Release Notes

Large Datasets

• The app can now handle several thousand items with minimal lag, so you can work with larger timelines more efficiently.

Data Clarity

• To make items more recognisable and meaningful, we’ve combined an item’s color with its type icon into a single coloured icon. E.g. Green item color + person type icon = green person icon.
• To help you keep track of your data, each view’s header now displays a count of the number of items in the view, as well as a count of the items that are being filtered out.

Easier Editing

• To maximise your working space, the inspector will now be automatically hidden when no item is selected on Mac and Windows. You can customise this behaviour from the right panel icon at the top right of the screen.
• We’ve added quick-entry rows to the entity lists and the mobile app lists for faster data entry.
• To make it easier to keep track of items as you edit them, items are now highlighted after dragging and dropping them.
• Keyboard shortcuts have been added to increase, decrease, and reset the zoom level.

Onboarding

• To help people get started planning their story, project, historical or legal timelines, we’ve redesigned the welcome screen and added new starter files that are populated with example content.
• We’ve updated the example timelines to better showcase the most relevant features and use cases.

Syncing

• Aeon Timeline now syncs with Ulysses' Projects feature.

Spreadsheet and Outline Views

• Spreadsheet and Outline Views now more clearly show items’ chronological and narrative positions in the leftmost column.
• You can now copy and paste in Spreadsheet and Outlines Views by first selecting an entire row by clicking on a cell in the leftmost column.
• Date fields in Spreadsheet View, Outline View, and the inspector now appear blank when they aren’t set rather than showing “None”.
• Instead of scrolling and causing a large screen jump, Spreadsheet View now shows a sticky row when an edit causes a row to move out of view.
• The column settings for Spreadsheet and Outlines View are now more accessible through the + column or in the footer.

Timeline View

• You can now navigate the Timeline context bar with a single click instead of a double-click.
• We’ve removed some unnecessary whitespace from the Grouped layout in Timeline View.

Relationship View

• Relationship View now indicates the hovered column and row.

Subway View

• To improve readability, the Subway view now better adapts its layout to support different font sizes.

Interface and Display

• The app now defaults to the Light theme for new users.
• In order to offer you more icon options, we have switch to a standardised icon set. More icon options have been added for item types and calendar markers.
• Selected items now appear in an active color (blue for most themes) for better visibility.
• We’ve removed the active color from the work view headers to reduce visual noise.
• We're added the option to show each related item type on a new line in item cards.
• Zoom options have been added for iPad and iPhone in the View Display Settings panel.

Custom Templates

• Custom templates can now include relationships.

Windows

• In Windows, when the app doesn’t have the necessary permissions to update, it will now prompt for permissions rather than failing silently. Note that this will only start to take effect with the next release.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where some changes made in Scrivener would not be synced when quickly switching from Scrivener and syncing before Scrivener could save the changes. Now, the app will display a message when the file has changed on disk and cancel the sync. In this situation, you will need to click Sync again to bring over the newly saved changes.
• The validation when adding a link is now less strict and won’t wipe out the link on validation error.
• Fixed many additional bugs.

We have just released version 3.1.8, which includes the following bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue in Spreadsheet and Outline views where you could hide the sequence and position columns but then they could not be shown again.
• Fixed a syncing bug where changing a synced entity type to be an event type in your timeline could cause metadata related to that type to be removed from Scrivener.
• Fixed a printing bug where the boxes around grouped items would print as curved lines rather than straight boxes.

We have just released version 3.1.6, which includes the following bug fixes:

Timeline View

• Fixed an issue where Timeline View could go blank at certain zoom levels when using a calendar with less than seven weekdays.
• Fixed an issue where ongoing events weren’t drawn to the end of the timeline when the timeline was set to a limited date range.

Copy and Paste

• Fixed an issue where the app could crash when copying items with attachments to different files.

Filtering

• Fixed an issue where filtering for “Male” also matched “Female”.

CSV Import

• Fixed an issue where end dates were not being imported.

Tutorial

• Fixed an issue where tutorial messages could be hidden behind the inspector.

Syncing

• Fixed an issue where ignored synced items could not be relinked.

Aeon Timeline 3.1.5 fixes a small bug introduced in 3.1.4 when dragging items without dates into the timeline from other views.

Syncing

• Fixed an issue where the app couldn’t sync with Ulysses when sheet titles started with certain special characters.
• Fixed an issue where setting documents to ignore would reset other syncing assignments.
• Fixed an issue where after creating new entities in both Timeline and Scrivener and selecting to link them, the Timeline option would disappear when changing the link.
• Fixed an issue where previously ignored documents couldn’t be changed to be synced to existing events.
• Fixed an issue where keyword type settings could be ignored, causing extra relationships to be synced.
• Fixed an issue where changes to synced color names in Scrivener would be reset.

Dependencies and Constraints

• Fixed a bug where date constraints and age calculations could become incorrect when when customizing the calendar while creating a timeline from a custom template with saved events.
• Fixed an issue where not all dated items were available as options when creating a dependency
• Fixed an issue where dependencies weren’t removed when changing an item’s type to a dateless one until reopening the file.

Mindmap View

• Fixed a display issue where turning on Blocked By could cause text to overflow the item card.
• Fixed a display issue where relationship icons could be squished for relationships with longer names.

Spreadsheet View

• Fixed a display issue where tags appeared too large in Spreadsheet view.

Inspector

• Fixed an issue where the Relationships tab options would be disabled when selecting multiple items of different types, even if they allowed the same relationships.

User Interface

• Fixed an issue where Remove from view was available as an option when selecting items in entity panels.
• Fixed notifications being covered by the inspector.
• Fixed a bug where the Scroll to Date panel could crash when using a custom calendar.

CSV Import/Export

• Fixed an issue where dependencies would export as avatar initials instead of identifiers.
• Fixed an issue where the CSV import panel’s date order option would not default to the app’s date order setting.
• Fixed an issue where exported items were listed in random order.

Printing and PDFs

• Fixed an issue where dependency lines could be misaligned when printing Timeline view.
• Fixed an issue where printing dependencies in Narrative view could cause extra line breaks.
• Fixed various sizing and alignment issues when printing Spreadsheet view.
• Fixed performance issues/long wait times when exporting large images/PDFs.
• Fixed the preview when exporting large images/PDFs to not appear too small.

Windows

• Fixed an issue where large files with special characters could crash when opened.
• Fixed an issue where Timeline view could temporarily appear blank when viewing a timeline with very long dependency lines.

Mac

• Fixed a potential crash caused when entering invalid link formats.

Aeon Timeline 3.0.22 has been released for Mac, Windows, and iOS.

For Windows users who have experienced auto-update issues due to using a on-admin Windows account, you will need to manually download and install this update. The problem was fixed in 3.0.21, so auto-update should work normally for any subsequent update, but you may still experience this issue if updating from before 3.0.21.

• This update fixes a rare crash when opening very large files.
• It should also be slightly faster opening large files.

Aeon Timeline 3.0.21 has been released for Mac, Windows, and iOS. It contains several new additions and a number of bug fixes.

For Windows users who have experienced auto-update issues due to using a on-admin Windows account, you will need to manually download and install this update. The problem has now been fixed, so auto-update should work normally for any subsequent update.

Improvements

Spreadsheet view

• Spreadsheet view now has a Tags column where you can show and edit item tags. To enable the column, go to Spreadsheet view and click the > arrow in the table header.
• Columns can now be sorted by both ascending and descending order.

Performance improvements

We’ve added lots of performance improvements to help the app load and respond faster, particularly in Subway view.

The app should now load large files much faster.

Updates and Fixes

OneDrive

• Fixed an issue where files saved to OneDrive would constantly show a “Your file cannot be autosaved” message.

iCloud

• Fixed an issue where files would incorrectly notify that they were modified on a different device.

Syncing

• The dropdown now has a search bar when choosing which item to sync a Scrivener/Ulysses document to.
• Fixed an issue syncing to a Scrivener project using external folders, where Scrivener would reload every document in the external folder after syncing, instead of only reloading those that had changed.

Relationship view

• Fixed an issue where Relationship view would crash when customising item types from the template and upgrade wizards.

Printing

• Fixed performance issues with printing and image exporting, where it could take several minutes to generate the print preview particularly for Subway view.
• Fixed a bug where Spreadsheet view could not be printed if it showed relationship or numerical property columns.
• Fixed issues with printing Spreadsheet view where the identifier, short label, and colour dot sizing could be off.
• Fixed an issue with printing Spreadsheet where the borders for the last column could be missing.

CSV Export

• Fixed an issue where list properties would export as internal references rather than their labels.

UI

• On iPhone and in iPad entity lists, the arrow to expand parent items has been moved to the right to allow more space for deeply nested items.

Windows

• Fixed an issue where Windows auto updates wouldn’t work if not in administrator mode. Affected users will need to manually install this update, but subsequent updates should then install correctly.
• Fixed an issue where links in release notes wouldn’t open the browser.

Mac

• Fixed an issue where Mac App Store version could crash importing or opening files with invalid link paths.

Bug Reporting

• There is now a button to copy device/app information to the clipboard in the About window, to help with filing bug reports.

Aeon Timeline 3.0.13 has been released for Mac and Windows, with an iOS release due shortly once it passes Apple review.

This update includes the following changes:

• Performance improvements for large timelines. We will continue to investigate further changes we can make to improve performance and bottlenecks.
• Fixes an issue where users in read-only mode (or with an expired trial) may see a blank screen instead of the app
• Fixes a bug where adding children into a parent item may erase properties of that parent item
• Fixes a bug that can prevent Item Type Advanced Settings to open correctly

Not logged in or mid-trial? Download from our website

Users who are currently in read-only mode (because they chose to enter read-only mode, have not started a trial, or have an expired trial) should download the latest installer from https://timeline.app/download/ (or wait for the update to become available via the Mac App Store).

The automatic updater will actually work if you let the app download the update and then restart the app, but the bug will prevent the interface from signalling to you when the update is available, so it will be easier to just download the new installer.

iOS Users

Our last update was held up by a minor issue with Apple review (Apple is suddenly quibbling over a support link to our website we included in our app description, despite approving it about 6 times previously across Mac and iOS).

We have hopefully changed this to their liking now, so we hope to have this new version approved promptly, which will include these and the previous changes.

Aeon Timeline 3.0.12 has been released for Mac and Windows. An iOS release for 3.0.12 will be coming shortly, but has been temporarily held up by a slow Apple review process.

Most significantly on Desktop, this update fixes a number of issues related to Scrivener syncing:

• Fixed a bug where preferred date order was ignored when syncing short dates to Scrivener text custom metadata fields (date fields are unaffected)
• Allows user to change Documents to Folders in narrative without syncing changing them back
• Fixed bug where Unicode characters entered by Ctrl+Enter were not recognised as a line separator
• Added workaround to Scrivener issue that could prevent setting an image for a newly synced document

In addition, 3.0.12 enables the following functionality:

• Adds option to delete a mindmap: On Desktop, this can be found in the footer. On iPad, this can be found at the bottom of the View Settings panel.
• Adds "remove from view" option to iOS app, which allows for removing items from a mindmap without deleting them, as well as easier access to remove items from the narrative. This can be found in the overflow (...) menu after entering edit mode.
• Adds ability to lock dates for multiple selected items at once
• In hourly calendar modes, allow date ranges to have time rather than day precision

And fixes the following bugs:

• Fixed bug in CSV exporting where absolute dates were exported for relative calendar formats
• Fixed bug where negative sign was not shown correctly for hourly calendar formats
• Fixed bug where timeline header would not respect 12-hour vs 24-hour date format
• Fixed error message in filter panel when changing focused views with popover open
• Fixed issue resizing columns in table views when text size is not 100%
• On Windows, fixed app to open links from licensing page
• On Windows, sets the document icon for version 2 timeline files
• Fixed various minor display issues

To update:

• Mac/Windows via our website: Your app will detect and install the update automatically using the in-built auto-update system.
• Mac App Store: You will need to download the update through the AppStore (your device may be configured to install it automatically, but this typically happens overnight, so you may want to force the update sooner).
• iOS App Store: Update as per Mac App Store above, once the app has been released to iOS. The app will notify you when the update is available.

We will release another update early next week with some performance improvements for larger timelines.

This update fixes a potential crash that can come after opening version 2 files on Windows.

The crash only occured after opening version 2 files that have previously been opened by double clicking on the file in Windows Explorer, but this should now be resolved.