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About Aeon Timeline For Mac and Windows
Aeon Timeline is an application that allows you to construct timelines to plan and
analyse your models. The application is the first of its kind written and designed with
writers in mind.
More than just a series of dots on a line
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Divide events into logical groups, projects, or concurrent arcs.
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Model relationships between people, places and ideas.
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Link events with your research material such as external links or images.
Configure timelines to suit your need
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Select timeline styles including absolute dates, and relative dates counting
weeks, days, or hours from zero.
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Decide what precision you want for every event, from an exact date/time out
to specifying just a year.
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Build your own customer calendars to model historic calendars, or your own
fantasy world.
Add, drag and edit events on-the-fly
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Move events around easily by dragging them on the timeline.
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Edit text in-place on the timeline
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Add external links or images to events via drag and drop.
Hidden Complexity
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Filter events according to people, places, arcs, labels and tags.
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Zoom out to a wide view of your whole timeline, or zoom in to view the time
scale you are currently working with.
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The Context Bar at the bottom will ensure you never get lost.
Import, Export and Print your timeline
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Import data from other programs via CSV files.
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Export and print your entire timeline, or just the visible portion.
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Export to a variety of text formats to move your data to the next part of your
workflow.
If you wish to download a trial version or find out more about Aeon Timeline, you can
visit our website at http://www.scribblecode.com for further information.
Using Aeon Timeline with Scrivener
The best place to Get Started using Aeon Timeline is by visiting our video page at
http://www.scribblecode.com/videos.html
Videos on that page will introduce you to everything you need to get started using
Aeon Timeline, including:
Intro Videos:
A 7-minute introduction video that will show you everything you
need to know to get started using Aeon Timeline. You can view
the introduction video here:
Example Video:
Aeon Timeline ships with four sample timelines, which you can
access from the welcome screen when you launch Aeon
Timeline. We have created a video that walks through the
example timeline for “Murder on the Orient Express”. This
timeline contains a lot of information, so the video demonstrates
the features of Aeon Timeline that let you explore and filter your
data without getting distracted and overwhelmed.
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Scrivener Sync:
If you are reading this, chances are you are planning to use both
Aeon Timeline and Scrivener for your NaNoWriMo preparations.
If that is the case, you should watch our video on how to
synchronize Scrivener and Aeon Timeline to keep both projects
up to date.
More information can be found in our user manual:
User Manual:
The Aeon Timeline user manual, available from the Help menu
when you launch Aeon Timeline, should assist you with any
questions you still have after watching the videos above. There
is a chapter devoted to syncing with Scrivener projects, which
you should read if you find yourself lost at any point.
Syncing Aeon Timeline with Scrivener requires Scrivener 2.0, which is currently
available on Mac OS X and not Windows.
Syncing will be introduced to Windows once the Mac version is available.
How Aeon Timeline and Scrivener Work Together
The main difference between Scrivener and traditional word processors is the way it
structures your writing, allowing you to separate each scene of your novel into an
individual document. This allows you to plan the narrative flow of your novel by
viewing your scenes in an outline, or dragging them around on a corkboard.
Aeon Timeline allows you to plan your novel with a real-world view of time. Using
Aeon Timeline, you can map out your story arcs, your character’s involvement in
scenes within your novel, and your character’s backstories long before the events of
your novel take place.
There is an obvious parallel between the way Scrivener can divide your novel into
scenes, and the way Aeon Timeline divides your plot into events, and there is a oneto-one relationship between many of these events and scenes.
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When you sync your timeline with your Scrivener project, Aeon Timeline allows you
to specify links between your Scrivener documents (scenes) and events within your
timeline. Each subsequent time you sync, Aeon Timeline looks for any changes that
have occurred to these Scrivener documents/Timeline events, and automatically
copies those changes across to the other project. It will also allow you to create new
Scrivener documents for any new timeline events that have been created, and vice
versa.
Obviously, not all documents in your Scrivener project will require an event in your
timeline, and not all events drawn on your timeline (eg. Character’s backstory) will
end up as a scene in your novel. You can choose to Ignore these items the first time
they are presented, and they will be omitted from any future syncs.
What is stored inside the Scrivener Project?
Internally, Aeon Timeline adds a number of custom meta-data fields to your
Scrivener project to provide you with information about a document’s corresponding
Aeon Timeline event.
These fields include the following information about a timeline event:
- Event Title
- Start and End Dates
- Label assigned to the event in Aeon Timeline
- Arc the event belongs to in Aeon Timeline
- Relationships with characters (entities in Aeon Timeline)
- Any notes about the event to be displayed in Aeon Timeline.
You are free to edit any of these fields, and Aeon Timeline will automatically copy
across the changes you make when you next sync the project with your timeline.
Note that labels, arcs, and characters (entities) must already be created inside your
project with matching names in order for your update to work, and you will need to
take care to ensure the date is complete and in the correct format.
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There are two additional meta-data fields that are added by Aeon Timeline that is
uses to track the document/event links. These fields are coloured red, to warn you
that you should not edit these fields unless you are sure of what you are doing.
What happens when syncing creates a new Scrivener
document?
When you sync, there may be new events you have added in Aeon Timeline that you
wish to be transferred as new documents in the Scrivener project.
Since Aeon Timeline does not know where this new scene should go in your novel
(and since we don’t want to upset any binder order you have carefully arranged),
Aeon Timeline creates a special folder at the top level of your Scrivener binder called
Aeon Timeline Exported Events. These documents will be created with all of the
available meta-data from the Aeon Timeline event.
Once the sync is complete, you are free to move these documents anywhere you
want inside your Scrivener binder and Aeon Timeline will track them the next time
you sync.
What happens when syncing creates a new Aeon
Timeline event?
Likewise, there will likely be times you have added a new document into Scrivener
that you want to transfer to your timeline.
If you have already filled in the custom meta-data fields for the document, Aeon
Timeline will automatically use the information you have provided in creating the
event.
Otherwise, Aeon Timeline will create a new event using the document’s title as the
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event title, and the start date of the timeline as the start date of the event. Once the
sync is completed, you can move this event to the correct date in your timeline, and
then re-sync the projects to update the date in the Scrivener document.
Is the process safe? Will I lose data?
For the reasons that apply to any data on your computer, you should ensure you
backup both your Scrivener and Aeon Timeline projects at regular intervals.
Having said that, there are a number of safeguards built into the syncing process to
protect your novel from data loss:
- Aeon Timeline only operates within its own custom meta-data fields. It does
not touch the text of your documents, the synopsis, or the document notes.
- To ensure there are no conflicts between Scrivener and Aeon Timeline, you
must always close the Scrivener project before performing a sync. This ensures
everything within your Scrivener document is saved before the sync takes
place.
- As an extra level of safety, whenever you perform a sync operation, Aeon
Timeline performs an internal backup of the Scrivener project. This is done in a
manner Scrivener will recognise, so that it can automatically recover if
something unexpected happens.
Happy Planning!
Matt Tobin
Aeon Timeline Developer
http://www.scribblecode.com/
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