Eastgate has just released Version 1.0 of a new notes application called Twig: http://www.eastgate.com/Twig/ "Twig is a powerful yet lightweight tool for capturing and cultivating your ideas."

I've downloaded it, but not yet tried it out in any serious way .At first impression it appears to be Tinderbox with a shallower learning curve. Like Tinderbox, it has outliner, map and chart views. I expect that some will call it Tinderbox-lite, except that it appears to be designed to work alongside Tinderbox, rather than in place of it, and export through it.

H

Hugh, thanks for the heads up about Twig.

What a strange application. It's like Notational Velocity and Tinderbox had a love child! Feels like there are still some kinks to work out, and there isn't any help documentation yet. But it will be interesting to see how this works alongside TB.

Thanks, again.

Steve

It's essentially a much cheaper, single-window version of the Tinderbox engine with a slightly restricted set of views (e.g. no Explorer view). Seems to me to be a really good idea.

-- Chris

I've just started using the demo. It's exactly what I wanted. I could never justify two copies of Tinderbox because of the price but now I have Twig on my laptop, perfectly adequate for making notes on my travels, and I can transfer to my main Tinderbox later. I haven't tried opening a Tinderbox document in Twig yet - that could be interesting: which features will be disabled? But then I'm not sure that I'll need to that often. The interface takes a bit of getting used to after years of using Tinderbox too, but that's OK.

- Bob

On two copies of Tinderbox, I asked Mark Bernstein about that quite a few years ago, and he replied that it was okay to keep one copy on a laptop and another on a desktop.

Bob & Chris,

I will welcome any insights about Twig you might have after you've run it for a while. I can see how it might prove useful as a baby-brother Tinderbox for a second computer, but I don't see how it could be that useful alongside TB on the same computer.

Steve

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Bob & Chris,

I will welcome any insights about Twig you might have after you've run it
for a while. I can see how it might prove useful as a baby-brother Tinderbox for a second
computer, but I don't see how it could be that useful alongside TB on the same
computer.

Steve

I'd welcome such insights too. The obvious role for Twig would be as a simpler substitute for TB for those who don't want to stretch to learning TB's "language". But if Twig can't export in a word-processor-friendly format without going via TB... I can see the business logic (less cannibalisation of Eastgate's own product), but not so much the user logic.

However, to be fair, it's very early days.

H

I just wanna mention, for us Winders users there is a freeware app called Tobu ( http://tobu.lightbird.net/ ) that looks kinda similar. Not pretty of course, but I've been using it for about three months and it is pretty handy.

Hugh wrote:

Eastgate has just released Version 1.0 of a new notes application called Twig:
http://www.eastgate.com/Twig/ "Twig is a powerful yet lightweight tool for
capturing and cultivating your ideas."

Tinderbox has some great abilities that we value a lot, even though their capabilities demand a certain amount of complexity. It has very flexible export, though you might need to write an export template. It has very powerful agents, though you might need to tell your agent what to do. It can look at the same material in lots of different ways, using lots of different windows.

Some people don't need all this, and dislike the necessary complexity. They don't want to templates, and actions, and lots of windows. But they need more than a simple text window with an image of a spiral wire binding. And some people don't need all this *yet*; if you're starting a dissertation, you may know you will want export someday but be happy to put off learning about export templates for a year or two.

Twig will please people who prefer a smaller, simpler interface. And it's less expensive. If it turns out that you need Tinderbox someday, you might still be happy to defer some of the complexity and expense until the time that they are of immediate use,