Introducing the Parallel Timeline: See History Side by Side, from the Big Bang to Todayeric

Reading an encyclopedia article tells you what happened. It rarely tells you what was happening everywhere else at the same time. While Catherine the Great ruled Russia, who sat on the throne in China, in Japan, in France? When did the first pharaoh appear, and how long after the dinosaurs was that, really?

That question, what else was happening then?, is the whole idea behind the Parallel Timeline, the flagship feature of Tyokiie, our offline-first reference app. It lays history out as a set of horizontal lanes so you can read across cultures and across time at a glance.

History, side by side

Open the timeline and you get a living chart of the past. Each lane is a region or a theme: Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, plus Scientists, Composers, Rulers, and more. Each bar is a reign or a life, drawn to scale on a shared year axis, with a portrait pulled from Wikimedia Commons. Scroll left and right through the centuries; pinch to zoom; drag with two fingers to make the lanes taller when you want more detail.

Suddenly the connections jump out. In 1770, Catherine II of Russia, George III of Great Britain, Louis XV of France, the Qianlong Emperor of China and Yeongjo of Joseon were all reigning at once, a fact that is obvious on a parallel timeline and nearly invisible in a stack of separate articles.

Tap any bar and a summary card slides up: a portrait, the dates, a one-line description, and a button to read the full article right there in the app.

Two ways to look at time

History has a scale problem. If you draw the last 400 years and the Big Bang on the same ruler, one of them becomes an invisible sliver. So the Parallel Timeline gives you two modes, and a single tap switches between them:

• History view — a normal, evenly-spaced year axis, now stretching all the way back to 3400 BC, the dawn of the written record. Egyptian dynasties, Mesopotamian city-states, medieval rulers and the modern era, all on one line.
• Cosmic view — a logarithmic axis that plots years before present, so the whole of time fits on one screen: the Big Bang (~13.8 billion years ago), the formation of the Earth and Moon, the Cambrian explosion, the age of dinosaurs, the rise of mammals, and the emergence of Homo sapiens, right up to the present day.

In Cosmic view the deep-time lanes — Cosmos, Life on Earth, Human Evolution, Religions — rise to the top, and dates read the way you actually think about them: "4.5 billion years ago," "66 million years ago," "300,000 years ago." It is the "cosmic calendar," but interactive, and in your pocket.

Built the way we build everything

The Parallel Timeline reflects the principles behind the whole app:

• Offline-first. The timeline data — hundreds of entries across dozens of lanes, curated from Wikidata and illustrated from Wikimedia Commons — is bundled right into the app. No account, no cloud, no waiting.
• Straight to the source. Every entry links to its full Wikipedia article, so a moment of curiosity is one tap from the real thing. (The same offline article engine we wrote about in Using Tyokiie for Offline Wikipedia Searching and Viewing.)
• Speaks your language. Lane names, entity titles and descriptions are localized into 15 languages — read the timeline in English, 中文, Español, Français, 日本語 and more, and jump to the matching-language article.
• Yours to shape. A filter lets you choose exactly which lanes and which countries appear, so you can focus on the Roman world, or East Asian dynasties, or just the composers — whatever you are exploring today.

Try it

History isn't a list, it's a landscape. The Parallel Timeline lets you stand back and see the shape of it, then dive into any moment that catches your eye.

You can install Tyokiie from the Google Play Store. Then tap Explore → Parallel Timeline, and switch on Cosmic view to travel from the Big Bang to this morning. We would love to hear which unexpected "they were alive at the same time?!" moment you find first.

— The TYO Lab team