Visual Grouping?

Q & A
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#1

I am running the trial version of this software, in consideration for moving my project to it. Currently I am using an online timeline. I have written some python magic to migrate the items from their timeline to Aeon, and there is one fairly major issue.

Take a look at 1/100th of my huge timeline in the current software:
https://ibb.co/8NVRchV

You should notice most items are grouped together with clear color-coded groups, and groups can even be collapsed to take up less room.

When importing this into Aeon, it becomes a completely unmanageable, essentially vertical scroll list
https://ibb.co/RTkrfkz

I have messed around a bit; I tried adding blank parent events, but that kind of makes a very faint line, and a confusing extra bar with diamonds in it, which seems to be stretchable. I have not been able to find any examples online of a complicated timeline how mine is, displayed nicely in Aeon.

So my question is, is there a way to do this in Aeon? If not, I won’t spend my time. If there is, I’d like to check it out.

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#2

I’m a casual Aeon user, but have had it for years.

If you assign story arcs to your events, you can filter the timeline by arc and you can also group them by arc or other properties.

Aeon is pretty flexible. My favorite trick remains the ability to fill out metadata in other products, like Devonthink, Curio, or OmniOutliner and directly export into a filled-out Aeon timeline.

Python, of course, is very cool even though most of my data flow into Aeon works without programmatic help.

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#3

I am getting the feeling this software comes from the angle of gantt chart/workflow-type of timelines, rather than from the historical point of view. It’s not convenient for me to use filters in that way, and I hope my post can serve as a suggestion on behalf of historians - we need to see events from all groups at the same time, but be able to minimize, and group similar to in the picture.

Really enjoyed the extensibility of the software, but unfortunately at this time I don’t think I could use it for very populated historical timelines. I will keep looking.

#4

Aeon Timeline, like any tool, isn’t for everyone and all use cases.

However, I don’t understand why the filtering is a problem. You don’t have to filter the timeline. Sometimes it’s handy to do so. Seeing all grouped items at the same time is what Aeon does if you don’t apply filters.

What view of a chronology do you need?

#5

The Group By functionality splits your events into vertical groups, based on the relationships they have. For example, you can split it depending on the person involved in each event, or the location of each event. That gives you a similar look to what you are looking for. Templates are also customisable, so you can create your own items to group by.
You can read about filtering and group by here: Alternatives to Timeline View Group By - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base a
Most of the example timelines have items and relationships set up so you can use the Group By functionality and see what it looks like.

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