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Creating narrative story timelines with Aeon Timeline
Welcome to Setapp Month! I have been a user of Setapp for quite a while now, almost ever since the service launched, and I visited Macpaw’s offices in Kyiv, touring their excellent Apple museum and meeting the office cats. Setapp is a macOS and iOS application subscription service, where for $9.99 a month, you get access to dozens of applications, large and small, complex and simple, old favourites and new arrivals.
If you like what you read and want to get your hands on a Setapp subscription to try some of those applications, then follow my referral link to get started, much appreciated 🙇!
In this post, I cover how I use Aeon Timeline, an application for building interactive narrative timelines. If you want to read more, then take a look at the post I wrote on the Setapp applications I use regularly.
Aeon Timeline is available on macOS and iPadOS, but only the macOS version is available on Setapp, and I have only used the iPad version in read mode.
Why create timelines?
Opening Aeon Timeline for the first time greets you with the same experience as many powerful and flexible applications. You stare at the screen, thinking, “Now what?”. Like the application, I mostly use Aeon Timeline with Scrivener. It’s an application you can mould and massage into your desired desires.
I currently use it almost exclusively for creating timelines for stories. You can also use it for project planning, research, legal cases, and anything else requiring an understanding of who, what, where, and when.
I use a fraction of the functionality available. This post starts with how I currently use it and then some of the experiments I am trying.
Core concepts
Data types
Aeon Timeline consists of item types representing the people, places, and events you add to a timeline. Item relationships represent how items relate to each other. For example, siblings and rivals. Item properties represent aspects of an item. For example, occupation and description.
These data types have defaults per project that you can customise and share across your projects. You can lose yourself setting…
