Christmas list

Scrivener Wish List
1

Things I’d really love to have in a new version (BTW: I love Scrivener, this is NOT criticism):

  1. A timeline/calendar function for planning events in the story (to avoid continuity issues)
  2. Binder: The icons for the sections in colour, according to their status, e.g. ‘to do’ = Red, ‘final’ = green etc.
  3. Info on how to create templates (perhaps I’ve just overlooked it?)

Thanks for this wonderful software!

Andrew

2

Glad to hear you’re liking Scrivener! Two of these three can already be done:

  1. Actual heavy-duty timelines is out of scope (you might want to check out something like Aeon Timeline), but we’ll have better support for tracking dates in an upcoming upgrade.

  2. Though out of the box Scrivener uses a plain-text tag for status, you can co-opt labels to perform that function (a number of my projects use labels for status for precisely this reason). So visit Project/Meta-Data Settings… to set up labels—even including renaming the field to “Status” if you want—and then the next ingredients are any of the options in the View/Use “Label” Color in/ submenu (icons would do precisely what you’re looking for).

Also, check out this forum thread, where someone posted a set of graphical custom icons you can install into a project or your Mac.

  1. I’m not sure which type of templating you were referring to, but we’ve got two different kinds, so hopefully one of those suffices:

[list=1][*] For project templates (like the ones we provide, “Novel” and such), see §6.10, Templates, pg. 48.

  1. For document templates, boilerplate files in the binder of individual projects like character sheets, see §7.5, Document Templates, pg. 77.
    [/*:m][/list:o]
3

Im new to Scrivener, i have been waiting ages for this to come out on Windows and then forgot about it until recently.
So anyway I was going to do a post about lack of Timeline in Scrivener. Since this program has been highly rated and not cheap its a bit of surprise such an important feature is missing. I came across Aeon Timeline but at $70 (my currency- this is way too much). Why couldn’t there be a lightweight timeline for Scrivener? what a shame.

I have a mind-map program which i will use instead.

4

It’s a real shame that Aeon costs so much in your territory. Aeon was developed by a long-time Scrivener user to work interoperably with Scrivener, and in my opinion is the best timeline application not just for use with Scrivener but with any writing software for any project that requires a chronology that is beyond the most straightforward. I’ve tried quite a few. Again, in my opinion (I’m just a user), now to add a timeline feature to Scrivener that is anything above the most simple would be “to re-invent the wheel”.

5

I use Scapple for timelines. The organizing tools make it easy.
[attachment=0]timeline.jpg[/attachment]

6

You could just type in dates/“Day x after the ship wreck” in a custom metadata field, which can be displayed in the outline view.