Greg Korgeski
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M. Renauld: Merci! J'aime toujours vos images belle de Tinderbox.
I've recently been experimenting with a similar solution, to replace a "dump everything in it" mega-Tinderbox that I used heavily for several years, until a few years ago when it sort of got sick and died. When TB6 came, I found I was able again to open and use it, but have realized it got a bit too unwieldy with the combination of everything from GTD project lists to journals to book notes to odds and ends to a large compendium of 'how to use TBX" notes and emails and so on. Not sure what I'm going to do with it.
But the problem of rapid entry of on the fly notes remains. What I've been trying is a bit different. I merged, cleaned up and converted my various DEVONthink databases into one master database; this works well for a sort of "everything in my life" database with main headings of personal things (including project files on everything from medical records to notes on the best riding mower to buy), a professional articles collection in psychology, a large set of misc articles I call the "Library" file (history, public affairs, climate change, books to read and notes on books), a professional practice file, and a large set of notes on various apps and software and Mac OS issues. (Incidentally, Tinderbox docs seem to live happily in DEVONthnk and are loosely searchable there; not so in Evernote.)
One key point: there is a nice DEVONthink widget that allows for instant addition of notes to the database. There are other ways to drag things into DEVONthink quickly, such as dragging a quote or link to the dock icon, etc. It allows me to catalog and tag them and add notes, etc., on the fly.
Where Tinderbox comes in is in the "son of Intellect," the original huge file being on hold for now. The new one is also arranged like a sort of Commonplace book by date but without mixing journal entries with collected notes. So I set up a smart folder in DEVONthink of anything added to it between one and a few weeks ago. My routine is to go through this folder after things have cooled, and see if there are articles, quotations, notes, journal entry passages, to put in the new Tinderbox doc. It results in a smaller Tinderbox document that still has a rapidly growing set of nicely labeled notes on basically anything that interests me, quotes from a NYTimes article, an old comment in journal entries (I'm rereading these), quotes I especially like from books, and thoughts on any and all of these things.
I'll sort and explore them over time, but they seem likely to become a more efficient and more useful commonplace book type thing for me. For me that works because I usually have about five writing projects going at any one time (currently a few novels in revision, a self-help book and an essay) and connecting ideas this way is most useful.
It may be a lot of work to review the 11,000 notes in my older bigger "everything" Tinderbox file, but the slow process of reading through it (whether old book notes, movie ratings, essay and writing ideas and so on) seems to be exactly the kind of "pondering over notes" process that Tinderbox is designed for. As a place to dump everything and search it with AI, both Tinderbox and DEVONthink are good, but the latter makes a better warehouse as it holds everything from videos, images, audio files, and so on, while Tinderbox is the place to take that raw material from the lumber pile and explore it and shape it.
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