[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by Zanth

For a while now, I have been using a cool "mind mapping" package called TheBrain (it used to be called Personal Brain). I also use Evernote and devonThink Pro (for you Mac users out there) to organize and collect notes, clippings etc.

Hadn't heard of TheBrain, looks interesting. I used XMind for mind mapping and Evernote for organizing and collecting notes, clippings, articles, etc.

As such, I was trying desperately to avoid replicating content generation or collection, but most of all I was desperate to reduce the time and effort needed to get my ideas down and ready to be used during a session.

Same here. Originally I was thinking of setting up my own wiki or document-management system (like Drupal or Joomla). Then I found RW.

I have seen the timeline button but never clicked it, I never had a need. When I set out to enter a date that was outside the range of 20000 CE, I couldn't. When I set out to change the BCE/CE identifiers, I couldn't. How was I to properly document my created history if I couldn't edit the names and ranges of the calendar?

In my campaign, I've not had to worry about the date-range limitation. I wonder if this limitation could be removed without a complete overhaul of the calendar. Keep the Gregorian for now, but allow dates to go at least billions of years into the past and future.

Customizing month names may also be something that could be allowed, but it really wouldn't mean much to me. I don't need to just give different names to existing calendar elements, I need calendars with differing numbers of days per months, months per year, etc.

The inability to map this to a timeline won't break my campaign, but it throws a pretty large kink in my workflow and that means I'm less likely to go through the effort to load up RW.

Something that occurs to me as I read your post is that one driver to get the calendar feature released sooner is that content owners who might want to sell popular material through RW's content market (I would be cool if Monte Cook games would make Numenera content available in the CM), but because of the limitations of the current calendar won't because there would not be a useful way for them to enter dates.

...but if said feature has dropped in priority or has never been considered a truly important one, I hope it might rise up a few rungs on the feature list ladder. Heck, even something as simple as permitting one to
edit the names of the calendar for those not using the Gregorian calendar and expanding the time range to essentially unlimited (or give us the option to take a long value or a string!). In my case, although there is no such thing as a Gregorian calendar (in the Ninth world), my players would understand if I used 10000000022 CE.

It is still a priority and has always been considered an important feature. It is just that the survey of users and potential buyers, as well as business considerations, has prioritized the Content Market and player journals. Most of the calendar code has been completed and in earlier versions (perhaps only for the beta team, don't know, it was before I bought the software) the custom calendar feature was available. You can still find videos in You Tube showing it. But apparently is was too wonky and users found it difficult to use and they wanted to make sure that they did it right rather than release something that was half-baked.

There are a number of large camps of users calling for what is the most important features for them: calendars, exports, printing, and apparently journals. All are very vocal but developer time is a limited resource, especially in a company the size of LWD. It will all be there eventually, but none of it will be available until after the huge task of getting the CM and Web version are released. The recent upgrades were a big step in this direction.