Moveable Feasts

Q & A
#1

For several years — first in version 1 and then in version 2 — I have been trying to add “moveable feasts” to a timeline. Moveable feast being events such as Advent, Easter, Ramandan. Of these Advent with Stir-up Sunday is the most crucial because it links to the fixed date of December 25th. I want this timeline feature to aid my celebratory baking/patiserrie/cakes/etc for Christmas. I make my Christmas cake on Stir-up Sunday, which is the Sunday immediately before the First Sunday of Advent. Yet make my lebcuchen dough is made on 25 October. Currently I put up with doing this in a spreadsheet, which includes a sheet to calculate the dates of Advent and Stir-up Sundays.

Having used Aeon Timeline versions 1 and 2 for fixed calendar events (typically plot lines for the great unpublished novels) I would like to try setting up these “moveable feasts” in version 3 so I do not have to update that dratted spreadsheet or a Timeline timeline. But v3 is defeating me.

#2

This and other recent posts make me think of the difference between Aeon and dedicated calendar apps. There are many features like recurring events that seem obligatory on every calendar app. Not having these possibilities in Aeon makes makes this powerful app feel a little crippled in comparison to those standard apps.
I imagine it can be a lot of work to implement this. And then there are plenty of free calendars which give you specific holidays for certain countries etc, all information which can be useful within Aeon.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to import dates from a calendar as events into Aeon? This way everybody could use whatever calendar app they like to make all kinds of complicated recurring events or add custom calenders for specific holidays or get the work calendar of their firm and put it into Aeon. (Or maybe this is already possible and I don‘t know?)

#3

I’m thinking more about Aeon’s project management feature than a simple timeline presentation. Especially the resource capability; I need to manage the use of my oven for the various baked Christmas goodies. Doing this with spreadsheets is rather tedious and error prone. Plus, of course, I want the moveable feats to “move” around programatically; the rule(s) for Advent are simple to follow.

#4

If you need project management, try one of the open source and free Project Management Software…
e.g.

  • GantProject
  • OpenProject
  • ProjectLibre

There are more tools out there that can be used, where you can import custom calendars, or create your own…

Just a Tip…

#5

Tried all those in the past and each found wanting. They may have been updated since I last evaluated them but not convinced that there are real improvements. Plus of course when I have Aeon Timeline with its quasi-project management why would I want to have similar products.

#6

That depends on how important it is for you to be able to work with the software or struggle with it …

You can also do a lot in Freeplane, Obsidian etc.
I know you can do it in Microsoft Project (create custom calendar with ambulating free days)

Just a tip from my side…
didn’t ment for it to be a discussion…
Have a nice day

#7

It is the nature of Discoure — the forum software being used here — to create discussion. And your comments caused me to spend yet more time playing with Aeon Timeline v3 to create a timeline that might be usable.

I don’t subscribe to the Microsoft hegemony at all. The monetary cost of using Project is simply too high for it to be serious contender.

As a computing scientist I detest using software that requires struggle to use. Complex systems are okay but requiring struggle is not. Setting up a timeline can be tedious especially when there are a long number of tasks/events. But it isn’t a serious struggle.

During my more extensive trials and your comments has resulted in a refinement of my user requirements for this “timeline”. One requirement is that events/tasks need to repeat. A second limits changes to the timeline. The necessary alterations to the moveable feasts data is effectively a complete re-input of them! Further the lack of programmability of the moveables effectively excludes not only project management tools but sadlt also Aeon.

Looking at alternatives I found a set of R packages for drawing GANTT charts plus some date handling functions which include a specific first Sunday of Advent one that lets me calculate the date of Stir Up Sunday with one expression. These date functions also allow me to have an ever changing GANNT chart that only needs the year to be “input”. Indeed the year can be grabbed from the system clock therefore removing the need to (re)input anything. So I’ll happily struggle with R to get what I want and to create the GANTT chart for any arbitrary year.

There are also some R GANtt packages that implement CPM which should allow me to get the secondary goal of managing the use of culinary resource properly.

Aeon Timeline will be there to support timelines for histories and fictions but not for my baking schedule.

#11

Hi All,
I have removed the last few posts of this conversation, as they had moved away from being constructive and helpful.

Repeating events is something we do hope to revisit, but there are a few different challenges that mean it is not trivial to design or implement such a feature:

  • One that is alluded to here is the complexity of some repeated patterns: things that repeat annually on a given date are straightforward, but rules such as “the first full moon after the vernal equinox” (i.e. Easter) somewhat less so.

  • We also need to think about how recurring events should be represented in different views, and consider the performance implications caused by large numbers of repeating events, as they would affect all of the layout calculations for timeline view, etc.

It is of course possible to design something to solve these issues, but the complexities mean they take a lot of time to get right, and we have some higher priority tasks we want to focus on first (including cleaning up the usability and reducing the learning curve for existing features before we complicate the app further).

Matt

2 Likes
#12

well, you can do all you ask for in LibreOffice, you just need to do some scripting… You can also do it in Python, Java, JS, VBA and in R.

#13

Pretty much what I’ve been doing except of course never VBA.