How many apps would it take to emulate all Tinderbox's features on the iPad?  Here are the results of a month of study.

1.  Hierarchy (outlining):  Carbonfin Outliner ($4.99) is a good, basic tool.  It exports Tinderbox-readable opml files through a web synch, and I betcha one of you clever types could write a Tinderbox export file that would make the TBX-->CO loop easy. (<--Hint)

2.  Linking:  Trunk Notes ($3.99) is a great app that allows you to build a wiki on your iPad using an easy markup language.  It will upload plain text files, so it's easy to get data into it from Tinderbox, although I haven't figured out the other leg.

3.  Spatial hypertext:  Once you get over the too-kawaii look and feel (and name) of Popplet ($4.99), you'll find that it does a good job at creating moveable, linkable and partially customizable little boxes in a nice big open space.  Very good for brainstorming!  Problem:  the only way to get data out is through a screenshot.

4.  Attributes (tagging):  There are several notetaking apps that allow at least basic tagging of notes, e.g. Moe's Notepad ($4.99) or ableNote ($4.99).  Tags of course make the notes searchable, but although I haven't tested them out, I doubt if they automate actions.  No agents!

So:  4 iPad apps sum up to a primitive version of Tinderbox.  But wait!  Tinderbox doesn't just do these four things--it does them all at once.  To represent that degree of complexity and interaction, I propose to use a factorial in the formula:

Quote:


But then to take into account the power of agents, we should probably double the final result.  In conclusion, 1 Tinderbox = 50 iPad apps.  At $4-$5 per app, that's a bit over $200.

I note with interest that if I enlarge the "noter" screenshot on the Twig webpage, it just about fits my iPad screen.

Prescient (to the best of my current understanding) in several design dimensions-- including timescale.

I also have to say you need just one and it is free: simplenotes.

I wish it was dropbox rather, but no big deal.

I do hope that either simpelnotes will integrate tags within the text of a note or tinderbox will recognize tags.

my setup is using "tags" via textexpander on both iPhone and mac and organizing the notes within tinderbox.
where I live, the iPad is not yest available, but I think having the note text and arraning the notes on the mac is not so bad as a workaround.

As an update after another two months of study:

For whatever reason, I haven't often felt the need to get Tinderbox notes onto the iPad (but thanks for the offer of help!).  I do want to get notes off the iPad and into Tinderbox, and for that Outliner-->OPML-->Tinderbox works well.

Simplenote:  Tagging does make it more useful.  But I'm still not using it! (Except for a bunch of recipes clipped from web sources, that I never end up looking at.)  I think what I need most from my notes is hierarchy (outlining) and spatial hypertext (visuals of little boxes)--Simplenote doesn't help with that.

Two apps I have started using since first writing are neu.notes, a free whiteboard app that allows drawing of the little boxes I like so much.  It has excellent zooming, which allows a bunch of little notes to be clustered in a container-like way, if you see what I mean.

The other is TaskPaper, which like Tinderbox makes plain text do nice things.

So if someone clever wanted to be helpful, how about a script that would import TaskPaper documents into Tinderbox preserving hierarchy?  I know I can do this by importing and then exploding, but that turns out to be too much work for lightweight notes.

Aside from that, I'll just wait for my "Christmas present"!

Hi Jean-

In the meantime, if you have Omnioutliner, you can open TaskPaper documents in it and save them as OPML.

HTH, Charles

@Jean

I've had some success selecting text in a TaskPaper document and click-dragging the text into Tinderbox.  Nicely outlined and indented just as in the orignal document.  ("Some" success because dragging text into a document doesn't always work over here.)

TaskPaper files are merely text files.  Tinderbox will open them as a single note, which can be exploded.  Some cleanup work for indenting needed, but OK for small jobs.

As a follow-on, you'd have to make some decisions about how to handle Notes and Tasks.

I don't think that you can maintain the distinction between Tasks and Notes translating to OPML. For example, you can have this:

Project
 Note
 - Task
 - Task
     Note
 Note

So you have 4 children of the Project: 2 Notes and 2 Tasks. And 1 Task has a child that is a Note.

So you could say that an OPML entry could have a Task for a $Name and the child Note for the $Text, but what to do about the Notes that (here) are children of the project? You could make the first Note the $Text of the Project, but what about the second? Either it gets treated like a Task to preserve its order, or it gets concatenated with the first Note in preserve its identity as a "Note."

I think I would solve this by treating Tasks and Notes identically in OPML, but maybe you have other thoughts/preferences.

Anyone?

Best wishes, Charles

concerning this hierarchy issue:

I use tags (via textexpander on mac and iPhone) in Simplenotes combined with nested agents in TB for that.

I like tags just sooo much better than OPML hierarchy. There should be a tag browser in TB for user defined tags (in addition to this great word frequency feature).

--
just as a side note: the path from TB to TaskPaper is very easy via note export and tags within notes. it kind of solves, but in a cumbersome manner:
http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/forum//YaBB.pl?num=1284024096