A new version of Tinderbox (7.5) is out and introduces significant new visual features as well as making notes, outlines, and maps easier to manage.

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updates/Tinderbox75.html

The feature set (new and existing) is so long that it is hard to describe and grasp the complexity of Tinderbox. In a good sense, it is Mathematica for note taking.

Want to link to a specific place in a long note? Now, you can!

finally, linking paragraphs is here.

The Dance feature, natural language processing

wow, this is growing amazing.

thank you for the note Paul.

But there is still no Windows version ...

It is highly unlikely that there will ever be one.

The number of developers is a finite resource (it seems n=1) and there are so many non-standard functions that will need to be coded from scratch that making a Windows version translates into basically putting the Mac version on hold. I have no inside knowledge but considering how much Mark has continually pushed the boundary over the years I do not expect to be proven wrong.
It is like trying to hit a moving target from a platform that is anything but stationary itself.

I think this is absolutely correct.

Prion wrote:

It is highly unlikely that there will ever be one.

The number of developers is a finite resource (it seems n=1) and there
are so many non-standard functions that will need to be coded from
scratch that making a Windows version translates into basically putting
the Mac version on hold. I have no inside knowledge but considering how
much Mark has continually pushed the boundary over the years I do not
expect to be proven wrong.
It is like trying to hit a moving target from a platform that is
anything but stationary itself.

Although he was working the infrastructure for a Windows version a while ago (while he was reworking the framework in preparation for the last major version), my guess is that plan has been shelved. It's one of the few apps (that and DevonThink) still keeping me on MacOS. Tinderbox is intentionally somewhere between a commercial app and a graduate research project (this is not a bad thing, IMHO) and the tradeoff for the developer's freedom to explore interesting ways of managing information is that you can't necessarily expect the same kind of roadmap or broad operating system support as something like Scrivener.

Anyway, very nice update. It's nice to see that linking to individual text portions is back. That used to be in Tinderbox all the way through version 5 if I remember correctly, but was phased out at one point.

--Chris

I did actually buy tinderbox at version 5. It is very deep software that I would love to use more.

However it is just too expensive for me, and I can't justify the cost.

It does seem that if he reduced the price more people would come on board therefore it would be a better business proposition. It is prohibitively expensive at the moment which puts people off.

apb123 wrote:

It does seem that if he reduced the price more people would come on
board therefore it would be a better business proposition.

By no means guaranteed. It all depends on "the elasticity of demand" - i.e. the degree to which more buyers would emerge as the price was reduced and he moved down the demand curve (as I learnt too long ago).

Really the only reliable way of discovering what the shape of a product's demand curve might be is by actually cutting the price - and then if you've got it wrong and too few buyers emerge to compensate for the losses as a result of the price cut, you could face the difficult task of raising it again. And then again, more buyers would not necessarily be an unalloyed benefit, requiring additional and perhaps more costly support, for a start (as I've heard developers say).

Eastgate offers the upgrade price for "any previous version" -- so a version 5 to version 7.5 upgrade is available. I agree the price is high and the upgrade fee is high. However, the developer wrote on his blog that 2017 was the best year every for Tinderbox so price reductions would seem to be unlikely.

apb123 wrote:

I did actually buy tinderbox at version 5. It is very deep software that
I would love to use more.

However it is just too expensive for me, and I can't justify the cost.

It does seem that if he reduced the price more people would come on
board therefore it would be a better business proposition. It is
prohibitively expensive at the moment which puts people off.