Aeon Timeline

This is something I have been puzzling over, related to a comment made in the original discussion that started me working on this application:

The thing that has struck me about the timeline apps I have looked at is not just that they expect real dates, but that they expect complete dates to be attached to events when you make them. I just can’t think of a single story idea of mine where events happen in a particular year in either world or galactic history. And even if events do eventually get pinned down in this way as things get worked out, this is information I would rarely have at the time that I wanted to be starting to work with a timeline app. (Most of that info will never get pinned down–Pick an arbitrary piece of fiction and try to tot up its events in your favorite timeline app without having to make up a lot of fake date/times!)

I think that the problem is that timelines apps are all modeled on “real” timelines which map out a preexisting set of events that happened in real time. This gets things backwards if you are making up the story. Creating a timeline as a fiction development tool is more like creating a timeline with variously (and perhaps wildly) partial information.

Since reading that comment, I have been mindful of not burdening the user by requiring too much date/time information at once. if the user creates events by double clicking in the right spot, and then by dragging the events in the interface rather than editing them manually in the Inspector, they can just about get away with not thinking about dates at all.

Which is what we want. The information is there when they are ready, but they are not forced to use it. (more…)