News about Tinderbox

Baty on Tinderbox 4.5

Jack Baty explores the new features of Tinderbox 4.5, and describes how he uses the new features to keep track of film reviews — complete with drop shadows that reflect the film's rating — and his daily weight — with an automatically-updated plot of the fluctuations.

Bywater on Tinderbox 4.5

Michael Bywater sends a wonderful appreciation of Tinderbox 4.5, complete with references to buzzards, steampunk, soulsucker bombs, and emergent structure.

Tinderbox 4.5

Tinderbox 4.5 is now available. Some comments:

The changes to Tinderbox 4.5 (from 4.2.3) are just what the doctor (of philosophy) ordered. I find Tinderbox indispensable for my work and every update makes it that much more mind-blowing. -- Johnnie Wilcox, San Francisco

I suspect this new version of Tinderbox will be the mose useful for me yet — please do a screencast of the new features! — Tom Webster, Edison Research

Whoa! Word-wrap in outlines - nice! Whoa #2 - in-place outline editing, very nice! Maybe I should finish reading the release notes before issuing further kudos :) — Les Orchard

Combined with greatly improved tools for searching and visualizing outlines and maps, the new in-line editing mode for outlines opens up Tinderbox as a robust and facile tool for organizing and writing manuscripts and presentations. — Warren Beck, Michigan State University

Tinderbox has crossed a wonderful new tipping point of power and usability. — Russ Lipton, Spokane WA

Screencast: How To Plan A Book

A new screencast from Mark Bernstein on how one might begin to plan a book with Tinderbox. Longer and more detailed looks at notes, adornments, idea maps, and agents — but still quite elementary. In Screencasts.

Tinderbox 4.2.3

Tinderbox 4.2.3 is now available. Free to everyone who has purchased or updated in the past year. You can upgrade to Tinderbox 4.2.3 from any version of Tinderbox for just $90. Order it here.

Presentation Assistant Update

The old (but beloved) Presentation Assistant tool, which helps you build attractive slide presentations in Tinderbox that can be viewed or projected in any Web browser, has been updated to work with Tinderbox 4. See the Tinderbox File Exchange to download it.

Tinderbox Weekend Dates

We have dates for the Fall 2007 Tinderbox Weekends.

Boston: November 17-18
San Francisco: December 1-2

Registration is open.

Blogging Factory

Earl Moore writes a detailed discussion in Meandering Passage on Tinderbox: My Blogging Factory.

His first point is one too seldom mentioned when we talk about weblogs: the place you need the computer to help isn't in designing the page or serving it. We need help with the hard part of blogging: writing. Moore uses WordPress for his weblog. What he needed, and built with Tinderbox, was a tool to keep track of what he was researching, what he was writing, and what he was blogging:

It needed to show a progression of the process.
It needed to be visual using colors, grouping and locations so as to convey at a glance the current status of any items.
It had to be simple.
It had to be efficient. There should be enough automation to make it easier to use then not.

Moore literally builds an idea factory, with adornments for Receiving, Manufacturing, Packing, and Shipping. New ideas and links go to the adornment labeled "Receiving", which adds some metadata to mark status and timestamps. When it's time to start an article, the parts are dragged into the Manuifacturing Department. Finished articles go to Packing — Moore, a manufacturing veteran, calls it "pre-staging" — where they are held for at least 24 hours, giving time for editorial review and second thoughts. Then, on to Shipping and the queue for posting to the Web.

Tinderbox's spatial mapping and color coding help make relationships clear without getting in the way of the unpredictable process of research and writing. Small assistants are easy to add as well; for example, Moore wants to add an agent to the Packing Department that will set an alarm if an article has been waiting for more than 24 hours. "I like," Moore concludes, "that Tinderbox encourages you to think about your data, and provides the tools to let you look at it your way.")

Tinderbox 4: Badges

Tinderbox 4 adds badges in maps and outlines. Badges are small symbols or icons can be used to distinguish special notes or to add a new visualization dimension. Tinderbox comes with a portfolio of fifty nice icons: "calendar", "home", "people", "camera", "database" and so forth.

You can select badges with contextual menus. Badges can be inherited from prototypes, and they can be chosen automatically by agents, actions, or rules. So, instead of just flagging notes, you have a rich vocabulary of flags that you can add yourself or that Tinderbox can add for you.

This is why we emphasize that Tinderbox is a personal content assistant. Automate the tasks you want Tinderbox to handle, or do things yourself: it's up to you.

You can even redefine the visual symbols — or add new badges — by dropping .icns files in ~/Library/Application Support/Tinderbox/badges.

Badges add (literally) a new dimension for visualizing relationships among notes. Just as important, you don't have to choose every badge; I expect that most of the time, people will let badges be set by agents or inherited from prototypes.

Tinderbox 4.0

Tinderbox 4.0 is now available.

Tinderbox 4 is a major update with more than 100 new features and improvements. Everything is better: maps, outlines, charts, agents, rules.

For starters:

What's New
Using Tinderbox (with lots of new case studies, from forensics to job hunting)
Application note: A Task Assistant
Application note: Email and Twitter from Tinderbox

The Tinderbox manual has been extensively revised and improved, and there's a new Tinderbox Forum to supplement the wiki.

Badges

Another fresh Tinderbox experiment went out to the testers today. Here, we add badges — small icons — to notes in the map and outline view.

Each badge has a name. Agents and actions can easily set the badge for a note, so you can use badges to highlight especially significant or urgent notes, or simply to reflect what kind of note each item happens to be.

An interesting tension in supporting badges is that the vocabulary of badges needs to be sufficiently rich to express what you want to say (and to look as you'd like things to look), but not so vast that you can't find the badge you want to use. Another tension, inevitably, is the contest between symbolic and realistic drawing, and between big badges (which look better) and small ones (which are less disruptive).

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