Aeon Timeline: Displaying Story-Arcs January 11, 2009
Posted by aeontimeline in design, development, discussion, new feature, usability.Tags: design, gannt charts, Mac OS X Software, timeline, usability, user interface, writing, writing software
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[Don't forget, a new version of Aeon Timeline has just been released. See the post below, and get it from the Latest Version page].
This is a rather long post (there are some pictures, at least). I say this as a warning for people who just want to check out the application, and the general direction it is taking. If you fit this category, the bullet points below list what we are trying to achieve. You probably want to read no further.
Goals of the Story-Arc View
- Create a view that does not have the Entity lines – this allows a lot more space and freedom.
- Events will be displayed at their exact location on the timeline, rather than pushed around to create sufficient space between each event. Combined with filtering by Entity, this will make it much easier to check that someone isn’t in two places at once, for instance.
- Divide events into separate story-arcs/timelines that split and merge throughout the timeline as groups of people are separated and reunited.
- Express the temporal and causal links between events.
- Provide an intuitive and interactive means to manipulate the additional information made available by this new view.
In the remainder of this post, I discuss the difficult task of displaying this additional information. Continue reading (click on the more link), if you want to see my current thoughts and sketches, and provide feedback and further ideas/suggestions. Feedback at this design stage is crucial, as it will become increasingly difficult to make large changes as we move towards implementation.
Beta Release: Aeon Timeline 0.2 January 9, 2009
Posted by aeontimeline in development, new feature, releases, usability.Tags: beta, Mac OS X Software, timeline, writing, writing software
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Aeon Timeline Version 0.2.1 has just been released for both Leopard and Tiger. The version 0.2 release is the next major milestone in the evolution of Aeon Timeline.
I would encourage everyone to update to this new release, as the new version is a major advancement. It incorporates a lot of feedback from writers who have used the software on real-world writing projects.
Key features of this release include:
- Folding timeline – periods with relatively few events will be zoomed out (eg. shown as decades), but the timeline will automatically increase the zoom around key areas, such as multiple events in a month or day.
- Tags and Hot Tags – events can now be tagged with keywords, and important tags can be shown on a header bar, allowing you to filter the events that are shown with a single click.
- Customisable Labels – the existing ‘event colours’ have now been expanded to fully customizable labels. You can now add and delete labels, change their titles and colours, and set a label as a default.
- Age-less Entities – characters have been expanded to ‘entities’. They no longer require a birth/start date, and can be added, deleted, and edited via a control window. All of the existing functionality with ages, etc. still remains available.
- Improved interface – new header and footer bars have been added, and selected events now ‘pop-out’ of the timeline. You can also, via preferences, change the width allocated for events before the first entity is listed, and change the spacing between entities.
- Various minor enhancements – notes auto-save, validation to ensure events have an actual title, all fields available in Add Event window, etc.
- The user manual has been completely revised and rewritten for the current version, and includes some additional information about the application to come.
