Tips for using Timebox

Good friends of ours were recently married and they shared their stories and a few of their favorite photos* via Timebox.

From their experience we realized that a few features of Timebox may be a bit hard to discover or unintentionally difficult to use. We hope the tips below help make Timebox easier and more fun to use.

Adding photos directly from iPhoto on your Mac
If you have a lot of photos (for example, a zip file of all the photos from your wedding photographer), first add them to a folder on your Mac and then import them into iPhoto (File > Import Into Library). Then open the iPhoto Preferences dialog box (iPhoto > Preferences…), tap on Sharing and then enable “Share my photos.” You can then directly access all your photos (by iPhoto album if you like) wirelessly from your iPhone/iPad. In other words, you don’t have to sync all of them with your iOS device. Instead Timebox allows you to directly grab only the photos from iPhoto that you want when you tap Add Photos.

Adding photos directly from Facebook
Timebox also has direct photo add from Facebook. So if you have some photos on Facebook, you can open a new Entry or edit an existing one, tap Add Photos, then tap Facebook. Once you go through the usual iOS and Facebook app approval steps, you can wirelessly pull any photos you like from one of your Facebook albums directly into your Timebox. You can also add photos you were tagged in.

Viewing and zooming your photos
When you share a Timebox page or make an ebook, Timebox creates a PDF for you. Timebox “down samples” the photos to 300 DPI (dots-per-inch) in the PDF so the PDF doesn’t get too big. When you view the PDF on your Mac, PC, tablet or phone you can zoom in to the photos and see a lot of detail. If you’re viewing your photos in Timebox itself, you can zoom in and see the full resolution of the photos since we always retain the photos at full resolution (unlike Facebook, which downsamples them). To zoom in and pan around on any photo in Timebox, just tap the photo (except while in Edit mode).

Sharing your stories via email, posting on Facebook or Tweet
Just tap the share button and choose your method of sharing.

Timebox on all your devices
If you have some photos on your iPhone and some on your iPad, with the  Timebox Cloud Sync and Backup upgrade, you can edit your Timebox entries or add photos on any device and you’ll always have a synchronized copy on your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Simply tap the Options tab in Timebox and purchase the Cloud Sync and Backup upgrade for $2.99. The upgrade also comes with an additional 8GB backed up cloud storage.

Congratulations Toni and Tad!!!

* Toni and Tad’s wedding photo by Dennis Kwan Weddings.

Timebox Feedback

We appreciate all the thoughtful reviews that people have posted in the App Store and the comments that have been sent to us directly. We are interested in building an app that people think is truly useful and we are very focused on that goal.

However it takes time to find out what people want and then to build it (building always seems to take a bit longer than we think). So we are constantly collecting a list of requested features and will add them to future updates as soon as we can.

We love hearing from you and would like to address a couple of recent questions:

1. Timebox does not require your name or birthday. However, Timebox works better if it has a starting date on which to base the Timeline, Yearbook, etc. But as we say in the Welcome page help text, both of these are “optional” in the sense that you can enter anything you like but you must enter something.
   Your name and birthdate are completely private and only stored in your Timebox. We NEVER use them for anything external to your Timebox.
2. When your device is normally backed up, your Timebox will be included in that backup. We offer the Timebox Cloud Service in case you would like to purchase extra “archival” storage and multi-device sync.
3. You can easily create a free PDF of any entry in your Timebox by taping on the share button while viewing an entry. The basic ebook artifact, available on the Artifacts page, is also now free (as of version 1.3) and we will soon offer different ebook designs for $0.99.
4. Dropbox will soon be added to Timebox as a source of photos.

Please tell us how you think Timebox can be a better app - we’re listening. Send us email (support@timeboxapp.com or me.heinen@pepper.com).

Thanks! 

Ebooks are now free in Timebox 1.3!

From a teacher “I LOVE Timebox! It is clear, beautiful, and easy for my [students] to use almost daily as an archive of their ah-ha moments and life events…I cannot afford to pay the $.99 for each [student’s] ebook creation. My school does not have enough funding to pay for it either. I need a free way of having access to their entire creations. Otherwise, it’s on an iPad unable to be shared and therefore useless to me as a teacher.”

 

We wanted to help so we decided to offer our basic ebook to everyone for free. In the future, we will offer a selection of additional ebook designs for $0.99, but the basic ebook design will always be free.

 

Two additional features in Timebox version 1.3:

• Improved Timeline view scrolling performance;
• Tap on a photo in the Yearbook view to zoom to full screen.

We appreciate all your comments and feedback. Please keep them coming.

 

Thanks!