I am coming late to this discussion, so 1) I have too much to say all at once, and 2) my comment is not a suggestion for matt’s work-in-progress (more power to him) – and cleaves to a rather different course anyway.
The thing that has struck me about the timeline apps I have looked at is not just that they expect real dates, but that they expect complete dates to be attached to events when you make them. I just can’t think of a single story idea of mine where events happen in a particular year in either world or galactic history. And even if events do eventually get pinned down in this way as things get worked out, this is information I would rarely have at the time that I wanted to be starting to work with a timeline app. (Most of that info will never get pinned down–Pick an arbitrary piece of fiction and try to tot up its events in your favorite timeline app without having to make up a lot of fake date/times!)
I think that the problem is that timelines apps are all modeled on “real” timelines which map out a preexisting set of events that happened in real time. This gets things backwards if you are making up the story. Creating a timeline as a fiction development tool is more like creating a timeline with variously (and perhaps wildly) partial information.
When you are creating the “reality”, the placement of events on the timeline should not, in the first instance, be thought of as pegging it to a particular, fixed underlying temporal line–at least that is not how the writer should have to think about it–it is, first and foremost, placing that event in a before/after sequence among other events. Some of these events will also have precise date-times associated with them. Others one only knows/cares that they have to happen between some other extant events. For some, what you know/care about is nothing more specific than that they happen 2 weeks (of 3 tweens or whatever) after some other event (which does not necessarily calculate to any fixed date, since the event it is two weeks after may have no designated date itself).
Is it just me, or what?
So, in my dream timeline app, placing an event on a timeline only implies that it stands in certain before/after relations to the other events on the line. For those events for which it was pertinent, I would be able to specify that this event occurred at a certain interval of time before/after some other event on the line. For those events where it was pertinent, I would be able to specify that event’s relation to an underlying (actual or fantasy) calendar–this might take the form of specifying a complete date, but might not be so specific–my calendar might divide years into seasons and those into months, say, and so pegging an event to a calendar might simply consist in saying that it happens in the spring or the spring of a certain year, etc. For those events with significant duration, I would be able to specify a fixed duration, or just min/max duration range, or to give it wholly unspecified duration. My dream timeline app also has multiple timelines that stand in no pre-arranged temporal relation to each other until I specify some temporal relation between them --by specifying a relation between one event on the one timeline and an event on the other, or until I pin events in both down to a common underlying calendar (of which, likewise, there would be the possibility of having more than one–since the Ajvar and the Hummus have been at war with each other for eons and do not have a common calendar despite the fact that they cohabit the same place in the back of the refrigerator (so much for freshness-dating)).
One of the jobs of my dream timeline app–besides enabling me to see all these relations visually–would be to take all these events and interpolate what their partial temporal specifications imply about when they actually happen or how long they can take. As the things you have temporal specifications for impinge on the ones you didn’t, its narrows down the range of options about when and how things can happen and and also enables you to identify time sequence problems. Yeah, okay, and it might also tell you how old your hero was at the time of the crucial backstory events–so you will see that she couldn’t have been drinking at the party, at least not legally.
This would be my going-in idea of the apex–that is the Scrivener–of timeline apps. Re-conceived somehow from the ground up for writers–for people who are making up the story, not just mapping an extant history.
“The fire’s cold, my story’s told.”
–Greg
P.S. Hey, I just realized it’s the 25th of Lacuna. Happy Elfskraang and love to all!
P.P.S. Surely, “character age” is an unnecessarily specific idea to work into any timeline app. It isn’t just life events, all events with duration have an age. Wars, thunderstorms, dictatorial reigns, your marriage, etc.
So here’s a first 