Tiki-Toki

When it comes to creating Web-based timelines, Webalon?s Tiki-Toki (Free) stands out for crisp aesthetics and dexterous media support. Charting a course between the ?ber-accessible Dipity (Free) and full-featured (desktop-based) Aeon Timelines ($39.99), Tiki-Toki seeks to balance elegance with capability, customization with ease of use. For the most part, it succeeds. Creating a timeline is fast, and populating stories with media from SoundCloud, Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr (Free, 4.5 stars) is as easy as copying and pasting links. Once you have completed a timeline, you can share it, print it, or save its contents. Sometimes the Tiki-Toki gets in its own way, burying features and demanding that users take circuitous paths to others. Administration of classrooms, in particular, will gray hair. When it comes to the building attractive, media-rich, Web-based timelines, however, Tiki-Toki deserves notice.

Entering the Classroom
Tiki-Toki offers tiered pricing ranging from a free baseline account to a $20 per month Silver account. I decided to test what I considered the sweet spot, the Teacher account, which runs $100 per year (or about a little over $8 per month). Suffice it to say that the Teacher account looks and feels like the basal account, but adds the ability to share more timelines (up to 25) with more users (up to 50 associated Pupil accounts), without ads.?

Although the home screen is a far from welcoming (see the first image in the slideshow for this review), it is highly functional. Certainly, I would welcome some sort of spreadsheet import, especially given that the site supports CSV exports, but all it takes to create a timeline is a title, a date range, and introductory text. From the home screen you can also customize the color scheme, associate a background image or introductory image, and supply more text. In my eagerness to create my timeline, two hundred years of Puritan writings and sermons (hold onto your shawls, ladies), I skipped non-essential steps?and I am glad I did.

The Friendlier Side
Tiki-Toki gets friendlier once you begin working from the timeline interface. I found that almost everything I did to my timeline relied upon the ADMIN tab. Using Web links I associated both an Intro image (an image that accompanies introductory text when you first open a timeline) and a background image. I also changed my color scheme to match that background image and supplemented my original Intro text. For text-heavy timelines, be advised that Tiki-Toki is not a particularly text-savvy. Although the software supports HTML formatting, without editing controls it is preferable to write in a word processor. The other annoyance with which you will contend is that every time you make a change, Tiki-Toki will prompt you to Save or Revert.

By default, Tiki-Toki runs with training wheels: Help text will appear as you cursor over menus. At first this is?as one might expect?helpful, but I soon found that I needed the screen space. Although most features are managed via Timeline settings or Advanced settings, Tiki-Toki the Help toggle in My Account?more on this shortly.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/77l-3VqahVI/0,2817,2419206,00.asp

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