Product Reviews

Timeline 3D tries to do for timelines what Pages did for flyers and booklets; give you an attractive template into which you drop your stuff. And it certainly does that, as long as you don't ask too much of it.

On first launch, the application gives you the option to import some data from elsewhere on your Mac and turn it into a 3D timeline, and this is something well worth doing to get a feel of how it works.

Among the features offered are recent photos, songs from iTunes, or software installs as listed in System Profiler. All of these might be interesting to see as a timeline, but in our tests it struggled to cope with datasets containing a large number of images. They wouldn't display

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in 3D.

Plain text data worked fine and timelines showing recent photos taken or albums played were imported without problem, but the program was unable to display them in 3D if they included more than 30 images. Building an animated 3D timeline from images is processor-intensive, but even so, we expected it to manage more than that.

Each new event in your timeline can have a name, an image, a date range and a URL attached to it. There are a number of different built-in themes to make your timeline look smart, and any image can be dragged in as a background. A photo browser gives you easy access to your iPhoto database. One disappointment is that events can't be dragged through time; to edit an event's location, you must open its info panel and re-type the date. This makes building a timeline frustratingly time-consuming and cumbersome.

Once you've got your timeline and got it working in 3D mode, it looks fabulous. Simple keyboard navigation controls make it easy to flip through events, which animate smoothly in a beautiful full-screen view. This is potentially a very useful and powerful tool for presentations in business and education.

Timeline 3D is a great idea, but this version is let down by odd performance issues and a few missing interface features.