I agree -- I said something like some of this on an earlier thread

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/forum//YaBB.pl?num=1306595528/32#32

though what you say here goes deeper and further. I'm a psychologist, and I've also noted the difficulty of bridging the gap between the experts and the novices -- a fairly common problem. In my view, the statement "Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant" actually obscures what the product does (or can do). It is a statement of technical capability which might mean something to a programmer, but it has no meaning at all -- or rather, it means too many things -- to a potential user. My psychoanalyst might also be described as a "personal content management assistant" because he helps me understand my thoughts and emotions. I would make any "first statement" about the program even more bald -- Tinderbox helps you to see links between bits of information. I feel that that is the basic idea that one needs to have when starting out with the program. Everything else can come later.

I look forward to howls of protest, and rebuttals saying that I have sold the program short! I know I have, but the novice needs a simple place to start, a basic idea from which they can build their relationship with the program.

Best wishes, Martin.

I would certainly agree that a lot depends on the individual, but I'd be very surprised if "Tinderbox, the tool for notes" attracted many people to the program. In my lifetime, for taking notes, I have used MS Word, Stickies, XPad, TextEdit, SimpleText, Notational Velocity, Evernote, Scrivener, Nisus Writer Pro, Circus Ponies NoteBook, EagleFiler, Devonthink Pro, OmniOutliner, MyMind, MindNode and probably several others that I can't remember at this moment. If anyone had ever suggested to me that I should buy a program costing $250 for the purpose of taking notes, I would have thought they were barking! In fact, I suspect that the phrase "the tool for notes" is actually another reason why a lot of novice users don't really understand Tinderbox. Looked at from the novice's point of view, what is so special about a program for taking notes? There are hundreds of them, and some of them are free, and do a very good job, too. What distinguishes Tinderbox, and makes it worth investigating, in my view, is not the fact that it takes notes, but that it has special tools for showing relationships between the bits of information. Otherwise, why would we use it instead of TextEdit?

Cheers, Martin.

PS: I hope that doesn't come across as a rant: re-reading it, it seems a bit forthright! I hate it when there are no visual cues in communication. Imagine the above as being written wearing a red plastic nose.

@Richard:  I have never seen software that has such great potential to fulfill my dreams!

Why?

Your answer might (or might not) lead to surprising insights relative to the challenge you have posed, but even your own proposed TbX description seems dry as dust relative to this enthusiastic declaration ...

Martin, I think you (and Richard) summarize the situation well. Off the top of my head: Perhaps the solution is to emphasize, say, three main use categories that correspond, in Richard's terms, to three main benefits. A compromise between the overly abstract "it does everything", on the one hand, and the possibly too narrow boiled-down-to-one-core-function approach, on the other. But I probably haven't given this as much thought as many others here.

Stacey,  your response is no different than others from The Company. Not much help to novices, and that is the issue brought up by the OP.

I teach program design, as well as most levels of our CS curriculum, and a programming language is not introduced as a program that can be used for processing data and asking students how they would like to use it. In parallel, we introduce the features and commands of the language while exploring case studies (micro and macro) of applications of the "program" to specific problems.

Maybe comparing TB to a programming language is not comparable, so how about a spreadsheet?  Shortly after buying an IBM PC-1, I was informed of a new app named Lotus 123 that was about to come out. I was not too knowledgeable of spreadsheets and couldn't see the connection to graphics (charts, etc.) and a database. Years later, when spreadsheets were the fashion in intro college CS courses, we introduced them much like programming languages. We studied modules of features and applications. We could have described them as rows and columns of numbers and labels with summation and average cells thrown in, but the with calculation cells that included logical and other advanced functions, we truly needed to introduce case studies in order for our students to understand what spreadsheets could do.  Sample applications did not limit them; they could extend these case studies to new problem domains - that's really what our goal is.

Eastgate seems to think that when a demo application of the program is revealed, users will think that's what TB is designed for. This is where I disagree.  

Quote:


Actually, we agree that offering demo applications is very helpful! This is usually the approach we take with our Tinderbox Weekend events. We frequently present case studies and explain how and why the example uses certain features to achieve specific goals. We take a similar approach for the tutorial CDs. In fact, we have a new tutorial volume currently in pre-release that will be available as soon as we get some Web site issues smoothed (probably early next week).

Here are some additional resources on this front in the meantime:

• Tinderbox at work series
• Many of the screencasts are use cases in disguise
• Mark Bernstein's blog is very good about linking to real people sharing details of how they use Tinderbox on their own weblogs
• At the bottom of the Tinderbox home page, there is a category of case studies called "Using Tinderbox"
• And I'll update this with a link to the new tutorial series as soon as it's up and running

I think this thread is not exhausted quite, at least for me. Warning: Friday afternoon verbiage lies ahead ...

First, not a few folks who have invested in the software clearly experience a need and need 'support', if only to to be encouraged not to 'worry'. Kudos to staff for being patient.

Second, though a long-time user, I have gained a small, but vital point of clarification myself, namely, that there is a difference between the 'what is it used for?' question and the 'how do I climb the learning curve?' question - admitting some overlap.

As was pointed out, Eastgate is aware of the apparent leap required to move from novice to intermediate and working on it. Neat.

On the former point, I see TbX as a toolbox for exploratory problem solving in situations where a formal application/solution is not available or, perhaps, suitable. In other words, if it can be solved in another piece of software designed specifically for that domain, go for it elsewhere. Alternatively, use TbX to get far enough to use the 'other' app effectively and/or as data input to that application. Use TbX when you can't avoid it is my point - and no shame in that.

Not everything requires or benefits from out-of-the-box exploration (thank goodness, or we would never get anything done). OTOH, some of the most rewarding study, learning, discovery and subsequent formalization demands exploratory work. MB emphasizes in his book that TbX rewards the deferral of formalizing 'x' method or approach until it is truly needed. Quite so.  Our culture is biased against admitting the necessity (read: the joy) of learning tools which don't treat us as children or slaves and we are suffering greatly as a result.

TbX demos are useful precisely because they cover such a ridiculously broad set of domains. Sensible users 'get it' that TbX isn't for just 'this' or 'that' - so I don't worry about this leading to misharacterization of the toolbox.

To me, a thread like this is (or could be) most useful if we pushed the discussion itself outside-of-the-box a bit. To wit:

.....why did the original poster say that TbX looked like it could meet his wildest dreams? We don't usually speak this way about software (or I hope we don't)! So, please, what dream are you talking about that, remarkably, this product might allow you to achieve? I argue that the answer to your own question might be found by pursuing that line of thought ...

... and Mark A (of all people) claims that even he hasn't 'scratched the surface' of TbX. I'm not sure if that is depressing or exhilerating. What the heck does that mean (serious question)? We don't usually say this about Word or PHP or even reasonably cool software products. Mark, what do you see 'below the surface' at your level of expertise that remains to be mastered or that could be put to use for you to do ....what?

Bottom line, "the application that can be described is not the application". I think that is a Zen thing? Seriously, that TbX can't be put neatly into a box doesn't mean nothing can be said about its target usage, but emphasizes rather that its architecture matches (as it should) its core use case: exploratory problem-solving for out-of-the-box requirements across a wide set of end-point domains (education, law, business, writing/publishing, religion, daybooks, cooking, movies, fantasy baseball, etc).

Other applications should be so lucky as to have an issue like that ....