Beck Tench returns to YouTube with a new series: Turning reading notes into a Tinderbox map.

Very detailed. Very interesting.

For your weekend CRIMP:

http://bit.ly/2UJZuqE

Thanks, @Beck

Between Beck and Stephen (and that fellow in France), I may actually be able to use Tinderbox. Looking at the manual and reading The Tinderbox Way don't seem to mesh with my brain.

Jeff

What I love about Beck's videos is three-fold:

1. You get a very nice primer on certain aspects of Tinderbox, of course, including the all-important (with Tinderbox) case example.
2. You see a smart person working through the process of making sense of complex concepts.
3. You learn something interesting about a subject (purposeful purposelessness, for example) you may never have heard of before.

Well done, Beck. And definitely NOT boring.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

What I love about Beck's videos is three-fold:

1. You get a very nice primer on certain aspects of Tinderbox, of
course, including the all-important (with Tinderbox) case example.
2. You see a smart person working through the process of making sense of
complex concepts.
3. You learn something interesting about a subject (purposeful
purposelessness, for example) you may never have heard of before.

Well done, Beck. And definitely NOT boring.

Steve Z.

I agree.

And very much by the way: for anyone tempted to follow Jeffery above in reading The Tinderbox Way in order to learn about how to use the app, "Jeffery's brain" is far from unique. The Tinderbox Way is much less a "How To" manual, and much more a book about the philosophy underpinning the application.

To be fair, Tinderbox's developer Mark Bernstein has stated as much in past, but evidently not loudly enough. The "How To" Tinderbox book is still to be written.

He has a name. Dominique Renauld

https://vimeo.com/user23860804


Jeffery Smith wrote:

that fellow in France

I think the issue I have had with Tinderbox's learning curve is that the printed documentation seems to get immediately bogged down in assigning properties to a note, and how to access those properties by clicking on icons associated with the note. After an hour, I'm still at the beginning of the manual. At that point, I go to something easier to use because I'm losing patience.

Right now, I'm using DevonThink Pro Office at work. If it doesn't fill the void left by Tinderbox, I'll start on Beck's series of videos.

Jeffery

PS: I didn't mean to diss Dominique Renauld. I thought I saw his videos on Vimeo, but couldn't find him there. I just upgraded to a new Mac Mini and am still in the process of restoring 500 gb of data onto it from my previous Mac Mini.

I was thinking about "purposeful purposelessness" today and it occured to me that that could describe the design philosophy of Tinderbox. Mark Bernstein has created a very specific set of tools, but leaves it entirely up to the user just how to employ those tools and to what purpose. Beck, did I even get close to the correct definition of "purposeful purposelessness"?

Steve Z.


Stephen Zeoli wrote:

What I love about Beck's videos is three-fold:

1. You get a very nice primer on certain aspects of Tinderbox, of
course, including the all-important (with Tinderbox) case example.
2. You see a smart person working through the process of making sense of
complex concepts.
3. You learn something interesting about a subject (purposeful
purposelessness, for example) you may never have heard of before.

Well done, Beck. And definitely NOT boring.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I was thinking about "purposeful purposelessness" today and it occured
to me that that could describe the design philosophy of Tinderbox. Mark
Bernstein has created a very specific set of tools, but leaves it
entirely up to the user just how to employ those tools and to what
purpose. Beck, did I even get close to the correct definition of
"purposeful purposelessness"?

Steve, you did! Tinderbox seems quite purposefully designed to let users determine the purpose, and Mark holds strongly to not determining that for us. Also, it takes a lot of time to understand it and what it can do — a rich experience of learning and experimentation. It is, perhaps, a very successful application of slow technology.

Another article I've read recently (citation below) is about how when you design slow technology in our world of fast technology, the initial user experience is often frustration (which mirrors what we often see with TBX) and that gives way to acceptance if you stick with it for several months (which has been my experience).

Odom, W., Sellen, A. J., Banks, R., Kirk, D. S., Regan, T., Selby, M. et al. (2014). Designing for Slowness, Anticipation and Re-visitation: A Long Term Field Study of the Photobox. Proceedings from Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I love that we can think about purposeful purposeless together.

Beck

Interesting ctonversation.

The analog world is full of "purposeful purposeless" context: a kitchen, a woodworker's workshop, an artist studio --- even a WeWork space, perhaps.

We don't walk into the kitchen and ask the chef "ok, show me how to make food", or the woodworker "let's make furniture".

We have to explore the cabinets and drawers, read the labels, fiddle with the tools. On day 1 in the kitchen, banoffee pie is not in our skill set. Maybe we start with toast.

There are lots of drawers and cabinets and odd-shaped tools in Tinderbox or Curio or DEVONthink or Scrivener. (Not intending to be Mac centric.) It takes a while to play around. PLAYing is the best way to discover purposes.

Unfortunately, lots of folks are told "go get Tinderbox, it's terrific" and skip a few movie nights with their partner to afford the cost of Tinderbox. We shouldn't hope to move into George Nakashima's workshop a few days after picking up our first screwdriver. Take a long while to play, first.

Playing is a wonderful way to think of it, Paul. I agree. Sometimes when I am putzing about in the garden or chicken coop, I feel like I am playing outside just as when I was a kid. The CRIMPing we do, well speaking for myself, it is a kind of play, isn't it? I feel lucky that I have enough bandwidth to play so much (ha!).

Your woodworker analogy reminded me of something my good friend, Howard, a master woodworker once told me: that a carpenter's first tool is a broom.

The interesting thing about play behavior is that it is both pointless and purposeful, and never reaches finality or resolution. It just stops and then continues later.

I've observed throughout my career that most procedures or behaviors in work groups are continuations of games we played in childhood. Usually with higher stakes (loss of work or status), because we are allowed to control greater resources. In this sense, we are adults only because we tell ourselves we are (itself a gamification), not because we "grew up". For example, every business meeting can be experienced as a simple game of "hide and go seek".

Hence the concept of game theory. Something I find more and more fascinating the older I get...

If you don't know it, Eric Berne's "Games People Play" has a lot that's interesting to say about all this. Style is a bit dry and it's from the early 1960s, but if you have the time (ha!) it's worth it.

Paul Korm wrote:

The interesting thing about play behavior is that it is both pointless
and purposeful, and never reaches finality or resolution. It just stops
and then continues later.

I've observed throughout my career that most procedures or behaviors in
work groups are continuations of games we played in childhood. Usually
with higher stakes (loss of work or status), because we are allowed to
control greater resources. In this sense, we are adults only because we
tell ourselves we are (itself a gamification), not because we "grew up".
For example, every business meeting can be experienced as a simple
game of "hide and go seek".

Ha, which I remember reading when it appeared in 1964 and was "the book" to talk about. Plus ça change ...

NickG wrote:

If you don't know it, Eric Berne's "Games People Play" has a lot that's
interesting to say about all this. Style is a bit dry and it's from the
early 1960s,

Those videos are why they coined the term tl;dr.

Is that comment necessary? @beck cared to create and share something that is very useful for others. No need to be snarky about it.

Listerene wrote:

Those videos are why they coined the term tl;dr.

Agreed (with Paul).

Paul Korm wrote:

Is that comment necessary? @beck cared to create and share something
that is very useful for others. No need to be snarky about it.

Listerene wrote:
>Those videos are why they coined the term tl;dr.

Thanks, fellas.

And to be fair Listerine, I *did* warn everyone it was boring. ;)

Beck,
your videos were exactly what I needed as a gentle nudge and encouragement to set up a similar workspace/process in TB.
I have been a TB user since 2007 (I bought a Mac specifically to be able to use it), but sometimes get exhausted by the quirks and rough edges and put the tool to the side for a while ...
Thanks for bringing it back to my attention!
Moritz

Beck wrote:

Thanks, fellas.

And to be fair Listerine, I *did* warn everyone it was boring. ;)

Maybe so; but my understanding is that rather than the term being derogatory of the content, it is indicative of the beholder's mental capacity:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/as-attention-spans-get-shorter-content-gets-shorter_us_5a57ae42e4b00a8c909f7f1e

Listerene wrote:

Those videos are why they coined the term tl;dr.