Tinderbox and Visual Understanding Environment (VUE)

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Posted by Andreas Sprotte
Sep 26, 2010 at 05:51 PM

Looking for a Windows Alternative to Tinderbox, I just found the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) which is multi-platform, and free. Has anyone tried it? Are the programs comparable? (URL for VUE: http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm )

Posted by Hugh
Sep 26, 2010 at 08:09 PM

I own a Tinderbox licence, but have only become aware of VUE in recent weeks and have just had another look at its website.

I would say that both applications are similar to the extent that both deal with notes and the visual representation of those notes and the links between them, but that appears to be as far as it goes. Tinderbox has many more ways of manipulating notes, their metadata and the links between them, many more ways of grouping them, classifying them and analysing them, more ways of representing them as an outline or graphically and more ways of exporting them. If VUE has advantages, they’re threefold: it’s probably much simpler to learn, it appears to be free and it may be better for presentations.

But on the basis of a quick skim of VUE, I’d say Tbx is much the more sophisticated, versatile and useful product.

(Of course, Eastgate have said that they’re working on a Windows edition, but they’ve said that for quite some time.)

Posted by Andreas Sprotte
Sep 27, 2010 at 04:37 PM

Did you take a look at the video tutorials, e.g.

How to Use Ontologies in VUE
Map Based Searching and Semantic Analysis Screencast
Using Data Repositories in VUE

These and more can be found in the Youtube VUE Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/VUEProject

Doesn’t that come close to Tinderbox?

Posted by Andreas Sprotte
Sep 27, 2010 at 05:05 PM

Also you can build complex searches with the search palette. You can search across one or several maps, broadly or within labels, categories or keywords. The result can be displayed by highlighting, hiding, , clustering or linking the found items or putting them on a new map.
When you’re done with your search you can save it as a set. That _might_ compare to Tinderbox Agents.

Posted by Hugh
Sep 27, 2010 at 06:17 PM

Andreas

I bet VUE is a very useful tool with potentially its own niche, I can see that it has the equivalent of agents, it’s very useful that it’s cross-platform and it could hardly be more financially attractive!

However, by comparison with Tinderbox, as far as I can see VUE still has to acquire the equivalent of prototypes, stamps, adornments, badges, the outline view and its meta-data columns, actions, several types of export format and a number of graphical views, including the new Tinderbox timeline. That’s not to devalue VUE: simplicity is frequently desirable.

Incidentally I think the new Tbx timeline could be extremely useful for those who need multi-level or multi-actor timelines, such as writers, historians, scientists and other academics, lawyers and police. Many (not all) current timeline applications have difficulties in representing multi-level timelines or at least don’t do it easily and straightforwardly (certainly those on the Mac platform), and none that I know of does it with a few clicks off the back of an application with an outliner - as Tinderbox now does.

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