Aeon Timeline Version 0.2.1 (Beta)

[matt]

Aeon Timeline Version 0.2.1 (Beta) can be downloaded from the following URL:

http://aeontimeline.wordpress.com/latest-version/

All users should update to this version as it represents a substantial improvement over the last version.

Key features of this release include:

• Folding timeline - periods with relatively few events will be zoomed out (eg. shown as decades), but the timeline will automatically increase the zoom around key areas, such as multiple events in a month or day.
• Tags and Hot Tags - events can now be tagged with keywords, and important tags can be shown on a header bar, allowing you to filter the events that are shown with a single click.
• Customisable Labels - the existing ‘event colours’ have now been expanded to fully customizable labels. You can now add and delete labels, change their titles and colours, and set a label as a default.
• Age-less Entities - characters have been expanded to ‘entities’. They no longer require a birth/start date, and can be added, deleted, and edited via a control window. All of the existing functionality with ages, etc. still remains available.
• Improved interface - new header and footer bars have been added, and selected events now ‘pop-out’ of the timeline. You can also, via preferences, change the width allocated for events before the first entity is listed, and change the spacing between entities.
• Various minor enhancements - notes auto-save, validation to ensure events have an actual title, all fields available in Add Event window, etc.
• The user manual has been completely revised and rewritten for the current version, and includes some additional information about the application to come.
• From this version onwards, Aeon Timeline supports automatic updates, which means you will be notified whenever an update is available, and able to download it directly within the program.

Over 200 people downloaded the previous beta, and I hope even more users will test out this latest version. If you know other users who may be interested in the program and the direction the program is taking, please encourage them to take a look.

Before downloading the beta, please read the Introduction and Beta/Forum Rules.

Please post all general bug reports found in this beta as a reply to this thread. Wish list items and discussion of other pending features belong in their own threads. Before posting a bug, please review the documentation and the below list of already reported bugs, to see if it is a known problem.

If the application crashes, please include the crash log and output from the Console in your bug report.

REPORTED/KNOWN BUGS

• Known display problem in Tiger where the date is displayed next to the overview bar.

[Scott Seely]

Matt,

After adding several new events tagged with a new label and color (set as the default) and saving frequently, Timeline stopped responding. When I quit and restarted, Timeline saw my existing file but there was nothing in it.

The last thing I did when Timeline appeared to be acting normally was to select several of the new events (by clicking and dragging) and drag them down a little.

When I get back to my office, I'm going to try to retrieve a good version of the file from Time Machine.

Scott

[Scott Seely]

I'm running OS X 10.5.5 on a MacBook Pro.

[sjmagy]

Other feedback as I've been using AT (latest version)....

• Show/Hide: Being able to Show/Hide entities is great, but doing it via a popup menu is aggravating. I only have 6 person entities at present and it's annoying to have to repeatedly reselect and deselect entities to filter my view. I can only imagine how painful this will be when you have 30+ characters. Can this be done via a sheet that presents a table or something, where you can check off the entities all at once and then click a "Filter" button, vs. having to continually use 2 clicks per entity?
• Dates: As events and entities are added via the menu or toolbar, the default calendar date is always set to the first day of the timeline (which I understand from the manual is intentional). Can it be modified, perhaps as a preference option, so that Aeon remembers the most recent date you used when entering a new event / entity and uses that to pre-populate subsequent events / entities (always relying on the most recent prior event's date)?
• Times: I find it time consuming to have to convert from military time into "normal" time for every event (and in my case, there are some events where I need the specific time, not just date). I'm fine with the HH:MM:SS approach, but can we add an option for AM/PM, so that I can enter 4:43:22 PM and have it represented as such instead of the current version where it interprets that as 4 in the morning?
• Settings Not Saved: Date Format settings still aren't saved. I change it to display as MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS AM/PM but after a save and quit, it reverts to just MM/DD/YY. Further, if an event or entity is selected and you change your Date Format display, the selected entity / event's information in the Inspector doesn't update. You have to click off the event / entity then click it again for the most recent display setting to take effect.
• Tag Filtering: currently doesn't filter unless the tag is also a Hot Tag. Basically, I assign tags to events and people entities, but when I try to filter by typing a tag in the search field, it always displays, "0 events shown (# total)". It only filters on tags if I check the box to make the tag a Hot Tag and then click the corresponding Hot Tag button in the header bar.

[janra]

I'm not sure if this is due to the timeline folding or not, but I was working in Aeon today and noticed my time scale looked like this:

aeon-datescale.png (23.69 KiB) Viewed 1540 times

Based on the event dates it looks like the year markers are positioned correctly relative to the events and it's the month markers in between that are incorrect.

[matt]

Thanks janra,
I've seen that before, I thought I had corrected it. If possible, could you email that file to me so I can play with it myself?

I have a new release pending this weekend, with a couple of bug fixes and added date options, and an extension to the "expiration date" -- the current version will actually expire January 31st, even though if is telling you that it will expire in October or something strange like that.

Thanks,
Matt

[janra]

No problem.

I'm trying to find your email address...

-Rhonda

[matt]

Sorry, I thought we had been in email contact previously.

Anyway, I have just registered a domain name for when I setup my own company/website. It was hard finding any 2-word domain names available (and in fact, even all the pronounceable made up names like google and skype are gone these days, I tried running a generate for hours).

In the end I settled on ScribbleCode. It was a choice between that and ThoughtBubbleSoftware, so I went with the short one

So you can email it through to:

support (AT) scribblecode (DOT) com

Thanks,
Matt

[janra]

It was forum private messages... I searched my email but couldn't find anything from you.

The file is sent.

The timeline uses the same zoom level for quite a while on my display; after I scrolled a few pages up the months started to look synchronized with the years and events. Could be that with only a pixel per year miscalculated on the month spacing it caused that mismatch after ten or fifteen years...

[matt]

I have found and fixed that one. I was using a cheat value of 30 days in a month, which was crude but good enough for the old way I calculated (it would only ever be off by a pixel at most), but I swapped to a much more efficient calculation method, which meant the slight error was accumulative.

Anyway, changed to 365/12 = 30.416 and all is well

New release will be available by this weekend at the latest. I am just waiting on one last update before it is made available.

Matt

[matt]

A new version of the software has been released, and so I am closing this topic.