Your timeline
Your life as a heatmap — months vertical, years horizontal. Months with more anecdotes glow; hard ones turn amber; vague eras render as bands. An honest view of the shape of your life.
The problem
The twelve chapters give you structure by stages, but sometimes you want to see actual time — "what happened in my life between March and August 2018?". And most apps that promise "your life on a timeline" demand an exact date for every anecdote, or invent one. But memory doesn't work that way: sometimes you know the exact day, sometimes only the year, sometimes only "the nineties," and sometimes nothing.
What Anecdotario does
The timeline (/timeline) is an editorial-broadsheet heatmap: months on the vertical axis, years on the horizontal. Each anecdote lands in the cell that matches the precision it actually carries.
- Exact day → bright monthly cell. More anecdotes in that month, more brightness.
- Approximate year → faint column over that year, marked with a
≈on top. - Era ("the seventies," "while I lived in Pocitos") → translucent band with diagonal hatching covering the year range.
- No date assigned → not on the grid. A discreet footer counter tells you how many there are.
Four details that matter
- "Today" marker. A dashed vertical line on the current month with a violet dot on the present month's row — your eye anchors in time when you see 50+ years at once.
- Amber for hard months. A month where most anecdotes are tagged as "hard" tone shows in amber instead of violet. Loss doesn't share the color of celebration.
- Decade margins. Decade boundaries (1970 / 1980 / 1990 ...) get visibly thicker hairlines than the rest of the grid — visual chunking to navigate decades without counting columns.
- Bloom halo on peaks. Months with many anecdotes glow with a violet halo behind them — the peaks of your life are visible from afar.
Why this matters
The difference between "we invent a date for you" and "we show you the precision you actually remember" is small in code and huge in the product. A story from your adolescence placed in the month you uploaded it to the app is a small lie repeated every time you look at it. A band labeled "the seventies — at grandma's" is honest, and the eye reads it for what it is: an era, not a point.
Your life didn't happen in categories — it happened in time, with the precision your memory could keep. The timeline is built to reflect that, not correct it.