Writing software with timeline generation?

Posted by Dormouse
Apr 16, 2025 at 09:59 PM

Graham Rhind wrote:
Would you happen to know whether (with a
licence) the timeline gets exported along with the rest of the project,
or whether it can be exported separately?

Good question. And idk.

Like most of these database apps, export in Lattics is murky and incomplete - though the developers tend to be good at answering in-app submitted questions by email. And will often add new features when they’re clear about the rationale and fit for their vision.
I’d like it to be better, but stopped being hypercritical when I realised that even file based apps like Obsidian struggled with exports of the features you use the program for. So I only check those exports that matter to me.
Lattics is very good at exporting documents in usable forms.

Events in a timeline also become independent notes, which are easy to insert into a document and thence easily exported. There may be ways to do it, but I’ve not found a way to export notes en masse. tbh I haven’t really looked for one - I’m used to such efforts becoming a trail of tears with these database apps. These notes do not include the timeline specific info.

What Lattics does have is a backup option that contains everything. It used to be in json format but they changed it last year - but nothing documented that I have seen. But it is still readable in a text editor and I suspect that it’s a tweak or extension of the famously loose specification of the json format. (I have checked that the timeline data is in there.) I believe that I could probably find a way of parsing that into other forms, should I ever need it. But that’s a backup of everything. And idk how easy it would be to extract just the subset of info that’d want.

I’d take the simple approach if I wanted to use the timeline info in another program. I’d export all the events/cards in a document. And use screenshots of the visual timeline. Clumsy but manageable for a rare one-off event. In practice I’ve accepted that everything is in Lattics - because I use it for writing etc, I have no need to export anything except the documents.