First, note that you don't have to download anything to make use of Timeline. It is designed to be used as a Web API that can simply be referenced in your HTML. See the various external uses for how people other than us have used Timeline.
If you do need / want to have an entirely local version, you also need to grab the simile-ajax library from http://simile.mit.edu/repository/ajax/trunk/src/webapp/api/
Timeline's source is hosted in our Subversion repository.
Subversion clients:
More on Subversion here.
Checking out Timeline
If you use the command-line client, check out the source by typing this command in the desired directory (for the stable version 1.2):
svn checkout http://simile.mit.edu/repository/timeline/tags/1.2/ timeline
or for the latest development version
svn checkout http://simile.mit.edu/repository/timeline/trunk/ timeline
ID and password are not required. If you use a GUI client, then it should be obvious where to put in either of those two URLs.
Running Timeline
In the timeline directory where you have checked out the source, type
run
to run the Jetty server serving Timeline. Timeline will then be served at http://localhost:9999/timeline/.
To use your local Timeline code, you can point either at http://localhost:9999/timeline/api/timeline-api.js or directly at the source files in file:///...some path.../timeline/src/webapp/api/timeline-api.js.
