Here's a quick tip for creating and maintaining timelines. Yesterday I had a bunch of notes in a Curio project and wanted to put about half of them into Aeon Timeline. Flipping back and forth between Curio and Aeon introduced the expected errors and omissions. Curio has some useful features for this, though. Every object in a Curio file has start and due dates. When you do a search, for instance for every object bearing a certain tag, you can export the search results as a CSV file. That file will directly feed Aeon. Curio can populate Aeon's link fields. If I click on the link in an event I imported from Curio, it pops up the object in Curio the event came from. Very cool - take notes and then produce a timeline with zero effort. I took it a step further and wrote a helper script in Python. I can add hints in Curio notes, things like @@participant=Mortimer Snerdly, and Aeon will fill out the character/role/event associations in its grid view. I can also cause a single object in Curio to create as many timeline events as needed, all with separate titles and metadata. I've had a couple of timeline utilities. Aeon is a very nice tool, but any of them may prove troublesome to maintain in lockstep with notes and outlines. Much easier to embed timeline information in general notes and auto-create the timeline. You can also use a spreadsheet to create an input file for Aeon. If you add columns for start, end, location, participant, and other roles to an OmniOutliner file, and it will directly feed Aeon, too.
