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.
