I noted that there is a new release of Tinderbox -- that hard to classify application for the Mac. I remain very interested in the program, but the high initial cost ($229), in addition to the high cost of annually paying for updates ($90) has me hesitant. I know a few of you are Tinderbox fans (Hugh?) and am wondering if you might wish to give me a sales pitch.

Thanks in advance!

Steve Z.

Hi Steve

I don't pretend to be an expert, and in fact I haven't upgraded to 4.6, which I believe embodies a large number of changes.

Sometimes it's easier to say what Tinderbox isn't. It's far from being a database like, say, DEVONthink (with which it's occasionally bracketed). It isn't, fundamentally, an outliner. (It does have an outliner view with some quite powerful outliner functionality, though no columns.) It is "a hypertext environment for notes", although it isn't built around a notebook metaphor, unlike, say, Circus Ponies. As "an environment for notes", it is more sophisticated, complex and powerful than, say, Supernotecard or ndxCards, to which it bears a superficial resemblance.

Notes comprise its fundamental unit of exchange. (Here again you'll see the contrast with a traditional outliner.) All the rest of Tinderbox is about manipulating the notes. Metadata is atttached to notes. Notes can be cloned, linked and arranged in hierarchies or networks. Notes can be changed in various ways by batch operations. Saved searches gather and group them and perform actions on them. Mind-mapping features can be used not only to arrange the notes in hierarchies or networks, but also themselves to link, badge, group and change notes. In addition, a language of expressions can be used to automate actions, or export hierarchies of notes.

A key advantage of starting with notes is that you can allow structure to emerge, rather than imposing it from the outset. In Tinderbox, you can do this with thousands of notes. A disadvantage is that some of the smoothness, simplicity and ease of use of a good traditional outliner is absent.

So if, say, you're cataloguing your wine cellar, your book library or the plants in your garden or throwing ideas together before writing a book yourself, Tinderbox may be for you. You can bang down the ideas, the names of the plants, the book titles or the details of the vintages and classify, link and add attributes to them later. I would imagine - I personally haven't tried this - that for a non--fiction book it's especially powerful, because once you've collected your key points, you're searching for the best lines of argument through them and Tinderbox may help to chart the way. That is certainly the opinion expressed by the British non-fiction author Michael Bywater, who has written of putting a book together around 2,500 notes. Darwin might have found Tinderbox very useful.

You could build Tinderbox into a GTD tool, and many users have. You could replicate all the functions of Supernotecard, or the Hollywood scriptwriter's corkboard, but that would be a waste of its power. To organise fewer than a hundred or so notes, or perhaps more where the structure and relationships between them are self-evident, Tinderbox is likely to be overkill.

A few final points: although the initial investment is nominally very expensive for this type of software, there are sometimes temporary special offers with significant reductions, and the upgrade price is a one-off, so you can skip years. The learning curve is notoriously steep, but you don't have to immerse yourself in the deeper complexities from the start. Export options are limited. And the aesthetics, once fairly painfully clunky, have been improved with recent upgrades. The software still awaits proper Cocoa-ification (version 5.0 at a guess).

There some good posts on the Scrivener forum, notably by Michael Bywater and AmberV: for example:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4031&p=31995&hilit=tinderbox#p31995
and
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=564&p=32603&hilit=tinderbox&sid=ae37cb8ec0f4ef8a33404f039b080213#p32603

Hope this helps.
H

Hugh,

Thank you for the thoughtful reply and the links to the Lit Lat forum pages. I had read the second thread, but hadn't seen the first. Michael Bywater makes a strong case for Tinderbox. Amber admires it, but she also seems a little ambivalent at times (despite her vast knowledge of computers and programming, she seems a true CRIMPer at heart).

I know that Tbx is incredibly function rich. What appeals to me most is probably its most obvious feature: the ability to move notes around at will, without any structure being imposed. Every other notecard based application I've seen is grid based (SNC, Writer's Blocks, Scrivener).

I agree with you that the outliner is more powerful and sophisticated than it initially appears to be. In fact, it seems to me to be one of Tbx strengths.

On the other hand, the implementation of attributes (metadata) feels really awkward to me. Actually, the entire program seems ungainly. I feel that I'd probably be able to overcome my aversion to those aspects once I used the program extensively, but I'm not sure. And that's the problem with the pricing -- it's just too much of a monetary risk. If there was a money back guarantee, that might make it easier to justify the cost. So, I will probably hold off buying a copy, but I will keep my eye out for a special deal.

Thanks, again, Hugh.

Steve Z.

I think a great program could be built along the lines of Tinderbox, but Tinderbox itself isn't it. Everything is kind of a half effort, e.g. there is a powerful attribute mechanism, but you can't display attributes directly in map view (though you can kind of do it via badges and colors), making them much less useful. The interface gets more and more baroque and obtuse (e.g. try adding graphical badges via the menus... you can't... you can't even add them by right clicking on boxes, except in one location that you'd probably not discover without reading the manual). The developer pushes out new versions with new features regularly but hasn't bothered even recompiling it to run natively on Intel processors (that should be a clue that the Windows version is still eons away and a Cocoa version will never happen). The manual still has some screenshots from pre-1999 Mac OS. It's more like a custom product aimed at the programmer himself than general users.

In some sense this is a shame, because I'm more and more convinced that two-dimensional canvases make certain types of outlines much more useful. I love the autolayout and filtering features in MindManager, for example... it really is a 2D outliner, not a "mind mapper", and the ability to superimpose some attributes on the map (e.g. due dates).

-- Chris

Chris:

You *can* display attributes in map view! Just set the note's DisplayExpression. More interestingly, a container or agent can now display a custom summary table of its children's attributes; see TableExpression

Badges: just right-click where the badge would appear. As badge menus tend to be long, we try not to include them where they're unlikely to be wanted.

Steve

You may be interested in this page, just added to the Tinderbox wiki, which discusses what Tinderbox "is":

http://www.eastgate.com/wiki2/?LearningCurve

Personally whilst I regret some of its quirks, believe some of the praise of it is overblown and wish its interface were more user-friendly and more part of the OS 10.4/10.5 "family" of software, I cannot think of any other application on the Mac platform which can do all that it can accomplish. (Curio and Personal Brain may come closest for certain tasks, but by completely different routes.)

H

Hugh wrote:

Steve

You may be interested in this page, just added to the Tinderbox wiki, which
discusses what Tinderbox
"is":

http://www.eastgate.com/wiki2/?LearningCurve

Thank you for the link, Hugh. Others interested in knowledge management, not just Tinderbox, might also find this article of interest. The basic premise of the article is that the user needs to find the right metaphor for thinking about Tinderbox in order to "get it." I would agree with this -- in fact it is true for most software, I imagine. However, the "web" metaphor suggested doesn't necessarily make the most sense to me. Afterall, I would say that a personal wiki is much closer to the web metaphor than is Tinderbox, especially since Tinderbox also claims as one of its strengths the multiple ways of viewing information (outline, tree diagram, etc.). Additionally, linking information doesn't seem as fast and painless as in a personal wiki. In fact, it seems to me that one way Tbx could be vastly improved is to implement a wiki linking scheme.

The other aspect of Tbx, and also seems true of knowledge management application in general is the conflict between comprehensiveness and comprehensibility. Here is what I mean by that:

In this article about Tbx and in articles about other applications, such as DevonThink, we are told that to really get the most from them, we need to load them up with a lot of data. As the author of the article says:

"... the more information contained within a Tinderbox document, the more useful that document becomes. More information, more notes, yields more opportunities for interconnections, more serendipitous discovery of those connections, and more results returned by the program's agents as they look for those connections."

This argues for creating just one, massive file (database, document, whatever they are called by the individual developer). Yet, when you do this, you start losing the big picture. With Tbx, having the structured view of an outline is supposed to be as important as having the map view. But an outline of a thousand notes becomes incomprehensible. This is not a specific criticism of Tbx... this is an issue no matter what application you are using. Cross database searching can help with this problem -- and I understand that DevonThink 2.0 will eventually have this function. Tbx does not, and that seems to me to be a weakness.

My point, which is really a philosophical one, is that it is one of the challenges of using any of these tools to find the right balance of comprehensiveness and comprehensibility. It is one I struggle with, and one reason I'm so grateful for Zoot on the PC -- it provides a strong search function across databases. Despite its lack of a graphic card metaphor, Zoot remains the closest thing to Tbx, in my view.

In fairness, it must be noted that there are tools that can help make massive files more comprehensible... hoisting being one, and saved searches being another. Both of these are available in Tinderbox.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

linking information doesn't seem as fast and painless as in a personal wiki. In fact,
it seems to me that one way Tbx could be vastly improved is to implement a wiki linking
scheme.

It actually does have a Wiki-like linking scheme... you can link words of a note to other nodes and even assign those links different classes (e.g. agree, disagree, depends on). However I can't figure out how to get the linked words to show up as hyperlinks or highlighted text in the note editing window. There's probably a way but like everything Tinderbox it's obtuse. (You can however see the links by pressing the Links button and then Browse links, but that's obviously not particularly nice.)

can help with this problem -- and I understand that DevonThink 2.0 will eventually
have this function. Tbx does not, and that seems to me to be a weakness.

DevonThink 2.0 manages multiple databases really nicely. The unified global inbox (meant to be a global inbox across multiple databases) is not yet implemented in the current beta though, as far as I can tell.

-- Chris

Tinderbox *is* a wiki; CamelCase words are implicity linked to a note with the corresponding name; if the note doesn't exist yet, Tinderbox makes one.

Conventional Tinderbox links may be hidden until you press cmd-opt, or may be colored as they are in web browsers.

eastgate wrote:

Tinderbox *is* a wiki; CamelCase words are implicity linked to a note with the
corresponding name; if the note doesn't exist yet, Tinderbox makes
one.

Conventional Tinderbox links may be hidden until you press cmd-opt, or may be
colored as they are in web browsers.

Thank you for that correction. That changes my perception some, for sure.

Steve Z.