I’d like to see a timeline thing, something that shows the main storyline, the subplots,the charactersin a scene and the setting. If any of that makes sense, lol. Kind of like Final Draft or yWriter5.
It’s worth carrying out a forum search on “Timeline”. This has been extensively discussed in the past.
There are lots of features within Scrivener that allow you to keep track of plotlines, characters, locations, etc, all visible in the corkboard and the outliner including:
- synopsis
- titles
- keywords
- collections
- labels
- status flags
- and (Mac only at the moment) custom meta-data.
On the Mac there is a piece of dedicated software called Aeon Timeline that integrates timeline functions with Scrivener. Note, however, that this interface with Scrivener is essentially just clever use of the meta-data functionality within Scrivener - which you can replicate using the above tools if you wish. Keywords / Synopsis text combined with saved search Collections being a prime candidate for a Windows user such as yourself.
Thanks for the replies 
I searched the forum but the results were for Aeon Timeline. I’ll dig a little deeper.
The maker of Aeon Timeline for Mac is trying to figure out how to program for Windows, but is finding the development kits on Windows a bit frustrating and confusing:
aeontimeline.wordpress.com/2012/ … evelopers/
… But he’s going to try to target Windows 8 (still in Beta).
aeontimeline.wordpress.com/2012/ … t-so-hard/
Not that this helps you now, though, but I just wanted to be sure you knew that the option will be available for Windows eventually, but it’s not available or even in development yet.
Here’s a good example of the kind of forum discussion I was talking about. And here (scroll down) is the developer’s explanation of why designing a timeline into Scrivener is difficult.
If you read here and go to the last comment, you will find the writer says this in August 2011:
On 31st October 2008, the Aeon Timeline forum here opened, with Matt saying:
I haven’t bothered to dig back to the original mail when Matt offered to start work on what became Aeon, but three years after Matt had got far enough to set up the forum and have a beta that had enough features to really go into the wild as a beta, the writer on the comment was still complaining that it was too primitive to be useful.
Now Matt has a day-job, I understand, and Aeon Timeline is a sideline worked on in evenings and at weekends. But since August 2011 Aeon has moved on apace and is now very much visual — and beautifully so — so I hope the author of that comment has gone back and had another look at Aeon.
But Keith also has a day-job … developing Scrivener. Would those who want a timeline from him — which for reasons that he has explained, would have to be a stand-alone module and not integrated into the binder-corkboard-outliner structure — want to wait 5 years before such a timeline came into being? Or would they want him to give up working on Scrivener as it is, with all the enhancements and bug fixes that he makes, to give all his time to programming a separate module? I certainly wouldn’t.
And in any case, there is a timeline application which is gradually integrating itself more seamlessly into Scrivener almost like a module, currently for Mac only … it’s called Aeon Timeline. Sorry Windows users, even if Matt finds someone to do a Windows version for him, like Keith found Ian, or even if he sits down to do it himself, it won’t be available in the immediate future.
Mark
To be fair to the author of that comment, Aeon Timeline was comparatively a pile of horse shit in August 2011. At that point the focus had been on features instead of design, and so the August 2011version was nowhere near as good as the current application. It wasn’t until around October that the new GUI was released and Aeon began to look like the current incarnation. Before that, ugly, ugly, ugly.
I hope we have made a lot of progress with it since then, and the next incarnation for Mac, version 1.1, will clean up a few more bits and add some nice features, so I am pretty proud of where it has got to now, but those comments back then were deserved - at least if it was a final product.
I hope the author of that comment has taken a look at it since then though.
Not confusing so much as disorganized, with no clear best path.
Anyway, I have started work on the Windows version. I will be releasing another Mac version 1.1 first, which I think will bring the Mac version up to the one I want to chase for Windows, and then I will get fully cracking on Windows.
The way I am writing 90% of the code, it will work for a Desktop or Win8 version, so I may yet get to the Windows 7/Desktop version first as a stepping stone to Win8.
Far too early for dates, but there will be at least decent standard beta software next year - I hope in the first 6 months but won’t start promising.
Matt
Matt,
I wasn’t intending to knock the poster of that comment, merely trying to point out how long it had taken you to reach an unsatisfactory version — I never tried it, so I’ll take your description of it as read — from the start of development as marked by the opening of the forum. My aim was to point out to those who keep asking Keith to implement a timeline within Scrivener what they were asking of him. And my hope is truly that the poster has looked again, as Aeon Timeline is a great app as it is, and I’m sure v. 1.1 will be even better.
And in terms of your Windows version as a comparison, I had long forgotten that your day-job is as a Windows developer, hence my saying your finding someone to do it — the way Keith has come to an agreement with Lee — vs doing it yourself. But as you say, you have already got all the date/time algorithms worked out, and yet you say you estimate at least six months before you even have a first working beta, leave alone how long it will take to reach a release version.
If Keith were to take this on, he’d either have to start back from scratch, working out all the algorithms and UI details from scratch, or he’d have to licence your algorithms from you to concentrate on the UI.
What would be the point? It would still be a standalone module needing to have some kind of hooks into Scrivener. And you’ve already done that, though as a separate App, and I presume the same will be true for your Windows version and Windows Scrivener.
I’d much rather Keith continued to put his energies and time into developing Scrivener, and to continue developing Vellum/the Program-still-to-be-Named as his sideline, eventually finding a way to interface that with Scrivener, the way you have done with Aeon.
Mark
Hi Mark,
Yeah, I did misread your original intention.
And I completely agree with everything you have said.
Matt
Thanks Matt.
I’m really looking forward to 1.1.
Mark
Since we are talking about something related…
As one example of the amount of time it can take to develop a seemingly small feature, I have just updated my blog with a post about a new feature of Aeon Timeline for version 1.1, and the amount of time and effort that needs to go into the development and design:
aeontimeline.wordpress.com/2012/ … g-is-that/
Matt
Very interesting Matt, and yes, it truly shows how something that is seemingly simple to us humans with our fuzzy reality turns out to be complex when you try to implement it in a different system, like a binary computer which needs to work on absolutes.
My breath is bated in anticipation of 1.1! 
Mark