Studio717, Mark,
I agree with both of you.
As for the numbers, there is the option y G in the preferences which will produce numbers without leading 0. See the UCI format informations. Not at all intuitive.
And a pretty print out needs another app for sure.
All the best,
Maria
Actually Maria, I’ve found that y G, and yyyy G as it comes up in that dialog, only changes the dates in the event label, not in the scale itself … I can’t find a way to get rid of those leading 0s.
Another profoundly irritating thing about TimeFlyer is that if you want to change the font in the event label texts, you have to do it individually, highlighting all the text and then changing the font. Using “select all” and then setting the font only changes the date/time, not the label text.
I thought using a vertical timeline might be an answer to what I want, but found that the scale line down the left of the page didn’t leave enough room from the margin for dates like 3100 BC.
I’m beginning to feel like AmberV that I might do just as well to set it all up in OmniGraffle Pro. That, or have a closer look at OmniPlan as a solution … expensive, but I really like OmniApps, and would love to have an excuse to get OmniPlan 
Mark
Mark,
you are right about the effect of the formatting. Did you have a glance at the forum?
To make it clear: I am just talking about an application I bought for very few Euros and which helps me getting a better overview over events than the spreadsheets I created earlier (because of the density coming up). I did not use it for creating print outs for my students or any such thing. I prepare these in Intaglio, although Graffle might be a good solution as well.
I am afraid, what I told you is all I can say about TimeFlyer.
All the best from a small island further east of you,
Maria
Yes, I realise that; I am in the same position … I bought it 'cos it cost so little, and I think I’m going to make do with it for that reason. I want something quick and simple, but it seems to me that these are basic things that need to be sorted out.
No, I haven’t had a look at the forum … perhaps I ought, or at least to send feedback. Trouble is I spend too much time in this forum and a couple of others as it is.
I hope all is well on your small island … this small island is suffering from considerable heat, very high humidity and rather too frequent downpours! But then it is the season …
Mark
I know how you feel. I made the mistake of setting the Scrivener forum as the home page on my browser, and now every time I open a new browser window, I see “New posts since my last visit” which I then can’t resist reading. Major work process interruptor! I blame all of you for writing such interesting and informative posts.
I’m not a Tinderbox user, but it’s interesting that they have simile format export. (Actually, I believe Beedocs Timeline may have simile export in the next version - at least, I posted a link and the developer said he was thinking about it!)
What I would be likely to do (if I did hack up an interface for it) is set up a webform that saves into a database, and lets you assign a keyword to it. Then choose which keywords to collect into which parallel timelines when you want to display them. And a whole lot more, too… More plans than motivation, that’s me! Although I have actually downloaded the source and started poking at it to see how it’s put together. I’m a bit hampered by not actually knowing javascript - I’ve successfully avoided learning it for many years now.
This entire debate was very fruitful. I checked out each and every timeline that was mentioned here (as timeline is very crucial for building up the structure of my novel). However before I discovered Literature and Latte, I had already set up my entire timeline (eight characters, yearly events, spanning approx. 100 years) with Excel. And honestly, I must say I agree with a comment here that says the timelines mentioned here are generally poorly programmed and Excel seems to be the only rational solution. Even the most general things like dynamic zooming or parallel columns (to follow two different characters, or cities or sports teams during the same period)are not available. I fully understand there is not enough request for a fully functional and dynamic timeline, but be that as it may, I still think a full scale, practical timeline would have many fans around. What we need is another Keith, that is a programme as well as a writer, who happens to be working on a large scale historical fiction. Until that day, I think I’m going to stick to Bill and his “bookkeeper” sofware. Although it complete lacks the “time feel” at least it gives one the opportunity to do all the above mentioned things.
http://www.smartdraw.com/specials/context/timelines.htm?type=42982&id=42982
This one looks nice and the lady in the photo looks as if she’s using it on a mac. However I presume thats just for aesthetic reasons… 
The problem with all timeline programs I’ve seen so far is that you only can show the beginning point and the end point of an event. This might be enough for teaching history (“King X reigned from the year… to the year…”), but as a novel writer, your needs are different.
What I need most is to see the age of a character in a given year. To know how old he was when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, for example. If I define that the character is born 1966, he will have no personal memory of that event. If I want him to have to have a personal memory of how he saw these snowy pictures on the TV screen, I have to make him older. That will change the year when he leaves home, he will be older in comparison to another character etc. - a lot of things depend on how old the characters are compared to each other and the history of the time in which the story takes place.
No timeline app provides this, so I help myself by using a spreadsheet. This is rather not very comfortable, because you always have to mark a whole set of cells before you can move them, which does not always work the way you want, and so on. I’d rather have something where I just start with bars I can drag in time and that display a running year count.
Oh, I totally agree. I always suffer from this too.
A timeliner for novelists - this would be wonderful.
Keith, do you hear our desperate wailing?
If she’s using a Mac, she’s running bootcamp/parallels/whatever, 'cos if you eventually find how to download the free trial — there’s only one of the links that actually works! — you’ll discover you’re downloading a setup.exe!
And then it’s going to cost you something like $180 for a single-user licence … well I suppose if you’re happy lashing out the price for Vista … 
If you want to go that route, OmniPlan is a bit cheaper, and in general OmniProducts are brilliant. And at some point in the pre-release process, one of the Omniguys produced a chart of Napoleon’s Moscow campaign using OmniPlan. Might interest some of you.
Mark
Napoleon.omniplan.zip (3.63 KB)
OmniPlan would be great…if only I had $150 to throw around. Heck, I’d even settle for OmniOutliner, but I don’t even have $40 to throw around at the moment!
Currently I’m using MyMind, mapping out the general map of events and then using the Tree map type to get it all in a ‘sort-of-like-a-timeline’ thing…It’s a little buggy and crashes a lot, but it’s still an interesting program in its own right, and donationware (can’t beat that).
I’m getting kind of curious now. What would be an ideal novelists timeliner?
My own list of features includes:
)Things I’ve seen other people mention that I think are a good idea (but aren’t on my “must have” list … yet):
Figuring out how to display all of the desired information without cluttering up the display will be the trick though!
Must study… don’t open up simile code… must study…
(Actually, I do think that with a bit of tweaking the simile timeline could do most of the above. Getting it configured to display the right information at the right time takes a lot of mucking about in text configuration files. Which doesn’t bother me any, but it’s slow and fiddly and isn’t very user friendly. And I was playing with ideas of building an interface for it… too bad I suck at making user-friendly interfaces.)
When I was using a PC I sometimes went to a site called Elance, and payed a programmer to do the software I needed. I don’t know if there is an Elance for Mac’s, but if there is, and a timeline is needed by many, we could list all the things we need and then find a programmer, pay him/her for it, and we would all be as happy as kings! Janra’s list seems to cover everything mentioned here so far. Of course one of us would have to sacrifice himself/hersel, to organize things together with the programmer. Thus we would have contributed something to the Mac author softwares too.
(It might be possible to find Mac programmers on Elance.)
Sounds interesting.
In another thread:
[url]https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/writing-software-in-ny-times/1925/1]
howarth recommends and links to an article in the New York Times, which says that Vikram Chandra has used Microsoft Project to organise his characters’ timelines. (All I can say is that Chandra must be a brave man! I have contorted project management software into many roles over the years, but that must take the biscuit!)
The article says:
[quote]
The program was “overkillâ€
A true authors timeline should be able to organize, just one day, one hour, or an entire century depending on the pace of the novel. Such a timeline would, I think, be a tool no writer could do without. I also asked my brother, who’s a PC programmer, but not much hope there either.
On the other hand, it seems that to order such a program from a programmer will be quite expensive. It all depends on how many of us are willing to be a part of this, and how much everyone is willing to pay for it. If we come to a conclusion we can put a note in Elance, and see the price different programmers want.
There’s a program for Windows called StoryView that can do any kind of tracking like that, from hours to minutes to seconds. It’s aimed at screenwriters (or was, I haven’t used it for quite a few years) but it worked for me - to a degree - for my novels. I say ‘to a degree’ because it has the sort of complexity of a Tinderbox (though much more closely focused) and I didn’t have the patience to deal with that.
Might be worth a look if you have an Intel Mac and run Boot Camp or Parallels or the equivalent.
It would be complicated. Quite a bit more complicated than a basic calendar type program, which is also complicated. (I wrote one, I didn’t even have to do the date calculations myself because I found a library for that, and I’d have to say it’s still a complicated project.)
From looking around a bit, the layout of events in the timeline - choosing where exactly to place them on the screen - is not a simple task, because making sure you don’t have any collisions where the text of one event overwrites another is very important.
I can’t see why project management software can’t be used for the purpose, especially if nothing specialised is likely to emerge (for what is a very niche market).
After all, the primary purpose of project-management software is to explore the temporal relationships and “conflicts” between parallel events. Granted, it’s likely to be a less elegant solution both intellectually and aesthetically than something purpose-built: one issue I can immediately foresee is that if characters replace tasks in a gantt chart, you can’t follow a single character on a single line. But maybe you don’t do this - maybe your characters’ activities replace tasks and you allocate those activities to individuals in order to identify “conflicts” - as I think someone might have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Bummer is, whilst there is AFAIK at least one piece of Windows project-management freeware, there’s no free equivalent on the Mac platform that one could experiment with. Or is there?
Saddo that I am, I starting playing with this in Merlin when I read the article. I’m thinking along the lines of having key story lines as high-level summary tasks, with each bit of action as a sub-task. You can allocate resources (i.e. characters) to these sub-tasks, and then use various resource views to show what each character gets up to. You can sort out the order of things by using task dependencies. Important events (even abstract ones) can be shown with milestones etc. Well, that’s the theory. In practice, it is proving hideously complicated, and I’ve set it to one side because I am meant to be revising for an exam on Tuesday. I’ll get back to it later in the week. It’s quite nice to have something to actually do in Merlin; I bought it out of curiosity to see what project management software was available for the Mac, to keep my hand in. It would be good if I could come up with some legitimate justification for having spent all that money to put it on my machine!
I don’t know about freeware, but if you just want to play around with proof of concept, you could try a free trial of Merlin at merlin2.net/ When I looked into project management software for the Mac over a year ago, there wasn’t much around, and what there was seemed rather limited, but the latest version of Merlin seems half-way there. (Yes, I’m hard to please - having spent my formative years in a company producing high-end pm software, a long time ago, I don’t even like Microsoft Project!)