Thanks to Timelined for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve started using this app to track my medical history, making it easy to reference my appointments, diagnoses, symptom onsets, and more. It’s going to be really handy when I go to a specialist and need to give them my history.

Aside from specialized applications like medical history, this app lets you track anything and everything in your life. I’ll let the developer tell you more:

There’s a category of information that no existing app handles particularly well — events. Not appointments — those live in your calendar. Not tasks — those belong in a to-do app. Events: the things that happened. The project you shipped after eight months of work. The diagnosis that changed how you planned the next year. The day you moved into a new house. The trip where everything went sideways.

Notes apps flatten these into undated text. Calendars push them off the visible edge as soon as they’re past. Photos apps have the dates but none of the context. None of these tools treats an event as an event — as something with metadata, narrative, and a place in a sequence.

Timelined is my answer to that problem. The main thing that the app allows you to do is capture good records. Every event in Timelined holds at least a title and a date. It can also (optionally) capture a subtitle, a category, links, photos, people, tags, documents and location data. In short – everything relevant to a moment, together in one place. You can even nest events within other events (think stops on a road trip, or musical acts at a festival). The design goal was depth: entries that are worth going back to, not just a marker that something happened.

The other strength is navigability at scale. A three-month timeline is easy to browse. A five-year timeline isn’t — not without the ability to focus it. Timelined’s powerful filtering system lets you isolate a project, a time window, a location, or a category. A large timeline stays as usable as a small one.

Timelined can be used for personal histories, home records, medical timelines, travelogues, project documentation and family histories. All of these disparate event types held in a single timeline. The underlying need is consistent across all of them: meaningful, time-anchored information that deserves a real structure. The sequence of events starts to tell a story in a way that scattered notes never can. That’s what I wanted Timelined to make possible — not just a place to store things, but a way to understand them.

Timelined runs on iPhone and iPad natively, and on Apple Silicon Macs. It’s free to download, with in-app purchases available to unlock unlimited events.

Timelined is on the App Store.