Tinderbox 8 is released

Posted by Skywatcher
Apr 13, 2019 at 05:46 PM

... about Tinderbox’s complexity. I think it made big strides in user-friendliness and documentation these last years. I remember starting out in version 5 ( or 6 ? ) and it was a whole lot more infuriating and with a terrible manual that was all over the place. Simple things seemed incomprehensibly difficult, and I pretty much gave up on it after a first attempt. It was until I found Stephen Zeoli’s blog and his early tutorials that I had an “Aha !” moment and the more basic aspects of TBX started making sense. I’m still struggling with the more complex aspects and the scripting, but I’ve been putting it to good use since then.

I still think that the entry cost ( in terms of brainpower, not finances ) is quite high, and the temptation to use it for things that could be accomplished by simpler more focused applications is a mistake that can lead to frustration. I tried once to set it up as a GTD kind of system ( and it can certainly handle such use), but it just felt like using a jackhammer to put a nail in the wall. Setting up and maintaining the system took more time than executing the tasks. Using a specialized GTD app ended up being faster and more productive.

TBX shines for the more complex, abstract tasks like ” I have all these notes and thoughts and I’m not sure where I’m going with them ” and putting some order into chaos. The curve is not linear : you almost need to same amount of effort to do simple things as it is to do complex things. Of all the apps I use ( including many cited here like Devonthink, Scrivener, Curio ) it is by far the most complex one, and I only resort to it when I can’t accomplish what I need by simpler application.