Twistory is a history browser that displays lifetimes and travels of historical figures, dates, and locations of historical events. It is a tool for keeping track of when and where things happened, and their relationships to each other. It is meant to provide a way to keep track of the multitude of different peoples, dynasties, empires and developments throughout history. It answers questions like, "What else was happening in the world at that time?" and "Did A live at the same time as B, or before?" A resource of over 1600 people, events and places is included. The database has an open text format, so that more historical information can be added by any user. A complete description of the file format is included. The two main windows are the time-line window, which shows lives and events against a variable time scale, and the map window, which shows people and events in their geographic locations during an interval of time.
v3.0 [Apr 28, 2011]
- Introduces some minor changes to the format of the text database, hence the new leading digit. If you use the new database with the new application, you will have some new capabilities. If you have made personal modifications to the database that came with version 2.x and you want to use it with version 3.0 of the application, or if you have to use version 2.2 to run in the Classic environment but wish to use the larger database that comes with version 3.0, you can; however in either case you will see a long list of notifications pop up in the Warnings window when you load the database.
- None of them prevent you from using the basic features of Twistory. The biggest difference you will notice is that all of the people and events are shown only with the default icons.
- So, new wineskins for new wine. Version 3.0 stores all of the custom person and event icons in the database folder.
- Hence any user familiar with an application for editing small graphics files with transparent backgrounds will be able to create and add his or her own custom icons. The same is true for the flags allowed as an option in the time-line view. The outline map is also now stored in the database file, and it can be edited with the PolyTool utility that accompanies Twistory. All of these resources were stored in the application's resource bundle up to version 2.3. The other major enhancement in version 3.0 is the capability to save genealogical trees in HTML format. Instructions for using all of these new features are included in the download.
