Twill be a great missed titling opportunity though. “Getting Time Done”! 
I like the flow of this discussion. As I reflect on how I use timelines (Biblical, theological, and historical), the strict linear is obvious. However, many times for presentations I like to have 4-6 timelines stacked (comparisons by category as well as chronologically), so that one timeline is political, one religious, one economic, etc. But it would be important that all the events on all timelines could be linked in some way to a master timeline.
Just a thought.
Attached (I hope) is a screenshot of my current progress. Obviously toolbars etc. are still to come, and all the usual features you expect from a program. Just trying to get the main mechanics worked out first.
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The “people/object/thingies” (see above discussion) are not yet drawn in, but they would be vertical lines coming from the empty white space at the top of the timeline view. At their intersection, another bubble would be displayed showing information about that person’s age etc. at the time of the event.
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Event durations are not yet depicted - not sure how I will do that yet… I may mark something on the character line, but not on the event itself.
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You will be able to move events by clicking and dragging them to a new position on the timeline (or by changing it manually in an inspector, which will be added in a similar way to Scrivener’s).
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Double clicking in the “time margin” will automatically create a new event at that time.
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In the toolbar (still to come) will be some kind of search/filter option to limit to events with certain keywords, or for certain characters etc. and hide the rest.
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And on the far left is a visual scrollbar showing your currently displayed position within the timeline (with dates and events marked in). You can click in that to jump to a new location.
So anyway, obviously a lot of work still to do, but thought I would show a brief glimpse of the progress, and gather some feedback on the interface so far. Obviously, colors will be changeable (and in the case of events, based on some sort of status label I have yet to create).
Matt
PS - I am still very interested in the “fuzzy dates” type idea (i.e. not having to worry about fixing events to dates), but I am unsure how that would work, whilst keeping things simple. Any ideas on how an interface for that would work would be very helpful.
Ooh, that looks lovely, Matt. I think I’d personally need to see it a bit more developed before I could comment properly, but from what you’ve said is still to come, it all sounds good. Glad to see you’re concentrating on functionality first - I’ve seen many a “forthcoming” app that looks very pretty but has no functionality, and inevitably never actually gets completed 
When it comes to “prettying it up”, drop me a line. I’ve had to subclass a lot of controls - pop-up buttons and wotnot - just to get them to look like they do in iApps and so forth. It does look pretty cool.
Best,
Keith
How about an Inspector to the right, where we may write additional notes about Some text about an event? Click on The dog dies, and in the Inspector, write: He was gnawing at something rotted and foul, maybe poisoned. That way, the timeline becomes a way of developing plot points, which Scrivener may import to its Synopsis and Document Notes areas.
Yep, already plan on having an inspector which will hold at least the following:
- Title and Date of event (updating these will be reflected in timeline)
- Description field to allow extra notes etc.
- Some other meta-data such as a label for an event, so you can classify events as background/current, or by different story-arcs, or whatever (obviously that would need to be customizable)
- Probably lists of the characters involved in the event and their ages at the time, as well as some meta-data about their level of involvement (eg. Observer, Actor… again, customizable). Again, this can be changed here, or it could be updated on the timeline itself. This is where I might look at Antony’s suggestion of the way Things does their "tag’ tokens.
Ah, now here is the secret super-duper bit I hope to build into it eventually. The problem with simply exporting the timeline is that a lot of the events don’t really need exporting as index cards, they are just background information to help with the character, or events that happen off-camera, or you might not be writing in a linear fashion etc.
So what I am planning on doing is having a separate “Narrative” panel that can open up down the bottom, that allows you to drag events into it to form “plot points”.
So you might setup a timeline with lots of events that add to the background/milieu without really being part of the story. You then get to the point you want to export, so you grab your events and drag them into this “Narrative Panel” as “plot points” (which will allow drag-n-drop reordering etc). Aside from maintaining a link to their event so that they automatically update their details if you change the event date, or add another character to the event etc, you will be also able to add meta-data to the plot point itself, so you could classify it as say “live action” versus “inner reflection”.
When you export to Scrivener, each of these “plot points” will become their own index card, with the title of the event, and all of the event’s meta-data, participating characters (including their ages and level of involvement), and the extra plot-point meta data included in the synopsis of the card.
Obviously, once you get it into Scrivener you can take advantage of the better outlining tools from there (the one in my app would be strictly linear with no nesting), but it will help to plan the initial story-arcs in the timeline app that way before you get them into Scrivener to do the full outline and writing.
Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping…
Matt
Wow 
That sounds like hard work… but also very cool 
Another timeline example … or perhaps a warning of what can happen when the characters take over the storytelling ?
- karen
LoL, too true.
Hi all,
For those who are still interested, just uploading another update of my progress.
Obviously the aesthetics will be improved a bit, but I am concentrating on functionality first. The screenshot shows numerous ‘person born’ events, as well as some other standard events.
You can see a person linked to a particular event by the circle at the intersecting point. At the moment it is only showing that for birth events, but I will add it for other events shortly. There will be two ‘levels’ of participation - based on “active participant” and “observer” but the definitions will be changeable - that will be displayed with a filled circle (as shown) or an empty circle outline. When that is done, I will probably change how births are displayed to make them unique, and probably introduce a death event also.
The character’s ages when the event occurs also needs to be listed next to these circles (there will be a toolbar item to turn the age display on and off).
The second-last event is currently selected, so it is highlighted in blue. The part of the background that is slightly orange shows the time span for this event (start of event to end of event, in this case the duration is 2 months). As the actual line for the event had to be shifted down to prevent overlapping with other events, it extends both above and below the event line. Normally this would be just below the event line.
The following is already implemented:
- Create a new event by double clicking in the “time margin” at the side (this can be either a normal event, or a participant creation event [i.e. birth for a person], which would then create a new person as well).
- Change event dates by click & drag.
- A partially working inspector allows you to change title, date, duration, notes for each event (still to come, ability to add/remove ‘participants’ to an event).
- Can change the start/end date of timeline in Settings.
- Can save and load timeline files.
- Zooming, and the overview bar on the left hand side work correctly.
Obviously there is still a lot of work to do, but I am getting closer to being able to release a very limited alpha version to get some feedback on the general functionality of the user interface etc. (i.e. what works, what doesn’t work etc.)
The main steps I have left to complete before I can do that are:
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Allow participation to be altered by clicking at the intersections (cycling through NONE|OBSERVER|ACTIVE as discussed above), and display ages alongside.
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Clean up the inspector so it looks a little neater.
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Implement a granularity feature to solve the “exact date” issue discussed above (basically for now, when you create a timeline, you specify the default granularity to be one of century/decade/year/month/day/hour etc, and all dates are displayed at that granularity, unless you override it to have an exact date to the second for certain events… although not perfect, this should allow people to do the early work without having to narrow down specifics, and then they can increase the default granularity later if they wish to refine the work).
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Go through and fix a couple of minor memory leaks etc. that I haven’t got around to solving yet.
Once they are done I should be able to release a functional alpha that will allow people to test the interface functionality, while I get to work on other aesthetic changes (such as allowing changeable fonts, colours, etc) and some missing features like Undo/Redo, event filtering, “fantasy calendars”, etc.
Matt
Which reminds me… since I am talking about an alpha release, there are a few other things I need to sort out before then.
- The application name.
I am using the working name of ‘Timeliner’, but I don’t have any particular attachment to that name (nor have I checked whether it is already used by other applications, etc). So if anyone can suggest another more suitable name, please do. Obviously something that is somehow related to time or timelines would be useful, if it has a relation to ‘writers’ it may be a bonus.
What did the old historian/record keepers get called (you know the ones, who wrote down general events in the 1600s books so we have some idea now)? Probably ‘scriveners’, right? 
- Application logo + Numerous toolbar icons (eg. Add Event/Add Participant, Remove Event/Participant, Show/Hide Ages [a birthday cake, perhaps ], etc.)
I have absolutely zero artistic ability whatsoever, and so will be completely and utterly unable to create any logos/icons for my own use, even if I was just adapting pre-existing icons. If there is someone who has some logo or icon experience and may be interested in free updates to this app for all eternity, please let me know!
Matt
Great stuff, Matt . Still strong interest here.
P.S. Forgive my lack of understanding - do you click on the overview bar on the left to get the “tight detail” chronology for any period? And how do you see the app integrating (or not) with Scrivener?
P.P.S. “Timeliner” sounds good - “Storylines”, perhaps the most appropriate, being already taken.
They wrote annals or chronicles, and the job names were annalist or chronicler, pretty archaic now. 
Timekeeper? Timeline? Timelines?
Plotliner? Plotline? Plotlines?
Not ‘Annalist’ though. That would be courting disaster.
Looking great, Matt - can’t wait for an alpha version to really try it out! (And I think you’ll get a lot more usable and accurate feedback from it - I’m sure there are many elements of Scriv that Keith would never have thought of including without user input…)
I have some experience and know-how with icons, but my time is increasingly limited, so you should really only consider me as a last resort :\ If anyone else can step up, go for them instead.
The first name idea that comes to mind is “Timewriter”, an obvious combination of the two main elements and play on “timeline”, but I’m sure we can come up with better than that.
Hi !
I’m reading this forum for a while, but I never wrote something (it’s easier for me to read than to write, since I’m french ; by the way, sorry if my English is wrong…)…
I just wanted to say your application seems really great for me. I’ve tried many timeline’s apps for managing my characters life, but none of them was good enough for me. Yours seems to be promising, and if I could help by alpha-testing it, it would be a pleasure.
So, thank you very much for doing this ! (and even if it’s not the subject, thank you Keith for Srivener !)
“Timewriter” works on a number of levels. Sounds like “time righter”–as in something with which one can right (as in a ship) the temporal order of things. Not to mention that it sounds like “time rider” – which for some reason reminds me of Pecos Bill bronco-busting a tornado – the writer as temporal cowboy/girl. Git along little dogies!
Hiya Matt
How about “Time Plotter”? “Time” is dominant and unambiguous as it should be, but “Plotter” incorporates the notion of plot, as in a story, plot as in plan, and and plot as in graphical representation.
The overview bar on the left shows you the entire timeline. The horizontal lines mark where events are. The blue background indicates which part of the timeline is currently visible in the main window. As you scroll in the main window, this will move accordingly. If you click anywhere in the overview bar, the main view will scroll to that location.
The zoom bar down the bottom controls how zoomed in/out the overall view is. I am not sure whether I will leave it where it is in the final interface or not. Once I have menu commands for zoom in/out etc. it might be taking up too much real estate that could be used for displaying more timeline.
See my post, 4th last on the previous page, for the eventual plans with that. Basically, I hope to have a way to arrange “events” into a narrative order (separate from the chronological order), and that would then be able to be exported to Scrivener as a series of index cards.
But that is a fair way off… obviously, I need to get the underlying timeline part working first, before worrying about the rest.
Thanks for the support, and all the suggestions for names. I quite like a few of the presented options.
- TimeWriter seems like maybe the best of them at the moment.
- I like the thinking behind TimePlotter, but the name itself doesn’t grab me… I think ‘plotter’ just sounds a little clunky. But maybe if we play with the theme we can find a good alternative.
- I thought about Timekeeper previously, but decided it sounds too much like a StopWatch application.
- The Plotlines option is also a good one, but I think I would like to keep the word ‘time’ or something similar in there somewhere (in case the app is useful in other fields, eg. historians).
Annalist would be hilarious. But Keith has enough trouble with people asking how to pronounce “Scrivener” 
Matt