In my planning, I realized that I had made a mash-up of the timeline of my story. I've got a couple of story arcs that start out different but come together at a key moment. So, being a software geek, I started to look around for something to help me visualize when things are occurring and when they SHOULD occur. I found a free timeline program (OpenSource, like Libre Office). Its name is difficult to remember, it's called "Timeline". I've been using it this morning and it's already helped me identify some problems. I must say, there is a LOT of "Thinky" stuff in planning and writing a novel.
That's pretty cool, and it's written in Python. That should make it pretty maintainable. Hackable, even (in a good way).
There were a few other freebies out there, but a lot of them were online applications with upgrades to buy. Timeline was the only one I found that could be loaded as a standalone application. There may be others out there, but I quit looking after I found Timeline.
So much this. So many times, I've gone to write, and realized I need to figure out some details before I can write.
I really like Timeline and use it a lot, unfortunately it has a few 'issues'; it tends to crash quite a lot (on my Win 7 machine) and it's hard to 'lock' items in place on the timeline meaning you can easily change the time and date of something without noticing, this can also affect adjacent items which makes it quite 'iffy'. It's the best thing I've found for my purposes - just make sure you 'save as' and make a backup so if stuff goes wrong you don't lose much.
No crashes on my Win 10 OS so far, neither my native Win 10 Lenovo Desktop or my elderly 4 GB Toshiba laptop (circa 2012 - or thereabouts) upgraded to Win10. I HAVE noticed how editing can change things further back in the timeline, It would be nice if one could lock an entry and a notice would pop up saying it needs permission to change something.
I don’t have much experience on diagram design, but I found this software is very easy to use for me as a beginner. I can choose from lots of preset timeline templates and symbols to save my time. Also the auto-create features assist me doing various diagram quickly in different theme styles, background colors, and layout types etc. It has so many originally designed timeline templates and symbols for business projects or educational assignments. You can easily make adjustments based on these templates, like changing default colors, theme, text fonts, shadow effects, layouts, connectors, backgrounds, or insert additional notes, comments, links etc. the tool is Creately timeline maker
Timeline software is a type of application that allows users to display starting points, milestones, specific events, and finish lines along a timeline in a highly visual, easy-to-track way. There are many tools which has the ability in drawing timeline makers.
