Is there an easy way to create an illustration that shows a timeline like the ones you find in some history books? The most control over what your timeline looks like used to be had with a copy of Adobe Illustrator and a lot of patience. Some 30 minutes for a timeline with a dozen events, to be exact. And then you’ll only end up with a static timeline or one in which the links to Wikipedia or whatever other information source you prefer, must be created using Javascript and SVG.

There could be a faster and smarter way by using a dedicated program. Bee Documents’ Timeline is an example. It took me 10 minutes to create the same timeline in their application. It looked exactly the same and came with effortless links in the high-resolution PDF document that I exported it to.

Timeline 2.x is a product that seems to make good use of the Core capabilities offered by Leopard. It’s a small footprint, light-weight program for making timelines. You can use it for creating a graphical representation of historical events and facts. With a little imagination on your part, you can use it for other purposes as well, but the basic functionality of the result will always be a timeline.

As I already said in my summary of Timeline 2.x on the Front Page, creating the exact same timeline took me 30 minutes in Illustrator, but only 10 minutes in Timeline, and that’s a dramatic time-savings in my book. The reason why I saved so much time is because Timeline 2.x has just the feature set you need to create timelines.

Clear and Uncluttered Interface

It has a Settings drawer --which doesn’t get in the way-- with three tabs. You can set event text and text colour, date line looks, and row shading. You can have different kinds of backgrounds, differently coloured or with an image to spice up your timeline design. You can add images to events, set dates with various parameters, and set up the printing preferences for your timeline.

Images can be imported from iPhoto and Aperture, or by dragging an image directly into Timeline’s uncluttered interface.

Starting a timeline can be semi-automatic. For example, if you want to create a timeline that shows which Apple software you have been adding to your Mac, you can select “System Profiler” in the setup assistant, select a date range, and a timeline template, and your timeline will be ready after a few seconds of work. Of course, you’ll want to fine-tune the results.

You’ll perhaps add some events of yourself, add an image and some notes. Or you’ll want to import a whole list of events --that’s possible too. It all works smoothly, without you having to think much about how to go about. The only thing that I disliked was the entry dialogue for creating new events. These dialogues are faint blue and have no window controls. In fact, you close them by clicking on the window elements --the sides, the top, the bottom-- themselves.

This is not particularly intuitive; you expect the window to stay open until you tell it to close. But even this minor annoyance grows on you very quickly. And so, you’ll end up with a nicely styled timeline in no time, complete with links to files or web pages --links that you create the same way as you would in Keynote or Pages.

In the newest version of Timeline, there’s the ability to export your timeline to a high-resolution PDF besides the TIFF, PNG and JPEG export formats supported. The advantage of the PDF is that it maintains the live links.

To me, Timeline 2.x is an example of a program that does one thing very well. It shines at creating timelines without fuss, and it has just the right mixture of ease-of-use and power to satisfy its users. In that respect, I think Timeline is in the same league as CSSEdit for CSS editing. It’s simply perfect for its purpose.