The Winterfest promotion is on at:
https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/

Lot of quality software from small companies on offer. Including Outliner Software favourites such as Tinderbox, Devonthink and Scrivener. Plus my own Hyper Plan and Easy Data Transform software. Most with 25% off. Most are Mac software, but some (including Hyper Plan and Easy Data Transform) are Windows also.

The official start of the promotion is tomorrow (21st), but I believe most of the discounts are active already.

NB/ In most promotions, the promoter takes a big chunk of commission out of the sales. Sometimes 50%. But this promotion is organized by Mark Bernstein of Tinderbox, who takes no commission (all the developers just pay towards the promotion costs, e.g. ads). So it is a much better deal for the developers.

Andy Brice

Lots of great software available through Winterfest. Thanks, Andy.

Got both of your products, Andy - but I'm still nervous.

My credit card could take a hit. For instance, Tinderbox. I strayed from it long ago because of the learning curve.

Still, I have to wonder - is it the One True Way to plan a story or a novel?

Tinderbox is updated, new and shiny again.

Life is so cruel.

Amontillado wrote:

Still, I have to wonder - is it the One True Way to plan a story or a
novel?

A true CRIMPer should always have more than 1 piece of software for any given task. ;0)

I have to say the ability to create aliases to notes is pretty compelling.

A single thing, like a character or location description, can be important in multiple places in a story. So, it should be able to appear in multiple places.

I feel myself slipping.

Hm, this is inspired and precisely true.

I strongly feel that this precept should be added to the definition of CRIMPing!

Cheers!
Bill

Andy Brice wrote:

A true CRIMPer should always have more than 1 piece of software for any
given task. ;0)

And a true CRIMPER will come back to softtware that didn't work for them time and again, "just in case it has changed"

YES! Another fundamental precept… ;-)

JDS wrote:

And a true CRIMPER will come back to softtware that didn't work for them
time and again, "just in case it has changed"

Another reason to be interested in Winterfest - Mellel is just about out of beta with version 5.1.

When you buy Mellel, you get a year or two of free updates, so anyone buying now will get 5.1 when it's released.

I haven't been in their beta program (bad customer! bad!) so I don't know exactly what's coming. One thing that I know is changing is the way auto-titles work, or at least what features they support.

I think writers either love or hate Mellel for a few things like auto-titles. Mellel's goal is for everything to be predictable.

You can set up styles called headings, but they are just styles. They don't affect the table of contents.

The table of contents is built from something called an auto-title, which is sort of like a template. It has text you enter when you use it, you can have automatic numbering, and each auto-title has multiple definitions.

You get to separately define how the auto-title looks in the document, in the table of contents, how it appears as a reference, and a couple of other things.

The worst thing about Mellel is it doesn't feature mail merge, which turned out to be a non-problem. Mellel's document format is so transparent, I wrote my own Mellel mail merge in Python in a couple of hours.

Then I discovered Affinity Publisher has a data merge feature. That's what I use these days.

Mellel's developer is friendly and responsive, too. Much to like about the product. Mellel isn't Word, but I think that's a good thing. :-)

Just a reminder that the 25% off Winterfest sales ends on the 11th Jan:
https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/

--
Andy Brice
https://www.hyperplan.com
https://www.easydatatransform.com

Does anyone have a feel for the differences between Storyspace and Tinderbox? I'm primarily interested in notes for writing. Technical writing, which is probably my only credible excuse for picking up a pen, and short stories and novels because there is a noisy Walter Mitty in my soul.

I would like to have a map of some sort - mind map, timeline, corkboard, something with references to notes - where a note can appear in more than one place.

That way, a note appears everywhere it is referenced and editing it in any context updates the source for the note.

Well, I was weak. Paid my upgrade fee, back to Tinderbox.

I remain very addicted to Devonthink. What I'm hoping to do with Tinderbox, mostly, is use it as a corkboard or mindmap.

If Devonthink had those view modes it would be amazing.

You ought to give Effie a try… still a new app, so in its early stages, but mindmapping is very nicely integrated into it. And the developers are very amiable. And it costs a small fraction of Tinderbox (in fact, it doesn’t cost anything at all at the moment). Also, it’s cross-platform (Windows, macOS, iOS).

https://www.effie.pro

Amontillado wrote:

Well, I was weak. Paid my upgrade fee, back to Tinderbox.

I remain very addicted to Devonthink. What I'm hoping to do with
Tinderbox, mostly, is use it as a corkboard or mindmap.

If Devonthink had those view modes it would be amazing.

I agree wholeheartedly. My primary criteria for outliner or task manger software is how well it sits on top of the data structures I built in DT (usually via item links) and allows me to change conceptual relationships and to plan how and when I make use of documents in the databases. I tried to use TB a while back snd, while I found it to be very impressive, it just didn’t stick for me.

Amontillado wrote:

Well, I was weak. Paid my upgrade fee, back to Tinderbox.

I remain very addicted to Devonthink. What I'm hoping to do with
Tinderbox, mostly, is use it as a corkboard or mindmap.

If Devonthink had those view modes it would be amazing.

Effie looks nice. I don't think I regret the upgrade fee for Tinderbox, though. I'm looking forward to messing around with it, and I'm cautiously hopeful I'll get a lot of good out of it, too.

steve-rogers wrote:

I tried to use TB a while back snd, while I found it to be
very impressive, it just didn’t stick for me.

That was my initial experience. One thing I remember - and am reminded of - is that the default settings for Tinderbox give it a rather plain appearance.

A little fiddling goes a long way, though.

I like the way it has a hierarchy. When you go into a container, everything else disappears. I think that's a good thing, at least for the planning/outlining tasks I want to try with Tinderbox.

Devonthink does everything I need. I can tag things like an outline hierarchy. I like that. I wish I could have a tag shown as a corkboard, though. Here's hoping I can do things like that with Tinderbox.

One of the knocks on Tinderbox was "how expensive" it is. But its price is beginning to look reasonable as apps like Roam Research are twice as costly per year. And unlike Roam, Tinderbox will still keep working even if you don't renew your annual payment.

The two apps are not directly compatible, and Roam has always been an outlier in price compared to its direct competition.

Regarding Tinderbox's learning curve, I'm not so sure it should be that big a deal.

You can use it like a 3-D version of Scapple with almost zero investigation. There are immediate uses for Tinderbox without cracking the documentation.

Scapple is very nice and if that's all I were going to do with Tinderbox the price would be too high.

But a Scapple that lets you stack workspaces, with links that are both visual and can be selected and navigated with context menus, and also lets you write very lengthy notes per object - that was worth the upgrade price of $98. To me, anyway. Particularly since Tinderbox is once again new and shiny.

Add automatic timeline generation, with in-place editing from the timeline, and outlines - that's enough to make it worth the full price to me.

As a document warehouse, I'm not so sure I'd like it. It's going to be hard to pull my cold, dead, hands off of Devonthink. Almost everything I want to do with Tinderbox, I can at least sort of do with Devonthink. I can do a one-step export to Aeon Timeline, and I'm pretty sure that with the excellent Easy Data Transform I could do an export to MindNode. To either product, by including DevonThink links, I could nearly get the edit-in-place of DT notes from either Aeon or MindNode.

If your mileage varies, I feel your pain. Mine does all the time, too. :-)

I suspect I may be able to make Tinderbox work as a to-do list that will suit me better than TaskPaper. For that, the fancier features of Tinderbox will prove useful.

It's probably valid to say Tinderbox has an antique appearance. Ugly, even. I think I see usefulness that will more than balance out the zits and warts. It also has poor documentation, but I think there's enough community support (and the aTbRef document) that will fill the gap.

Not sure what you mean by compatible. Probably you mean comparable (undoubtedly a mistype). If that is what you meant, I disagree. Though they go about it differently, both are personal knowledge management apps. Roam has set the high end of the cost of such apps at $150 a year. Other online apps cost in the same ballpark.

Akiflow is $15 per month
Amplenote is $10 per month
Evernote is $8 per month
Milanote is $10 per month
Reflect is $160 per year

My only point here is that where Tinderbox once seemed expensive, it is now right in the middle of the pack price-wise. And, it keeps working just fine if you stop paying your annual renewal.


satis wrote:

The two apps are not directly compatible, and Roam has always been an
outlier in price compared to its direct competition.

Though they go about it differently, both are personal knowledge management apps.

That's a rather large container. And I wouldn't consider those apps you listed as direct competitors to Roam; instead I'd compare it to apps like Obsidian, RemNote and Logseq, all of which are considerably less expensive than Roam and they and Roam resemble each other much more closely than any do to Tinderbox.

One of the things I like about Tinderbox is that it's not tied to cloud syncing. I'm not a fan of apps tied to a particular service. That's why I migrated away from OmniFocus, which is a great app.

Erm, in most apps you can switch off cloud syncing… Just saying!

Amontillado wrote:

One of the things I like about Tinderbox is that it's not tied to cloud
syncing. I'm not a fan of apps tied to a particular service. That's why
I migrated away from OmniFocus, which is a great app.