Timeline Software Recommendations

[Rob_Haines]

I asked this on Mastodon last week, but no-one had any suggestions, so given the number of historians on here I thought it might be worth asking:

Can anyone recommend me an offline horizontal timeline-making tool?

I'm looking for something akin to TimelineJS or Tiki Toki, to visualise some periods of my life, but given the current state of internet scraping I don't particularly want to upload a bunch of personal info to someone else's server.

I'm not after Gantt charts or vertical-scrolling timelines, but most of the search engine results I've found assume I want project management or fancy websites.

Any thoughts?

(Open source would be ideal, but I'm absolutely willing to buy a reasonably-priced product if it's good enough.)

[Jubal]

I just realised I'd never replied to this. I think "how fancy do you want it" is the main thing I'm thinking: like, what would you envision the output looking like?

[Rob_Haines]

Ultimately, it doesn't need to be that fancy; this isn't intended as a presentational tool. But not being abhorrent to the eye wouldn't be the worst thing

(Someone suggested jury-rigging an Excel spreadsheet to chart it, and that's probably on the side of being both "a pain in the ass to upkeep" and "ugly as sin")

The example I've been using is Tiki Toki:

(though even this is perhaps more fancy than I need; the multiple aligned timelines would defintely be a boon to my visualisation, though)

[Jubal]

This is still on my list to think more about: there must be a simple way to do this, and if there isn't then it shouldn't be beyond the wit of mankind to code one. It'd be interesting if one could make the underlying scales flexible too: I was reading some of BagaturKhan's very extensive worldbuilding notes over in the writing area earlier and it'd be fun to have something that was effective for e.g. timelining one's fantasy setting.

How does that multiple aligned timelines feature work more exactly?

[Rob_Haines]

Essentially, you input individual events (with a Title, Start Date, End Date, and a user-defined Category, then it presents each unique category in a separate row. All the rows scroll horizontally together, wherever you click on the page.

The only real complexity is that since it's possible to have events that occur over a period of time, more than one event can be occurring in a particular category at the same time, so they have to stack vertically within a row.

In my wanderings since the original post I've also come across Aeon Timeline, which seems to be a legitimate option in terms of worldbuilding notes and so on, so I'm considering giving that a try at some point. (Though again, it's probably overkill for my use case.)

[Rob_Haines]

So I ended up picking up Aeon Timeline (which had a fairly generous 14-day free trial), and used it to make a timeline of my creative year so far (for this blog post):





I find this sort of visualisation really useful for making my brain recognise that I am indeed doing things with my time, even if not the things my brain mistakenly thinks I should be doing

[Jubal]

Oh that does look neat

Though I always worry that if I take too much stock of what I'm doing I'll fret about the gaps more than finding comfort in what I am achieving.

[Rob_Haines]

Yeah, I had similar thoughts. My main solutions were:

a) To recognise that whatever my main focus is during a period is taking up all my subconscious processing even when relaxing or taking a few days off or whatever, and adding the supercategory across the whole period with child items to highlight the periods of hyperfocus. For example, in the green bar for website design, I did not work on that consistently throughout the period; the slightly brighter green is the bits I was fully engaged, the darker shade is where my subconscious was running stuff while I was resting or relaxing or taking a walk to see trees.

b) Being aware that my brain naturally assumes that I've been lazy and wasteful with my time, and that a lot of the time the problem is that I forget about legitimate reasons why I may not have been able to focus on things, which is the value of the bottom row, Complicating Factors. I spent most of October sorting out new job admin, so obviously my creativity took a dip, so at a glance I can go "oh yeah, there was A Complicating Factor, I can give myself a little grace during that period".