Traditional calendar view?

Feature Requests
#1

It would be lovely to have a calendar view; that is, a traditional calendar display (modified for invented calendars, of course), with events placed on an array of days (and hours), similar to how any digital calendar works. Just as in, say, Calendar, there could be alternate calendar views (day/week/month/year). This would be a very natural way to see story events, and it could also be a handy way to change the date or date range for an event (by dragging the event to the new date/time). Maybe there already is such a view? In any case, it would be very useful, I think.

I don’t know what this view would do with events lacking a time/date stamp beyond making sure they are ordered appropriately among events with a time/date.

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#2

Just seconding that I would love this as well!

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#3

I was just thinking this and did a search to see if anyone had suggested it. I was also partly thinking about a recent post relating to tracking people’s ages. So clicking any date on the calendar grid/list would show a list of events intersecting with the date and all selected characters ages on that date. Character selection might be either through the standard filter, or maybe through a view-specific selection, the way the tracks work in Subway view.

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#4

I’d like to see a traditional calendar too! I’ve been using Aeon since ver 1, and it has always surprised me that this isn’t available.

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#5

Me too … I would like a grid type calendar. It’s sometimes hard to track what days things are happening on, so a grid type calendar would be great.

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#6

I’m currently reviewing Aeon Timeline in the free trial version for a writing project. I’m currently in the plotting stage and thought Aeon Timeline would help me better visualize and comprehend the complex chronological structure of my story.

Unfortunately in timeline view there is no option to organize events by day. The available layout options only allow events to flow to the top of the timeline visualisation depending on the length of the event’s description, but not based on chronological properties.

The problem for me as a plotting writer is the following: While time is continuous (as it is handled in Aeon Timeline), the lives of most people are structured by the repeating pattern of days. Most people do certain things in the mornings (e.g. work), afternoons (work more), evenings (spend time with their family, do sports, meet friends), and nights (sleep). And when I plot a story about several people that interact with each other during their workweek, I need to be able to visualize and move events around in this tabular school-timetable-like structure of time. A purely chronological display, where breakfast follows dinner instead of being placed at the beginning of a new day, is confusing for this purpose.

For that reason, the lack of a traditional calendar view seems to become a dealbreaker for me. I love many things about Aeon Timeline, but this lack is such an obstacle to my understanding of my story, that I’m forced to go back to scraps of paper that I can move around on my desk.

:confused:

It would be nice to know whether you are working on this feature or not and when we could expect it.

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#7

It sounds as if you need a time table instead of a timeline. Have you tried using a spreadsheet application? In this case, I would use LibreOffice Calc or Excel and simply create one column per person, with the rows corresponding to the desired daily periods.

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#8

@Peter_T Thank you. I would have liked to use other features of Aeon Timeline that a spreadsheet app doesn’t have. I just thought I’d explain why I miss this feature in more detail, to help the developers better understand how fundamental it is for plotting fiction in my opinion.

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#9

One aspect of a traditional calendar is that it contains empty time. Frequently there’s an expectation of usual activity in that space. I think seeing that, whether by day, hour, or second (% etc) can be useful for more than just plotting novels. A spreadsheet is one way of looking at it; a calendar is another; and list of events another still.

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#10

This leads us to a topic that has already been discussed elsewhere in this forum: All in one, or the optimum application for each purpose?

Anyway, there are a myriad of calendar applications that may do everything that is required here, but only one decent timeline program for the desktop. Okay, there’s another one that’s open source, but to me it’s not really a competitor.

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#11

Now, hang on there! :thinking: AT3 is mostly used by novelists. Why shouldn’t we speak up when the app could better meet our needs with additional functionality? The Subway view will soon integrate with the Narrative/Outline views because the developers listened to us (for which I’m very happy, btw). Folks, keep advocating!

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#12

I don’t agree that this is the issue here. AT is not a spreadsheet and neither is At a list of events.
We’re talking about different ways of viewing the same data. AT is about more than that but offering different ways of seeing the data it holds ought not to be a problem. It might be too much programming effort, but that’s a different question. Having it wouldn’t affect AT’s functionality at all, just make it easier for some people to use.

#13

Go ahead, don’t mind speaking up. I just want to point out the existing possible solutions so as not to get stuck for the time being.

I know that you still see a lot of untapped potential in Aeon Timeline.
I can’t speak for the developers either, who may want to keep all their options open. At the transition from AT2 to AT3, for example, the core concept was significantly expanded, which in my eyes has led to a considerable increase in needs for documentation and support. However, features such as the web display and the roundtrip-capable file format were dropped at the same time.

Right. However, this does not seem to apply to the use case described by @Waterfall.

#14

?
idk
@Waterfall wanted to be able to move events around in that view. That seems pretty normal to me.
Was there anything else.

#15

Maybe I didn’t get it right, but to me it looked like a quite different kind of time scale.