On opening, the application window is set to an “almost maximised” size on my screen, but the Microsoft Windows taskbar (which is always on top, by default) overlaps the bottom of the window forcing you to resize the window, or actually maximise it.
Because the application doesn’t remember the window size and position when closed, it always re-opens in this state, so I always have to re.
The application still fails to resize properly when maximised on second monitors, where the second monitor is a different width to the primary.
To replicate use: primary@1680×1050, secondary@1280×1024. Move the window to the secondary and click maximise. The window frame is resized correctly, but a chunk of content is off the right-hand edge of the screen.
Choosing File => New does not reset the application state to reflect the new (empty) timeline. The search box, for example, still shows some of the events (often just one) for the previous timeline.
This is also true of File => Open.
Choosing File => Save did save the timeline correctly, but also closed/crashed the application down when it contained some of my erroneous events (see later for details of these).
There is no “Save As..” option, for saving a duplicate, or different version, of the same timeline.
There is no indication of which timeline file you are currently editing. Perhaps the filename should be shown in the title-bar?
The XML produced by the system does not include line-breaks for the timeline properties (it does for event items).
While line breaks are not necessary, the whole point of XML is to provide human-readable and editable data. Having no line-breaks hampers this.
The XML encodes the HTML markup from the richtext editor using XML entities, but it would probably have been easier to use CDATA sections for this, and use the entities to encode just the user entered stuff in the field – this is a geeky XML thing! 🙂
When setting any date (timeline duration, or event dates), if you pick the day and then change the year, the day selection disappears, but the day-number *is* still selected.
Note: You can also cause the same issue by choosing a day then changing the month, but the subsequent problems seem to be more terminal to the application if you change the year instead.
Pressing [OK] will accept this day-number even if it is not visibly selected – this causes problems when you choose a day-number that doesn’t exist in the currently selected month.
It’s perfectly possible to select a start date of 31/2/2010, which produces very strange dates on the timeline scale.
It also permanently breaks the date-picker when you first re-open a duff event. When reopened, no day or year is pre-selected for you and the number of days per month is wrong.
To replicate:
– Change the start point to January 31, 2011 but don’t press [OK] yet.
– Change the year to 2010. The selected day disappears.
– Change the month to February. The monthly calendar changes, but there’s still no selected day showing.
– Press OK to save your selection.
– The start point will now be 31/2/2010 and the timeline scale will be scrambled.
– Re-open the start point, the month is January, but there’s no year or day selected, and the monthly calendar is wrong (it looks like it defaults to today’s monthly calendar).
– Once a date-picker is in this state it cannot be used to select another date, and you have to restart the application.
Closing the application using the windows control [X] closes the application without a warning or confirmation. Using File => Exit does warn you.
The timeline scale will often show times (e.g. 6am, 12pm, 6pm, etc) but there’s no way to enter an event that has a start/end date that includes a time. Only dates can be chosen.
You can drag timelines around and they snap to fractions of a day, but there’s no indication of what time each fraction is.
When dragging events, the start/end times should snap to sensible values. If you check the XML output, after some dragging operations, you can have silly things like: 2011-01-12T00:03:51.248Z That’s a start date of 12:03am and 51 seconds, 248 milliseconds.
Due to there being no time options, setting the end date of an event produces misleading results.
For example, to create an event that encompasses all of February, you might think you’d choose a start and end of 1/2/2011 – 28/2/2011.
This is not the case, as that actually creates an event that runs from Feb 1st thru Feb 27th. it DOES NOT include Feb 28th. Check the timeline scale, the event ends prematurely, one day early, instead of continuing through the date you actually chose as the end date.
I would guess the end date is using a date/time of 28/2/2011 00:00:00 when it should use 28/2/2011 23:59:59.
If you press the [DELETE] key while in any window, you get the inappropriate confirmation message “Are you sure you want to delete the selected items?” even if you’re editing a text-field (e.g. the search event textfield, or the timeline title textfield).
You can also make this problem trigger by editing the title of an event, but only sporadically. I haven’t been able to pin-down a reliable way to replicate it in the edit event dialog window.
**** On the main timeline window…
The default timeline runs 15/1/2000 – 18/1/2001. I guess the default dates will always be a little arbritary, but this selection seems odd.
Setting a timeline End Point that’s before the Start Point generates no error messages, and scrambles the timeline scale.
The “Start Point” and “End Point” fields look like text boxes, presumably deliberately, but you can’t edit or even click on them – which should probably open the appropriate date-picker.
Both controls are also missing from the tab-index, so you can only operate the date controls using a mouse.
Both controls display a different date format to the timeline scale. (D/M/YYYY instead of DD/MM/YYYY)
When using short timelines the timeline scale shows no dates, only times.
To replicate use: 01/01/2011 – 30/04/2011 and any zoom level over ~33%.
Click and hold the horizontal timeline scrollbar. If you try to move the slider past the left/right without letting go of the left mouse button, the timeline scale numbers ‘jiggle’ as the application changes them, then realises it’s reached the start/end point and changes them back again.
Searching for a non-existent event produces no feedback message.
After searching for an event, the “1 Entry found” message that appears in the top-left of my application window, does not go away and partly covers the Edit and Help menus.
The search event dropdown list still lists events in the order they were created. It should be either alphabetical or chronological.
Newly created events never appear in the search box dropdown until you type their name.
Short events on max zoom-out, appear very strangely. There’s no background color, and the text of the start/end dates is very jagged and ugly.
To replicate, have a timeline 1/1/2011 – 31/12/2011 and create an event that’s a couple of days long. Use the (-) button to zoom out to the max, and you’ll see the ugly text.
A minor quibble, but pressing [ENTER] on the “Edit Title” window does not save and close the popup, which is typical application behaviour.
**** On the “Add Event/Theme” window…
The “Start Point” and “End Point” fields look like text boxes, but aren’t (you can’t type in them, nor does clicking on them do anything). They are also missing from the tab-index, so you can only operate the date controls using a mouse.
The creating of new events contains multiple date checking problems, which cause cascading problems for the timeline display and search.
To replicate the following, start with a timeline of 01/01/2011 – 30/04/2011 and then try to …
Create an event (Event-1) that entirely pre-dates the timeline (e.g. 1/11/2010 – 30/11/2010) and click [OK].
The event is saved, but does not appear on the timeline as you would expect as it pre-dates it.
The event does not show in the search box dropdown, but if you start to type it’s name “Event-1” it will appear, and can be found (although not displayed).
If you change the timeline start point to 1/1/2010, the event still does not appear on the timeline.
Create an event (Event-2) that pre-dates but overlaps the timeline (e.g. 8/11/2010 – 8/1/2011) and click [OK].
An incorrect error message “Please select a valid end date. Minimum period is 1 day” appears, but the event is saved anyway. If you press [OK] on the error message, the event window has gone.
The event does not show on the timeline or the search box, unless you type its name. Instead, you’ll probably see an extra empty line in the dropdown box.
At one point, a pre-dated, overlapping event also generated the incorrect error message “Please select a valid end date” but the actual error is in the start date, not the end date.
I could not reliably replicate this.
Create an event (Event-3) that starts and ends on the same day.
You will receive the correct error message “Please select a valid end date. Minimum period is 1 day” but clicking [OK] on the error message will save the event anyway.
The event does not show on the timeline or the search box, unless you type its name.
Create an event (Event-4) that has a duration of a few days.
If you now change it’s start and end to be on the same day, you will receive no error message and the event will be saved just fine.
The event will now not show on the timeline but will be in the search box.
Create an event (Event-5) where the end date predates the start date (e.g. 31/1/2011 – 28/1/2011) and click [OK].
The event will be saved without error, but will not appear on the timeline and sometimes not in the search box dropdown until you type its name. It can be found, but not displayed.
**** General Problems
On opening, the application window is set to an “almost maximised” size on my screen, but the Microsoft Windows taskbar (which is always on top, by default) overlaps the bottom of the window forcing you to resize the window, or actually maximise it.
Because the application doesn’t remember the window size and position when closed, it always re-opens in this state, so I always have to re.
The application still fails to resize properly when maximised on second monitors, where the second monitor is a different width to the primary.
To replicate use: primary@1680×1050, secondary@1280×1024. Move the window to the secondary and click maximise. The window frame is resized correctly, but a chunk of content is off the right-hand edge of the screen.
Choosing File => New does not reset the application state to reflect the new (empty) timeline. The search box, for example, still shows some of the events (often just one) for the previous timeline.
This is also true of File => Open.
Choosing File => Save did save the timeline correctly, but also closed/crashed the application down when it contained some of my erroneous events (see later for details of these).
There is no “Save As..” option, for saving a duplicate, or different version, of the same timeline.
There is no indication of which timeline file you are currently editing. Perhaps the filename should be shown in the title-bar?
The XML produced by the system does not include line-breaks for the timeline properties (it does for event items).
While line breaks are not necessary, the whole point of XML is to provide human-readable and editable data. Having no line-breaks hampers this.
The XML encodes the HTML markup from the richtext editor using XML entities, but it would probably have been easier to use CDATA sections for this, and use the entities to encode just the user entered stuff in the field – this is a geeky XML thing! 🙂
When setting any date (timeline duration, or event dates), if you pick the day and then change the year, the day selection disappears, but the day-number *is* still selected.
Note: You can also cause the same issue by choosing a day then changing the month, but the subsequent problems seem to be more terminal to the application if you change the year instead.
Pressing [OK] will accept this day-number even if it is not visibly selected – this causes problems when you choose a day-number that doesn’t exist in the currently selected month.
It’s perfectly possible to select a start date of 31/2/2010, which produces very strange dates on the timeline scale.
It also permanently breaks the date-picker when you first re-open a duff event. When reopened, no day or year is pre-selected for you and the number of days per month is wrong.
To replicate:
– Change the start point to January 31, 2011 but don’t press [OK] yet.
– Change the year to 2010. The selected day disappears.
– Change the month to February. The monthly calendar changes, but there’s still no selected day showing.
– Press OK to save your selection.
– The start point will now be 31/2/2010 and the timeline scale will be scrambled.
– Re-open the start point, the month is January, but there’s no year or day selected, and the monthly calendar is wrong (it looks like it defaults to today’s monthly calendar).
– Once a date-picker is in this state it cannot be used to select another date, and you have to restart the application.
Closing the application using the windows control [X] closes the application without a warning or confirmation. Using File => Exit does warn you.
The timeline scale will often show times (e.g. 6am, 12pm, 6pm, etc) but there’s no way to enter an event that has a start/end date that includes a time. Only dates can be chosen.
You can drag timelines around and they snap to fractions of a day, but there’s no indication of what time each fraction is.
When dragging events, the start/end times should snap to sensible values. If you check the XML output, after some dragging operations, you can have silly things like: 2011-01-12T00:03:51.248Z That’s a start date of 12:03am and 51 seconds, 248 milliseconds.
Due to there being no time options, setting the end date of an event produces misleading results.
For example, to create an event that encompasses all of February, you might think you’d choose a start and end of 1/2/2011 – 28/2/2011.
This is not the case, as that actually creates an event that runs from Feb 1st thru Feb 27th. it DOES NOT include Feb 28th. Check the timeline scale, the event ends prematurely, one day early, instead of continuing through the date you actually chose as the end date.
I would guess the end date is using a date/time of 28/2/2011 00:00:00 when it should use 28/2/2011 23:59:59.
If you press the [DELETE] key while in any window, you get the inappropriate confirmation message “Are you sure you want to delete the selected items?” even if you’re editing a text-field (e.g. the search event textfield, or the timeline title textfield).
You can also make this problem trigger by editing the title of an event, but only sporadically. I haven’t been able to pin-down a reliable way to replicate it in the edit event dialog window.
**** On the main timeline window…
The default timeline runs 15/1/2000 – 18/1/2001. I guess the default dates will always be a little arbritary, but this selection seems odd.
Setting a timeline End Point that’s before the Start Point generates no error messages, and scrambles the timeline scale.
The “Start Point” and “End Point” fields look like text boxes, presumably deliberately, but you can’t edit or even click on them – which should probably open the appropriate date-picker.
Both controls are also missing from the tab-index, so you can only operate the date controls using a mouse.
Both controls display a different date format to the timeline scale. (D/M/YYYY instead of DD/MM/YYYY)
When using short timelines the timeline scale shows no dates, only times.
To replicate use: 01/01/2011 – 30/04/2011 and any zoom level over ~33%.
Click and hold the horizontal timeline scrollbar. If you try to move the slider past the left/right without letting go of the left mouse button, the timeline scale numbers ‘jiggle’ as the application changes them, then realises it’s reached the start/end point and changes them back again.
Searching for a non-existent event produces no feedback message.
After searching for an event, the “1 Entry found” message that appears in the top-left of my application window, does not go away and partly covers the Edit and Help menus.
The search event dropdown list still lists events in the order they were created. It should be either alphabetical or chronological.
Newly created events never appear in the search box dropdown until you type their name.
Short events on max zoom-out, appear very strangely. There’s no background color, and the text of the start/end dates is very jagged and ugly.
To replicate, have a timeline 1/1/2011 – 31/12/2011 and create an event that’s a couple of days long. Use the (-) button to zoom out to the max, and you’ll see the ugly text.
A minor quibble, but pressing [ENTER] on the “Edit Title” window does not save and close the popup, which is typical application behaviour.
**** On the “Add Event/Theme” window…
The “Start Point” and “End Point” fields look like text boxes, but aren’t (you can’t type in them, nor does clicking on them do anything). They are also missing from the tab-index, so you can only operate the date controls using a mouse.
The creating of new events contains multiple date checking problems, which cause cascading problems for the timeline display and search.
To replicate the following, start with a timeline of 01/01/2011 – 30/04/2011 and then try to …
Create an event (Event-1) that entirely pre-dates the timeline (e.g. 1/11/2010 – 30/11/2010) and click [OK].
The event is saved, but does not appear on the timeline as you would expect as it pre-dates it.
The event does not show in the search box dropdown, but if you start to type it’s name “Event-1” it will appear, and can be found (although not displayed).
If you change the timeline start point to 1/1/2010, the event still does not appear on the timeline.
Create an event (Event-2) that pre-dates but overlaps the timeline (e.g. 8/11/2010 – 8/1/2011) and click [OK].
An incorrect error message “Please select a valid end date. Minimum period is 1 day” appears, but the event is saved anyway. If you press [OK] on the error message, the event window has gone.
The event does not show on the timeline or the search box, unless you type its name. Instead, you’ll probably see an extra empty line in the dropdown box.
At one point, a pre-dated, overlapping event also generated the incorrect error message “Please select a valid end date” but the actual error is in the start date, not the end date.
I could not reliably replicate this.
Create an event (Event-3) that starts and ends on the same day.
You will receive the correct error message “Please select a valid end date. Minimum period is 1 day” but clicking [OK] on the error message will save the event anyway.
The event does not show on the timeline or the search box, unless you type its name.
Create an event (Event-4) that has a duration of a few days.
If you now change it’s start and end to be on the same day, you will receive no error message and the event will be saved just fine.
The event will now not show on the timeline but will be in the search box.
Create an event (Event-5) where the end date predates the start date (e.g. 31/1/2011 – 28/1/2011) and click [OK].
The event will be saved without error, but will not appear on the timeline and sometimes not in the search box dropdown until you type its name. It can be found, but not displayed.