Outline 4D (formerly known as Storyview 2.0)

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 4, 2014 at 08:34 AM

drm vorlock wrote:
>The event tracker of Outliner-4D looks like it might do I want, but I’m
>put off by the software’s premium price combined with its apparent
>abandonment and lack of mantenace updates. Also a 5 day trial for O4D
>seems unecessisarily parsimonious—certainly not much time to get
>comfortable with the ins and outs of the program or to determine if it
>is going to crash frequently on my win7/64 and/or be a resourse hog.
> >Unfortunately, searching “event tracking software” (for novelists)
>yields slim pickings, so I’m asking for any suggestions before I
>download the O4D trial.

Most of your concerns are justified. It can crash, but it does it rarely enough that it doesn’t bother me (on Win7/64), and I’ve never lost any data. I don’t think it’s a resource hog, in fact it seems fairly light. I don’t think very highly of its horizontal outliner (Gingko app is much better for that), but the vertical outliner is one of the most fully featured on the market for single-pane outliners with inline notes, which is why I still use it.

The “event tracking feature” does work, but whether it works the way you want to use it, you can only find out if you download it and try it yourself. As for the premium price, I’ve never seen it for less than the current promotion.

>I want to create a timeline/eventline to help plot a novel which is not
>told in chronological order. I’m looking to create a purely
>chronological eventline, as well as an a-chronological ‘throughline’
>with the scenes in the order in which the story unfolds, correlated with
>parallel eventlines showing ‘who-knows-what-when’ for several
>characters. I may end up using paper and markers, but I’d like to find
>some software which would allow me to change things around freely
>without facing the tedium of constant redrawing.

The first software that came to my mind was Storybook, however I don’t know in what shape it is currently. You can search this forum for discussions on it (e.g. http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5144/). The latest version is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ostorybook/