Sneak Peak: What we're working on in Q1 2025

Official Announcements
#1

Hi everyone, my name is Rob and I’m the newest member of Aeon Timeline!

I’ve been here for a few months now and have written a few guides on how to get started using the app. I’ve also been lurking around in the background on the forum, but today it’s time to pop my head out and say hello :slightly_smiling_face:

We’re starting the year with some big plans and we’re excited to share our Q1 roadmap with you. We’ve put together a video with a quick look at some of the features we’re working on to make Aeon Timeline even better for you.

Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming. These features are all still in development, so there may be some tweaks and changes along the way. We’ll post an update when we’re almost ready for beta testing.

You can find the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkY_YtpYJ4w

Click on a link to go straight to that section in the video:

We’d also love to hear how Aeon Timeline fits into your workflow, so we’ve created a quick survey to help us get a better feel for how you’re using the app and what we can do to improve your experience.

Your feedback is invaluable as we fine-tune things like import and export options to release in a future update. Take the survey here: https://nfvfwzyc40a.typeform.com/to/b1QDdcq4

We’re looking forward to an incredible 2025 with you!

Cheers,
Rob

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#2

Very nice! Almost all of the changes you discussed in the video are things I’ve been wanting, especially the export of just the data visible in the Spreadsheet view. Will it be possible to save a Spreadsheet layout, make another, and then come back to the saved view with just a few clicks?

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#3

Rob, it’s nice to have a look at the Q1 roadmap.

I know everyone has their favorite hoped-for feature. Mine is the ability to display the Narrative/Outline events on the Subway view. Bravo!

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#4

Very nice. I do have a request I hesitate to mention because I don’t want to be mistaken for being snarky.

You could approximately double the value of an Aeon license by actively participating in these forums.

You would increase sales if prospective customers saw vibrant dialog between support and users.

If you would like examples, take a look at Zengobi Curio’s forum. Or DEVONThink’s support forum. You will see problems quickly resolved and many thankful comments from users praising those products’ support.

For a negative example, check out the Nisus forum, particularly the thread “Is Nisus moribund?”

The Nisus forums were formerly a lively dialog between user and vendor.

4 Likes
#5

Hi Rob,

Thanks for this update. And good to see you here. I hope this is the start of some dedicated community support beyond just technical support needs.

I’ve watched the video a few times since first coming across it very early this morning (UK time) and everything is looking very interesting and promising.

The app appears to be heading in the direction of increased power, with a much simpler and easier to navigate user interface. I am always a big fan of this approach, which is why I value Ulysses so much. Great design and flexibility will always win me over. So please pass on my congratulations to the rest of the team for their hard work and dedication in bringing about these planned changes.

There is a lot to look forward to. As Steve has already mentioned, narrative order in other views is a feature I have been waiting for, for some time now. So that will be great to have. And different text export formats have been long overdue. I just hope that the text exporting options are as flexible and powerful as the rest of the planned features.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the hopefully imminent first beta release. Keep up the good work, all.

Cheers!

Andrew

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#6

That’s not snarky at all, and in fact, it’s actually a big part of why I’ve joined the team.

I’ve been spending a bit of time getting to know the app so that I can talk about most of its features with some degree of confidence, and now that I’ve finally introduced myself I’ll be getting more involved with the discussion and helping out wherever I can!

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#7

Thank you! You’re going to add a lot of value to Aeon, I can tell.

For some food for thought, here’s a trick I’ve used a few times.

Aeon is not my cup of tea as an outliner. That’s something I wish it could evolve into, but it’s not easy to outline in Aeon.

Back when I used OmniOutliner, I added columns for Aeon fields like start and stop, observers, participants, etc.

Exporting to csv yielded a file I could directly import into Aeon.

DEVONThink will export a metadata report that’s also a direct transfer to Aeon, if you add custom metadata fields in DT for the timeline fields you want.

I haven’t used it in a while, but I still have a Curio-to-Aeon Python script. The idea was to tag things with #timeline, search for the tag, and export the search results as a CSV.

My Python script turned that into an Aeon import file by finding metadata and also searchable strings in note attachments, like “@@start=7/4/1776”. I haven’t used that in years, but it worked.

Techniques like that make Aeon a secondary tool, though. The data lives in DEVONThink, OmniOutliner, or Curio, and Aeon isn’t the right place to evolve the story.

It would be awesome if there was an Aeon view mode that worked like a bespoke, low-friction outlining app.

Anyway, great to hear of Aeon’s presence here. A new era!

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#8

Hi @V_Sirin, yes, you will be able to do just that. With tabbed views, you’ll be able to have multiple spreadsheet views, each with different settings. These settings can include showing rows for different item types (like events vs characters), or having different columns or different filters. Your tabs will all be easily available in the toolbar, and you’ll be able to move between them with a single click.

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#9

This makes me happy.

Thank you, and the people making it possible.

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#10

Interesting. I outlined my novel series in AT3, and found it superior to, say, Plttr by miles. Out of curiosity (and not to pick a fight!), what would you like AT3 to be able to do so that it would be ideal for outlining?

#11

I appreciate your insights, @SCN. My kind of outlining is probably highly non-standard. If I outlined without software, I would use notes on index cards, some of them in shallow stacks.

The best setup I see for writing an outline in Aeon is outline mode, everything turned off except position, label, section, and summary.

The summary field is a multiline text variable. It starts out one line high and doesn’t resize until you hit enter, moving to the next entry.

All outline sections are at the same indentation level. This isn’t a deal-killer for me because I like outlines that are only two, at the most three, levels. But it would be nice if there was a visual cue to differentiate the different levels.

The narrative view in vertical mode shows indentation, but the cards can’t be expanded horizontally.

Either view is workable. Part of the problem is mine. I want to be expansive in my topic notes. Back when I made YouTube videos, I wrote my scripts in OmniOutliner.

First, the outline was little more than topics. Then I wrote the narrative for each topic. That got exported to text which a teleprompter app on my iPad used without trouble. Outliner to teleprompter without an intervening word processor.

That workflow is targeted to one purpose, so it’s OK if I can’t do that in Aeon Timeline.

What would be awesome, though, is to find myself in a full featured outliner, working in general terms like OmniOutliner, Bike, the now retired OutlineEdit, or even TaskPaper. There I sit, moving topics, writing notes, making a hierarchy if I want. I don’t have a clue I’m using a timeline app until I click the timeline view button. Then, it’s good old Aeon Timeline.

Agreed about Plottr, by the way. I want to like it, the developer is worth supporting and I’m glad I bought a license, but I’m not continuing the subscription. The Apple Numbers spreadsheet with its categories feature will do the same thing as Plottr’s grid with more flexibility.

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#12

I’m sure the improvments will be of great help to others. Looking at the examples it is clear that you except each even to have more data than mine. I have a large number of events spread over one lifetime [world wars produce a lot of episodes!] so I have a huge amount of wasted vertical white space. It would be wonderful for be able to close it up.
In the attached view there are half-a-dozen items lost off top/botton!
Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 15.16.37|690x468

#13

Had to reply again - I just re-read some of your thread about what Aeon could be. This hits the nail on the head as squarely as I could imagine:

… it got me thinking as an entrepreneur: what if there were a product that combined Scrivener and AT3 into one app? And what if it were marketed as the next evolution of writing tools? I think there is an opportunity to evolve writing software to the next level.

Yes, indeed! Exactly what I’d like to do.

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#14

I’ve been advocating for as long as I’ve been using AT3 (approx 5 years now, including very early alpha versions) that the summary field needs to be shown inline on the outline (that’s an awkward confusing sentence), not in a separate column. This alone makes speedy outlining awkward. The way the Narrative Outline displays on mobile versions would be my ideal. And although it is possible to add a summary inline on the Narrative view that is time consuming, as you need to consider the narrative folders and add items via user interface clicks and not only keyboard shortcuts or key presses.

Also, why can’t I bring up totals of scene word counts as a property in the narrative outline and narrative view and have them add through the entire outline? Another feature request which I’d like to see added

The way OmniOutliner handles outlining is the gold standard. But I still prefer AT3 because of its other benefits (visual representations of structure and relationships etc). It would be great though if AT3 streamlined its outlining…

I do want to be clear though, that despite the above, I’m still loving AT3 and it’s invaluable to my workflow.

Andrew

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#15

You could put a link to this forum on the Timeline help menu. That’s what DEVONthink does, and it means that user support and discussion is so much easier to access. It becomes part of the experience of using the app.

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#16

I like all of these forthcoming changes, particularly the spreadsheet view and grouping additions.

The way I use Timeline means I don’t have much need for text export. I sync to Scrivener, and that’s where a project gets finished. For some things, I’ve found that an export to CSV has allowed me to do any manipulation required.

#17

A few hours passed, and I discovered I do have a use case for text export. I added various Properties associated with a Person so that I could use them to build character profiles. I would love to be able to print out or export to text those Person profiles.

#18

Export to JSON probably includes the information you want. For about $75 you can get a copy of Easy Data Transform which will read JSON, filter out what you need, and write it to a spreadsheet.

I am not connected to Easy Data Transform other than it has been pivotal in my life. For instance, there were hidden hijinks in our local property tax appraisal office. EDT helped me uncover the details and blow the lid off a scandal.

Edited to add: If you have any tool that will read JSON, you can probably do the same thing. Or maybe a comma delimited export to Excel will get you what you need.

Edited again: Export to CSV will get you a file you can read with a spreadsheet. The rows with “Character” in the type column will be your characters. Other columns will have the properties you see in Aeon.

#19

Thanks for the preview. This looks very promising, I think I will make use of most of these features. Especially the spreadsheet with non-event items is highly welcome. This will make everything much more flexible.

#20

Getting a JSON file from AT3 is not a big deal. There’s still my Python script available that extracts the JSON part from AT2 and AT3 files. However, due to the complex AT data structure, the result is not easy to figure out, I’m afraid. It is a network of references that cannot be represented easily by a two-dimensional table, as the limited csv export shows.
See this thread: What is the data format of an *.aeon file?
If they aked me, I’d love to have a versioned, xml-based data format that is open for third-party software. However, I have good reason to believe that this concerns an insignificant niche and will not be put on the agenda.

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