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Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

by koch on 7/31/23, 3:31 PM with 58 comments

I've been working on markwhen for a bit as a way to create timelines and calendars from plain text, like markdown.

I personally like tools that let you immediately start using them, and I set out to do that here with markwhen.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

  • by floating-io on 8/1/23, 12:24 AM

    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. =)

  • by klardotsh on 7/31/23, 10:24 PM

    Whoa. This is hella cool. Love the documented spec (https://docs.markwhen.com/syntax/dates-and-ranges.html) and "here's an open spec I'm adding value to with a creature-comforts UI, but not walling you in per-se" approach to funding the thing. Rock on, I'll have to play more with this soon.

    UPDATE: There's also a related CLI tool?! Oh HELLS yes. https://github.com/mark-when/mw

  • by koch on 7/31/23, 9:41 PM

    The pricing structure I'm going for is offline == free, online/collaborate == paid.

    There's a promo code on the most recent blog entry (https://blog.markwhen.com) for those who are interested

  • by zakary on 8/1/23, 1:50 AM

    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.

  • by tony_cannistra on 7/31/23, 9:43 PM

    This is not only excellent, but has a great working example that doesn't feel like a toy and showcases the app's features. Great work! Especially on the presentation of the app's value.

  • by gcr on 7/31/23, 8:36 PM

    Really nice project! Thanks for sharing with us!

    Having structured timekeeping capability in plain text (due dates/deadlines, work estimates, time tracking) is also a core feature of org-mode. Do you have a sense for how your approach compares?

  • by jmisavage on 7/31/23, 9:37 PM

    Interesting project. Mermaid has an experimental syntax for timelines too. You might want to look at it for ideas.

    https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/timeline.html

  • by danielvaughn on 8/1/23, 12:20 AM

    I've been trying to find something like this, because I dislike most product roadmap tools and yet I need to use them often. Mermaid has an okay-ish gantt chart but it feels underpowered for what I need.

  • by alberth on 8/1/23, 12:42 AM

    How does this handle dependencies / relationships?

    Isn’t the real power of Timelines, is being able to adjust one task duration and then have it auto cascade down the impact to all the dependent tasks.

  • by rg111 on 7/31/23, 9:50 PM

    I have been using Markwhen since ~6 months. It's nice. I use it to track life events and books/projects/moocs etc.

  • by harlanji on 8/1/23, 12:06 AM

    Really great work. I see great value in an ical translator, to and from if possible.

    I'm working in Python land lately and a big fan of these plain text/markup like formats. I might've stumbled on this format before, definitely at least something similar and was excited. Can't promise I'll tackle the job but I do have great interest in looking closer at the format and seeing if I can load it into Python, and if I did then an ical import/export would probably be the first thing I hook up. Sorry if it's poor form to say I'll do it for dirt cheap if anyone wants to fund it, like $15/hour, might take under a week to get something working.

    Thanks for the great work and demo that so powerfully illustrates it.

  • by Crowberry on 7/31/23, 9:28 PM

    Looks really useful! I would love to have this as an obsidian or vscode plugin to run locally

  • by murphyslab on 7/31/23, 10:40 PM

    Suggestion:

    Zoom/Magnify feature doesn't feel intuitive with the zoom being centred on the middle of the layout and expanding both to the left and the right. It acts like a vecgtor image editor, rather than like a timeline which tends to have an explicit start point. That behaviour makes it difficult to interact with.

    My preference would be to have it start at an anchor somewhere near the left/early edge of the page, then while zooming, to only expand toward the right, pushing the future further away to the right.

    Overall really well done!

  • by jamesgeck0 on 8/1/23, 4:41 AM

    I thought the application was broken at first. The timeline for the example document is scrolled all the way left to 1986 by default, with no visible scrollbars in Firefox on macOS.

  • by ddejohn on 7/31/23, 11:18 PM

    On the landing page, there's a little blurb about a blogging platform (called "re:" I guess?) built on markwhen. But there's no link to any such platform and, well... trying to google "re blogging platform" is an exercise in futility. This is more of a gripe with whoever the heck "re:" is, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

  • by Terretta on 7/31/23, 6:52 PM

    I wanted this to be awesome, but on iPad (Safari/WebKit) all entries in the example are dots with no time length.

  • by asielen on 8/1/23, 4:40 AM

    Not sure if this is currently possible but I would love if you were able to extract the dates from multiple docs at once. So I could for example have separate docs for different meetings and then put the relevant dates in each specific doc but then have a single view of all dates.

    Looking forward to the desktop version.

  • by whyfor_butToBe on 8/1/23, 1:22 AM

    MermaidJS is a markdown diagram tool with a huge variety of options including Gantt charts. Might be worth a look as well!

    I’m on mobile otherwise I’d link to the Gantt directly

    You can find it in the docs here I believe:

    https://mermaid.js.org/

  • by tminima on 8/1/23, 10:05 AM

    Great work. Nice blend of aesthetics and simplicity of building the timeline.

    Along with embed link, I was wondering if there is a way to download the HTML of the rendered timeline directly. I use static pages for my blog and would love a way to add the rendered output directly.

  • by pratio on 8/1/23, 8:52 AM

    Congratulations on the release. I've been following this project for a while and it's great to see this. I agree with many others here about an obsidian plugin but no rush. The work you've done here is amazing.

  • by vagab0nd on 8/1/23, 3:22 AM

    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.

  • by javajosh on 8/1/23, 3:28 AM

    I like this, but I don't see an easy way to use it as a library. For example, I'd like to add it to showdown as a plugin, but the API seems too low level for that, at first glance.

  • by _kasper on 7/31/23, 11:30 PM

    Is it just me, or is this completly broken on mobile?

  • by ApolloRising on 7/31/23, 10:51 PM

    Very well done, have you considered a one time price for personal? Many of us hate the monthly type charges for a tool we only use sometimes.

  • by primitivesuave on 7/31/23, 11:46 PM

    I remember seeing this project at an earlier stage a while back - really cool to see the progress you've made here.

  • by delfaras on 8/1/23, 9:46 AM

    This timeline component is gorgeous, I would love to use it as a lib for some other project

  • by jbaber on 7/31/23, 9:41 PM

    I've wanted something like this for a very long time and made lots of half-hearted attempts.

    Thank you.

  • by byndlimitsfy on 8/1/23, 1:05 PM

    Wow! This is cool. Love how the documentation is done

  • by prydt on 7/31/23, 10:41 PM

    This looks awesome! Great idea and UI.

  • by throwaway888abc on 7/31/23, 6:45 PM

    Very cool a very polished! Bookmarked

  • by pologreen1978 on 7/31/23, 9:34 PM

    OMG, this is awesome!

    This is what I needed for a current project!

    Thank you!