Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

Random feedback:

- On an iPad Pro (iPadOS 16.1.1 - not sure how current that is offhand), the UI is extremely unintuitive and/or broken. Tapping the example landed me in an editor that then took far too long to figure out how to get out of.

- It remembers that the editor is up. Once up, getting out and back to the homepage is next to impossible until you figure out the UI (clearing cookies probably would have worked, but that’s not exactly convenient). Reloading just takes you back to the editor.

- The timeline and one other view (can’t remember which one offhand) just showed a black screen.

- One of the biggest draws for markdown for me is the fact that it, in general, reads like a formatted text file. The formatting “instructions” are almost transparent in that sense. Not completely, but almost. My initial view of the example timeline’s source did not feel that way.

For example, sections:

   Section welcome #welcome
   Blah blah blah
   EndSection

   Section foo #foo
   Blah blah blah
   EndSection

(Ignore my extra caps; iOS is annoying like that.)

“Sections” in markdown would be written more naturally, and the end intuited based on the following content:

    # Welcome
    Blah blah blah

    # foo
    Blah blah blah

The extra wordy markup means little, and detracts from readability. Similar with groups. Date formats appear to get somewhat complicated as well. If that was resolved, I think it would be much better.

This is just a surface reaction to what I see; I didn’t do a horribly deep dive. I love the idea. It just needs some work if it’s going to be as smooth as markdown.

JMHO, and good luck in any event. =)

I'm getting the same, it's zoomed out to 2140.

Centering and zooming doesn't work either. The "centre" seems quite offset and ends up in the 2030's

Hi Rob, I love the concept. I've played around with it for about 20 minutes now. I use obsidian for almost all my notes and documentation because I like keeping everything as close to plaintext as possible.

I also currently use Omniplan for timelines and Gantt charts, so that is what I would be comparing Markwhen to, in terms of functionality. Omniplan is a very mature app and I recommend giving it a try if you haven't yet. There's a lot of ideas in there that you could import to Markwhen.

Thoughts: - The travel itinerary planning aspect is interesting. I've never found an itinerary planner I liked, and many of them cost a substantial amount. I'd like to see more about this from markwhen. - The syntax is somewhat confusing on first reading. I am used to using `###` to mark out headings and paragraphs and this conflicts with standard markdown in that sense. though I havent used Markwhen enough yet to climb over the learning curve.

Two biggest feature requests from me:

- release an Obsidian plugin for Markwhen so I can have Markwhen timelines inside my exisiting Obsidian notes. I'd be happy to pay a one off licence for this even though it would be locally run.

- Find a way to do automatic dependency levelling so that when one task is dependent on another, and I increase the time taken for the first task, then the dependent one is automatically moved forward appropriately.

I vouched for this because while it does not relate to using markdown to create gantt & timeline charts, it does relate to using code to create said charts and is therefore IMHO a relevant comparable tool.

See https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/gantt.html and https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/timeline.html

Having said that, it's late tonight but I plan to give this markwhen a good look tomorrow when I'm fresh, because even being aware of the above options, I've not found an offline friendly code-to-timeline tool I can settle on and this may be it.

Does this support timestamps within a day?

When playing murder mystery games, frequently I need to construct a timeline of events. This would be the perfect tool if I can mark timestamps.

EDIT: yes it does! But looks like it needs to be in the ISO date format.