There are still numerous things (current list has 16 + testing) to be done before the next Aeon Timeline release, so it will be at least a fortnight before you see it, probably a bit longer.
But here is a screenshot of the progress. Scroll to the end of the post for my questions if you want to skip the guided tour.
- header_bar_screenshot.jpg (291.52 KiB) Viewed 2849 times
The things to notice are:
1) The collapsing time units - so that the early years are displayed by decade, while there is a month view around the important bits. Hitting the refresh toolbar item will cause it to recalculate the best zoom level for each part of the timeline. I did have it doing this automatically, but found it disconcerting to have it jump around as you add or shift events.
2) New header and footer bars, as per Antony's suggestion.
3) Tagging - each event now has a series of tags. Some of these can be setup as 'Hot Tags' (another tab in timeline settings does this), which means they are displayed along the header bar. Clicking these buttons (multiple can be selected at once) narrows down the events shown to be only those associated with a particular tag. With these tags activated, you can still add events (which automatically take on those tags) - this is prevented with the toolbar filter.
4) Show/Hide 'Entity' menu, and also delete entity button (which produces a dropdown menu) have been added to the header bar also to make controlling these easier.
5) 'Entities' (formerly characters) now have a type (Person, Minor Person, Place, Technology, etc. - currently a list of about 8, but I will probably make this customisable later), and can exist quite happily without a creation event.
6) If you look closely, you will see the label in the Inspector has its own name now. These are now fully customisable, as per Scrivener.
7) The footer bar is a little bare at the moment with just the zoom and a non-functional event count. But this is where other tools will go to toggle between standard and 'story-arc' view, when that gets implemented.
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My main reason for posting the screenshot, though, is to get feedback on a couple of questions:
* should the header bar extend all the way across the window to be above the inspector, or should I leave it as-is?
* are there any other useful items that could go into the header or footer bars?
And a final, unrelated question: I will probably implement some customisable GUI parts for small screens before this next release (such as how wide is the event display bit, what size font for the time margin, etc.), as well as make it remember the last window position and state of the binder. Are these things that belong in user preferences (and thus be the same for every document created on the computer), or could you see some benefit to having them saved per document?
I am leaning towards Preferences, but just wanted to see if others would prefer it the other way.
Thanks,
Matt
I think I'd still prefer to have it there, though, even if it meant the tags would often revert to the dropdown. It makes it feel more immediately relevant to the contents of the central pane.