Sharing Tinderbox Timelines

Tinderbox timelines are easy to share on web sites and blogs. The new Tinderbox Timeline Library is a Javascript library that you can include on any Web page to render a Tinderbox timeline in any modern browser.

Fast and Easy

Make a container to hold your events.
Adjust the Tinderbox timeline view of your container.
Move events to new bands, add labels and colors, to get the look just right.
Press the Embed… button in the Timeline view. Tinderbox will copy HTML and Javascript code to your clipboard.
Paste this code into your web page. (Or paste it into a Tinderbox notes and use Tinderbox to construct a Web page.)

Understanding Complicated Events

Timelines help people understand complex chains of events. They are especially useful when different events – perhaps occurring in different places – ultimately interact in complex and consequential ways.

Timelines are also invaluable for resolving complicated and uncertain events in which some aspects are uncertain, or when conflicting accounts must be resolved. Journalism, jurisprudence, and scholarship all find many uses for timelines.

Allocating Resources and Facilities

How shall we allocate facilities and staff? Whether we are scheduling sessions in a conference or figuring out which surgical procedures are most efficiently performed in each of our costly operating rooms, timelines help identify conflicts. With Tinderbox, it is easy to explore the impact that new assignments will have on your plans and to identify bottlenecks.

We can show the whole timeline on the Web page, or enclose the timeline in a scrolling frame to leave plenty of space for other elements. If needed, rollovers hints can provide lots of additional information for each item.

Planning A Course

Tinderbox can be invaluable for planning courses, conferences, and other complex events.

Here, one band highlights scheduling constraints like holidays, examination dates, vacations, and other events which any course must accommodate. A second band sketches the topics we plan to cover and the time allocated to each. Band 3, in turn, contains milestones like assignments and paper deadlines, and schedules for student reading.

As the term progresses, unexpected changes – a guest lecture opportunity in March, a week’s delay caused by an unplanned but profitable discussion of humor in psychoanalysis and in Hollywood – can readily be reflected in the timeline.

Rules and Constraints

Tinderbox lets you automate constraints to enforce business rules and help avoid mistakes.

Here, each note inherits a rule from a prototype Task that schedules the operation 15 minutes after the previous task if it’s the same kind of task, but allows an additional 45 minutes of setup time if the task is a new operation. The effect of schedule changes can be seen at once, and updates schedules can be posted to the Web or intranet without delay.

Customizing Shared Timelines

Eastgate’s Timeline Library is a powerful and flexible tool for rendering timelines in Javascript. Proficient Javascript developers can use it to customize the way timelines look and operate. Here’s how.