It all started with my dad.
He was reaching pension age and was reminiscing about his life's work: his rather quirky and eccentric Swedish consultant firm. The stories are plenty, and as the ever-excited amateur photographer he is, it's all photographed in glorious detail. Like that time a local restauranteur named a steak dish on his menu after them, or that time they wrote a seminar slash jazz album with a saxophone player. That kind of thing.
With his rose-tinted glasses firmly on his nose, he approached me, asking whether I, as the tech wiz I am, could cobble together some sort of timeline. You know, an overview of the whole thing, with anecdotes and images to go with it, outlined from start to finish.
No problem, said I. See, you would think this is the sort of thing you could easily find online. One of those online templates you buy or something. You log in and badabing-badaboom you can upload things to a timeline. Right?
Well, wrong. All I could find were corporate planning products, like "timeline your upcoming product launch", and stuff like this, that looked about as fun as a tax return. So no. That wasn't gonna cut it. The steak dish anecdote alone deserved far better.
What I was looking for was something more akin to a blog. Like a truly dynamic experience with tags, galleries, and pages. Something to disappear into. So one very silly, very wicked thought entered my naive mind: "How hard could it be to program this myself?" I'm no web developer or anything and only dabbled a bit with WordPress in uni. This, I understood, would be on a whole other level, and I was readying myself for a dive deep into tutorial hell.
But as my Dantean journey was reaching the inner circles, Dad's interactive timeline was really shaping up, and I became more and more dedicated to the idea. This timeline tool thingy is quite fun, actually. It's neat adding a year and seeing it popping up on the timeline. It feels fun to click around in it and discover memories this way.
So... a year or so later here I am, launching Time Climber Beta. Perhaps other quirky, Swedish consulting firms could get use of this tool? Or heck, anyone, really? The use cases seem endless when you begin to think about it — with one notable exception: planning a corporate product launch, for which there are already plenty of other options.
Now I'm excited to see how you'll use Time Climber. Sign up and let's begin!
Cheers,
Gustaf
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