Simile Timeline in Salesforce, Revisited

The Simile Timeline is a javascript widget that's available as open source to create interactive timelines.  If you go to the main page for the Simile Timeline, you'll see how you can drag the timeline back and forth through time and click on items to see a detailed description; it's pretty slick.

Back in another life, I had implemented this timeline in Salesforce to provide a graphical display of a Contact's history on their detail page: Events, Tasks, (Job) Opportunities, Interviews, Jobs.  I did it by customizing the free Timeline S-control mashup that utilizes that Simile Timeline widget.  It provided a nice graphical narrative that you could scroll forward or backward in time through, and clicking an individual item on the Timeline would display details on and a link to the record.  This is the screenshot of that application from the appExchange:

That application is still available, but in it's original S-control form, now replaced by Visualforce.  Salesforce still supports S-controls, so you can  use it if you're fine with the default configuration it comes with.  If you're going to need to customize the information that's displayed on the timeline, for instance showing custom object child records to Account, Contact, Case or Opportunity or values of custom fields in the pop-up details, I'd recommend just doing this in Visualforce, which is what I've just done for a client.  Anyone with a bit of javascript and Apex savvy can easily implement this themselves.

I'm considering creating a nifty little package that anyone can install to implement it with no code, probably with an admin screen to let Sys Admins select the Timeline settings such as the intervals of time displayed, and a query interface to display custom object records or fields without requiring any code.  Interested?  Leave me a comment.