Chronos Notes

Chronos Notes is an application for recording historical events. It allows you to take notes in a random order but then view your historical notes on a graphical timeline. A history professor doesn't always lecture in chronological order. This application will help students organize their history notes regardless of the helter skelter way they were made. Chronos Notes can be used on an iPad or on an iPhone. Currently, data is not communicated between devices. Images on this page show the iPad version.

Using the Timeline View

The timeline has many useful features for viewing your events in a chronological fashion. By default there are no filtered applied and the view is organized with time across the bottom and places on the left side.

Touching a colored dot will tell you which event or events it represents. The size of the dot indicates how many events are represented, larger dots mean more events. Touching it again will open the event for edit or if this dot represents multiple events, you will be directed to select an event to edit.

When an event or event set is selected, the icon will appear as a star and some information about the event(s) will appear on top of the tool bar.

he color of a dot indicates which place or parent this event belongs to.

When the place toggle is ON, the dot color indicates which place this event occurred in.
When the place toggle is OFF, the dot color indicates which top parent event this event belongs to.

Touch on an empty part of the graph to create a new event.

Use the filters, place toggle and the timescale control to change your timeline view.

Filter View

Use the filter to focus the timeline on specific types of events.

You can filter by tags, parents and places.

Items included in the filter are indicated by a checkbox to the right.

To select or de-select an item, tap it.

Editing an Event

When this is a new event, the edit will be automatically turned on. If this is not a new event, you will need to push the edit button to edit.

The begin and end date ranges are bounded by this event's parent.

You can add places as needed by selecting the items in the Where section. This will take you to a selection screen for locations. From the locations area, you can add/remove locations.

Tags can be useful for filtering later. You can add/remove tags by selecting Add/Assign Tag.

Parent indicates which event this event is a sub-event of.

You can add Wikipedia links by using the Search Wikipedia option. Please note: when you land on the search page, the search term is the name of the event. You may need to edit the search term on the search page to retrieve relevant articles from Wikipedia. This is because the Wikipedia search is based on article title.

Using the Event View

The event view allows you to view and edit events directly without going through the timeline graph. You can also access settings from this view.

The event list is on the left. The puzzle pieces indicate what sort of event this is, either a top level parent (parent with no parent) or a child with no children. An event is only eligible to have children if it has both a start date/year and an end date/year. An event that starts and ends on the same date can not have children.

You can use the sort type and filter to change the display of the event list.

On the right, the current selected event is displayed and can be edited.

Show tags and show children are toggles to show the attached tags and children of this event.

You can edit available places and tags by choosing the Add/Assign option within the place and tag sections and then using the edit toggle.

Editing Settings

You can change the way Chronos Notes behaves by changing the settings.

Show Tags: Automatically show the tag list when editing an event.
Show Children: Automatically show the children when editing a parent event.
Ask me on delete: Ask for confirmation when deleting anything.
Event action when deleting a parent: Determines how children of a deleted parent are handled. Free children, delete children, or ask me each time a parent is deleted.
Event action when deleting a place: Determines how events attached to a deleted place are handled. Free events, delete events, or ask me each time a place is deleted.
Event action when deleting a tag: Determines how events attached to a deleted tag are handled. Free events, delete events, or ask me each time a tag is deleted.
Sort by: Default sort type for the event list.
Group by Parent: Organize events by parent.
Minimum year: The earliest year Chronos Notes should allow events to have.
Maximum year: The latest year Chonos Notes should allow events to have.
Default Scale: Timeline scale default selection.
Timeline Theme: Color scheme of the timeline view.
Manage Exported Files: View, send to application, or delete your exported files.

Exporting documents

It is also possible to export your timelines and event to external documents. Both PDF and tab delimited text are supported. An export button is available on the timeline, events list and events detail screens.

Export Types:

Events Detail (pdf) - This is a detailed listing of each event selected for export.
Events (pdf) - This is a short listing of each event selected for export.
Timeline (pdf) - This is a graphical representation of the events selected for export. It includes a legend to give additional detail about the events exported.
Tab-delimited (txt) - This is a text file that including event details that can be used in any text or spreadsheet application.