Anti-creative, Ugly, Difficult, and Nonsensical

This app used to be elegant, beautiful, fun, and made you more creative. Now it is the exact opposite.

1. You used to edit in the timeline itself with background images, fonts, embedded images, and other settings. The result is that working in the application made you feel intuitively “in tune” with the creative aspect of the project you were working on. Now you have to edit events in a blank white interface that is like a stripped down Notes file or Text Editor. In addition the application controls image sizing and other settings. You might as well be writing an XML file in a text editor that the timeline would read from.

2. If you want to actually see your work you have to render it into “3D Presentation.” The separation of preparation and presentation is utterly ruinous to the creative process. Nevermind the fact that probably much of Timeline’s actual users NEVER present their timelines at all, but instead create them for personal use, like myself. Timeline used to be useful for visualizing all kinds of data, whether you ever intended to present it or not, and the VISUAL aspect of working in a Timeline visualization (as opposed to a spreadsheet) is directly related to the question of “Why am I using this app at all?” There used to be a good answer.

3. You also have to pay to be able to save your work in different formats. Again, this follows from the idea that the ‘rendered’ or ‘saved’ work is something different than the work itself. You can’t work in multiple formats and simply use Timeline to keep them all in sync.

The entire philosophy of the application’s new workflow, i.e. that you should work and then render and then work and then render is reminiscent of 1970s computer applications. When working on a visual project in a visual space, like a timeline, it is ESSENTIAL to have real-time rendering of every change. I am a web application developer by profession and for years we put up with the work-then-refresh process but nowadays even web applications are built in real-time with real-time display of every change. This application is like a Neanderthal version of it’s previously evolved self.

I am deeply dismayed to see one of my favorite applications of all time become a glorified Notes file with a wait-and-see-it presentation mode.

Paul B. Hartzog about Timeline 3D