, like mending the soil, removing suckers, or changing irrigation frequency, and keep some sort of log of the things I tried and the effects they had.

Then I realized the same tool could be useful for a variety of things and topics I found myself keeping notes of – when was the last time I changed the filters of our air purifier, completely refreshed the cat litter, had to confirm when we bought our dishwasher to see if it was still under warranty or how frequently am I doing my knee rehab exercises.

In general, these are activities for which general purpose reminders don’t really work well; because exactly what and when you do them depends on more things than just a timer for a set date or cadence. You may want to be able to see the historic information – to repeat or make changes between grow seasons, or share accurate information with your physician about that knee rehab routine, for example.

So, this is what Timeline is about – to help you take notes and keep a logbook about specific events, interests or topics in a quick and easy way.

How does it work?

We use two key concepts – Activities and Occurrences.

Activities

This is the topic, event or interest you would like to keep track of.
Eg. your garden grow, books you’ve read or your physical therapy rehab routine.

Occurrences

These are the individual events within your Activity you would like to note and keep track of.

Example

Let’s say you’d like to keep track of the books you are reading.
1. You’ll first create the Activity “Books”.
2. When you first create the Activity to track, you can enter the title of the first Occurrence.

In this case, it will be the title of first book you want to track (btw – Timeline lets you create Occurrences in the past, in case you missed adding it)
3. When you are done with your book, you’ll create a new Occurrence with the same title for the Activity “Books read”.

Timeline will show you the duration between Occurrences with the same title, so in this case you can see how long it took you to read any book you are tracking.

This is just a simple example to get you going. Timeline can be used for a multitude of topics and interests that follow similar patterns. Keeping track of exercise routines, things you loan to people, you journey to quit smoking, your garden crops, your mood, and many, many more.

Helping us - what to look for?

We want to begin by making sure that the way we conceptualized the app works for you.

Creating something to track, adding the events (we call them “occurrences” for now) and going back to see your history is super simple and quick to use. The app “flows” well, this means that things are where you expect them to be.
That you can add the activities and notes you need.
That when you are tracking multiple things, you can still find any of them easily.
That you get the information you want to see when you look back at your events.

How to share issues, feedback or ideas.

Via Screenshots

When you install an app via TestFlight, you will see a new option for sharing screenshots you take of the app.

Please send them our way following these steps:

Take a screenshot of where you are in the app. Make any annotation you need to point at the issue
Click the Share icon and select Share Beta Feedback
Add your comment (please be specific!) and tap Submit

If the app crashes, Apple’s Beta program will automatically prompt you to submit the issue in a similar way. Please do.Submit

Cool, anything else?

Yes, we may also send you a survey or two about your experience, as you use Timeline. After you are a couple weeks into it, and a later update.

Interested in trying out Timeline?

If Timeline sounds like an app you’d give a try, click below and join.