Aeon Timeline Version 0.4.0 has just been released. This new version is compatible with Snow Leopard, Leopard, and Tiger.

This new version just extends the expiry date for the current release, which is due to expire shortly. This version will not expire until the end of February 2010.

Development is continuing on the next major release of Aeon Timeline. The next version will include Custom Calendars, numerous bug fixes that have been reported from this version, and a few other additional changes. This version will probably be released early in the new year.

Follow the link for upgrade information.

Aeon Timeline supports automatic updates, which means you will be notified whenever an update is available, and able to download it directly within the program. If the program does not alert you automatically, you can choose ‘Check for Updates…’ from the Aeon Timeline menu.

Alternatively, you can download the latest version of the application by clicking on the Latest Version link at the top of the Blog page. The last beta was downloaded more than 500 times, and I hope even more users will test out this latest version. If you know other users who may be interested in the program and the direction the program is taking, please encourage them to take a look.

There will be more posts in the coming weeks as I discuss and seek feedback on some of the more interesting and exciting developments still to come, including fantasy calendars, further improvements to story arc view, and more.

Aeon Timeline Version 0.4.0 has just been released. This new version is compatible with Snow Leopard, Leopard, and Tiger.

I would encourage everyone to update to this new release, as the new version is a major advancement.

The big addition to this release is in the improved exporting capabilities. The export mode allows you to filter events based on Tags, Story Arcs, Entities, and manual selection, and then export them to a variety of formats and applications, including:

• Both Story Arc View and Entity View can be exported to a range of image files (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, TIFF).
• To Scrivener, via OPML (a better Scrivener exporter will be coming with Scrivener 2.0).
• RTF document, HTML table
• Other presentational timeline applications, including Bee Doc’s Timeline and Simile Timeline.

The export system uses a plugin architecture, which makes it easy for further applications to be added in future (discussions are underway with several other application developers). If there is an application you wish to see included, please let me know via the feedback form.

Other changes include background images, the ability to specify an entity’s age at first event, improvements to the collapsible timelines, and improved calculation speed.

Follow the link for upgrade information.

Aeon Timeline supports automatic updates, which means you will be notified whenever an update is available, and able to download it directly within the program. If the program does not alert you automatically, you can choose ‘Check for Updates…’ from the Aeon Timeline menu.

Alternatively, you can download the latest version of the application by clicking on the Latest Version link at the top of the Blog page. The last beta was downloaded more than 500 times, and I hope even more users will test out this latest version. If you know other users who may be interested in the program and the direction the program is taking, please encourage them to take a look.

There will be more posts in the coming weeks as I discuss and seek feedback on some of the more interesting and exciting developments still to come, including fantasy calendars, further improvements to story arc view, and more.

Aeon Timeline Version 0.3.1 has just been released for both Leopard and Tiger. The version 0.3 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. 

The big addition to this release is the all new Story Arc View. Although it is not yet feature complete (the links between Story Arcs have not yet been implemented), it is still a big addition to Aeon Timeline. The new Story Arc view provides:

• A horizontal timeline, using a similar folding timeline algorithm to the Entity View, that compresses time periods with little activity, and expands time periods when there are lots of events.
• A much better temporal view of the timeline by placing all events at their exact location, and provides a visual display of events’ duration.
• Events can be split into different story arcs with simple drag and drop operations, making it easy to sort out the events that belong together.
• Story Arcs can be hidden and shown with a simple drop-down menu option, making it easy to concentrate on smaller sections of your timeline at once.
• The Story Arc View is fully integrated with the Entity View, sharing the same Hot Tags bar, maintaining selections as you toggle between views, etc.

The next version will provide vast improvements to the somewhat limited exporting and printing options currently available. Please participate in the discussion over on the Scrivener forums regarding exporting the timeline data to Scrivener (and other writing software): http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=6085

Follow the link for upgrade information. 

Aeon Timeline supports automatic updates, which means you will be notified whenever an update is available, and able to download it directly within the program. If the program does not alert you automatically, you can choose ‘Check for Updates…’ from the Aeon Timeline menu.

Alternatively, you can download the latest version of the application by clicking on the Latest Version link at the top of the Blog page. The last beta was downloaded more than 500 times, and I hope even more users will test out this latest version. If you know other users who may be interested in the program and the direction the program is taking, please encourage them to take a look.

There will be more posts in the coming weeks as I discuss and seek feedback on some of the more interesting and exciting developments still to come, including further improvements to the Story Arc view, and to be included in the next release, the non-linear narrative for exporting.

Almost two months have gone by since my last post here, so I am just writing to let everyone know that Aeon Timeline is still being actively developed.

As I forecast after the last release, I am now in the middle of a large update to add the separate Story Arc view to Aeon Timeline. This is probably the largest piece of development left to complete on the application, as I need to write not only a new view, but make sure it is seamlessly integrated with the existing application.

At this point, I will not predict when the next beta release will be available. But it will be a big improvement. In the mean time, please continue to download and provide feedback on the existing beta release.

Aeon Timeline version 0.2.2 has just been released for both Leopard and Tiger users. Version 0.2.2 is a minor release following on from the previous major release.

This is a compulsory upgrade for all users. The previously released betas are due to expire on January 31st (users will have been receiving warnings with an incorrect expiration date of October last year for some weeks) and will not function beyond that date. This new release will be valid until June 31st, by which time several further releases will have been made available.

Key changes for this release include:

• Updated Expiration Date
• User Interface State (Inspector state, toggle ages on/off, etc.) is now saved with your timeline, so it will always open as you last saved it.
• Date format for Entity View and Inspector can be controller separately, with the option to not display dates in Entity View.
• Option to toggle between Day/Month and Month/Day format in the margin of the timeline.
• Option to switch off the time display in the calendars.
• Calendars now use 12 hour format plus AM/PM, rather than 24 hour format.
• Document Icon created to distinguish Aeon Timeline files in Finder.
• Numerous bug fixes: the application no longer hangs if dragging an event past the end of the timeline, the date format is saved correctly, you can filter on tags regardless of whether they are hot tags, and several display/interface bugs.

As has been the case for many beta releases, this new release also sees another update to the Application Icon also. This new and final version of the application icon has a metallic base which makes it much brighter in the Dock, matching the other application icons.

Aeon Timeline Application Icon

Aeon Timeline now supports automatic downloads, so Version 0.2 users can check for updates and download the new version from within Aeon Timeline. Alternatively, the latest version can be downloaded by clicking on the Latest Version link at the top of the blog page.

The next release will feature Story Arc View, as per the previous blog post and forum discussion. As this is a major development, this new release will not be available for some time.

[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.

The ideal timeline: some notes and constraints

An ideal timeline would capture the maximum amount of data in the minimum space required (computer people call this entropy). Although this is an incomplete list, some of the constraints and properties we would want it to meet include:

1. Events must be displayed at their correct temporal location in the timeline.
2. Events with a duration must have that duration visible and accurate in the timeline.
3. The division of events between story-arcs should be easily visible and understood.
4. The relationship between the different story-arc threads should be clear at all times: at times they will split and merge, there may be events shared between different story-arcs, etc.
5. It should be easy to work on small sections of the timeline at once, without getting swamped with details from all the other events, entities, and story-arcs.
6. The causal chains between events should be displayed (eg. Joe was out late, which caused him to sleep in, and therefore arrive late for work the day the building was destroyed by fire).

Constraint 1 and 2: Handling collisions between events

In Aeon’s (existing) Entity View, this first constraint was intentionally broken: although we had a line marking the event’s correct location on the timeline, to avoid collisions between events, we intentionally shifted events up or down (parallel to the timeline) to avoid collisions between events.

Most timeline applications shift events perpendicular to the timeline instead (this option was not available for the existing Entity View, because it would encroach on the character space). This is why horizontal timelines are more common – it is visually better to shift events by the short height of a line of text, rather than the longer and variable width. The typical result looks something like this:

Figure 1: Standard Timeline

So that events can be displayed in their correct position on the timeline, our story-arc view must use this method to avoid collisions. An example of Constraint 2, an event with a duration, is included in this image.

Constraint 3: Dividing Events into story-arcs

If we were to consider the events included in the above timeline, the events can easily be divided into several story-arcs:

• There is the story-arc shared by “boy and girl”, when they first meet, and when meet up again.
• There is the story-arc that follows the boy during the war.
• There is the story-arc that follows the girl during the war.
• There is a set of external events (eg. the war itself) which are not part of any particular story-arc.

If we drew the timeline in more detail, there could no doubt be additional arcs and sub-arcs. If we were to draw an overview of how these story-arcs would be structured, we would see a diagram something like this (the story-arcs are labelled, but we cannot see the events that make up the story arcs):

Figure 2: Story-Arc Overview

Constraints 1-3: combined

Aeon Timeline’s story-arc view will need to combine both of these properties, which means that the perpendicular dimension will have two separate uses: it will be used to prevent collisions between events, and it will also be used to separate the events belonging to each story-arc. This is acceptable, so long as the collision stack does not get too deep (we have some control over this, through the flexible zoom already used in Aeon’s Entity View, and by truncating event titles, if necessary).

Aa very rough sketch is shown below. Here, the vertical lines are just a visual aid to help with alignment, and would be placed at sensible date boundaries. The horizontal lines are another visual aid, dividing the events from each of the story-arcs. Note that only those events shown in the original timeline are included in this one, and so the additional sub-arc is missing.

Figure 3: Structured Story-Arc View

We have already lost some of the information in Figure 2. Although the events are clearly divided into the three separate story-arcs, it is not clear how those story-arcs relate to each other, or where the original story-arc divides into the two other story-arcs.

It would be possible to annotate the timeline with some of the detail, using something like Figure 4 below. If this is structured well, the gray horizontal lines dividing the story-arcs may be unnecessary.

Figure 4: Annotated Story-Arc View

Constraint 4: Detail within Context

The sketch in Figure 4 looks like a reasonable start, but as the timeline increases in complexity and volume, several important properties of the timeline are likely to change:

1. The overall structure of the story-arcs will become more detailed, as more sub-arcs and sub-sub-arcs will be added into the timeline structure, thus increasing the amount of annotation required.
2. The interaction of story-arcs will become more complex: A might break into B and C, and C might in turn break into D and E. E might then merge back into B, leaving B and D as the active sub-arcs. As these chains become more complex, it may not be possible for all splitting and merging chains to be adjacent to one another. 
3. As more events are added, the timeline will need to zoom in and stretch horizontally to accommodate them, resulting in more scrolling, and much longer chains of events without annotation.

Edward Tufte (described by the New York Times as the “Da Vinci of Data”) has listed his thoughts on why Project Management GANNT Charts do not work, and provides his own sketch of how such charts should look. One of his concerns is Detail within Context, and it is this property that breaks down as we extend our Figure 4 sketch to a real-life example.

Viewing the timeline will be like looking at a wall chart through a straw. There are two possibilities to overcome this. One is to implement a physical zoom, that shrinks the text until it is so small that it looks like a fuzzy line from Figure 2. The other is to do what Tufte suggests, and what already exists in Aeon’s Character View: add a context view separate to the main view. 

The most likely implementation for the context view would be a floating panel, which can be moved around the window or hidden completely as required. Figure 5 shows an example. The light-blue highlight would show the area currently visible in the main scroll area.

Figure 5: Annotated Story-Arc View with floating Context View

Constraint 5: Avoiding Information Overload

As you develop your timeline, there are probably times you want to focus on events for one particular story-arc, or one particular character. This is the same reason Hot Tags and filtering were added to Aeon’s Entity View. Similarly, in implementing the story-arc view, there must be some function to limit the events being displayed to just a few of the story-arcs so you can work on your separate threads in peace.

Importantly, you will still be able to filter events by entity, even though the entity axis has been removed. As events will be displayed in their exact location (rather than bumped parallel to the timeline to create sufficient space between event lines), you will be ensure that you do not require a character in two places at once.

Feedback Stage: That’s It, For Now

You will notice I didn’t address the last ideal, showing causal links between individual events. I have omitted it, at this point, because I am unsure how to display the additional information without making the timeline look like a spaghetti bowl of interconnecting lines. It may be that we have already reached the natural entropy of a two-dimensional sheet of paper, and these causal links may need to be omitted.

I would appreciate comments on what I have said above, whether they are suggestions for major paradigm shifts, minor adjustments, or just an agreement with what I have proposed.

Obviously, there are a lot of details still to thresh out, including:

• An intuitive user interface design, and ensuring the user is not burdened with supplying unnecessary information.
• Temporally linked events, and how these get displayed in both views.

I will probably post on these issues further down the track, but I welcome suggestions for these ideas at the same time. To provide feedback, comment on the topic below, send your comments from the ‘Provide Feedback’ page, or (preferably) participate in this thread on the Scrivener forums.

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.

From this version onwards, Aeon Timeline supports automatic updates, which means you will be notified whenever an update is available, and able to download it directly within the program.

You can download the latest version of the application by clicking on the Latest Version link at the top of the Blog page. Over 200 people downloaded the previous beta, and I hope even more users will test out this latest version. If you know other users who may be interested in the program and the direction the program is taking, please encourage them to take a look.

There will be more posts in the coming weeks as I discuss and seek feedback on some of the more interesting and exciting developments still to come, including Story Arc view and the non-linear narrative for exporting.

Along with the new release of the next version of Aeon Timeline, the application icon has also received some minor tweaking in response to user comments.

The changes made to the icon are as follows:

• The colour tones have been made slightly lighter.
• The money symbol has been replaced with a book, to symbolise working.
• The order of the icons has been reversed, so that the baby and book are found at the front of the icon, where the shadow falls. It is less morbid to have a timepiece indicating the start rather than the end of life.

I hope everyone likes the new icon.

Just a quick note to let everyone know I have not left Aeon Timeline behind. I didn’t quite have everything ready for release by the time I hoped, and naturally, I had no time over Christmas to get everything done.

The current plan is still the same:
1. Get the next beta release (version 0.2.0) out shortly.
2. If necessary, release a bug-fix version 0.2.1.
3. Start playing with mock-ups and interfaces for the most conceptually challenging idea I have left: multiple timelines/story-arcs.

I won’t be so rash as to publish any sort of timeline for the above, other than to say the next release should be available in the next week or so (once I clean it up for Tiger users, and fix up the documentation).