Tinderbox News
Tinderbox Training
MIT's Elin Sjursen invents a new verb -- "to tinder", meaning "to convert your weblog to Tinderbox. She found (scroll down in her weblog, BloggerdyDoc, to May 19) that spending an hour or so at Eastgate was a big help in getting used to Tinderbox. Tinder Me: Mark was so nice: He invited me to visit Eastgate a while ago, where he showed me how to Tinder my blog. I'm still working on the transition, I'm ashamed to say - there has been so much going on and my blog has suffered- but maybe, if I get things straight, BloggerdyDoc will be Tindered by the end of the upcoming week:-)
Conference Notes
Gordon Meyer sent this screenshot of his Tinderbox notes, captured in the middle of WWDC, the annual Apple Developers Conference. 
When you consider lost work time, travel, hotels, fees, and everything else, attending a technical conference often costs thousands of dollars. It's important to capture whatever you can -- and not to be so distracted by your tools that you miss important ideas. That's why we've worked hard to make Tinderbox fast and easy for experienced users. Agents and Stamps are new concepts -- almost all of Tinderbox is new -- but once you've got your personal Tinderbox set up the way you want, maps like this fall out of routine note-taking with little or no effort. Note the simple but handy use of color, and the way Meyer has both a local map and a broad chart open at the same time.
(We're very interested in learning more about how people use Tinderbox. Tell us what's in your Tinderbox! Send us notes and screen shots!)
"Wow!"
More Tinderbox fan mail, from Matthew McNatt in Illinois, and Dave Garbutt in Basel.
Elegant
Dave Garbutt writes from Basel to tell us, "Keep working 24 hrs a day on it ;-) Actually keep very calm - and don't bloat it with features. It is already beautiful and elegant." (More, in Tinderbox Mail)
Tinderbox Templates
Three Tinderbox Template packages, ideal for starting Tinderbox weblogs, are now available for free download.
These templates were designed by legendary Web designer Derek Powazek. He writes that "In my time as Creative Director of Pyra (the makers of Blogger), I got to watch which blog templates got adopted, and which ones didn't. It was fascinating, and often counter-intuitive. In general, the most widely-adapted templates were the ones that started off simple, templates that let the blogger fill in the personality.
Don't miss Gray Flannel, Trainblogging, and Simplicity!
Tinderbox 1.0.1 is now available!
Tinderbox gets even better with the debut of version 1.0.1. Current Tinderbox users can download the update free. If you don't already use Tinderbox, get the free demo and see what you're missing. Visit the Tinderbox download page today!
David Kosiur
New in the Tinderbox mail: author and industry analyst David Kosiur uses Tinderbox to see the big picture.
Tinderboxing Engelbart, Revisited
Gordon Meyer revisits his Tinderbox notes on a Douglas Engelbart lecture and reflects on new ways to use Tinderbox. A superb case study!
Of special interest: Meyer is exporting his Tinderbox essays to Radio Userland for upstreaming and formatting. Cooperation between exciting new tools is vital!
Noise Between Stations
Victor Lombardi's Noise Between Stations, an established Information Architecture weblog, is now Made With Tinderbox.
Nutcracker
Tellef Kvifte's Nutcracker/Nøtteside page is made with Tinderbox. Every month, this bilingual site presents a picture and challenges readers to identify what the picture could possibly represent. From the Institute for Music and Theater at the University of Oslo.
Taking Notes on Engelbart
Gordon Meyer describes a unique experience: learning to use Tinderbox to take notes at a lecture by hypertext pioneer Doug Engelbart. (Engelbart's NLS/Augment was probably the first full-scale hypertext system; the same project also invented the computer mouse, the outliner, and groupware). Sometimes, an application just comes together; it sounds like Tinderbox is at that stage. Meyer recalls that:
"Engelbart discussed how technology should be used to augment our abilities, to extend what we can do. Automating the mundane does not move us forward -- we should be building tools that augment our human capabilities -- making connections, thinking, communicating, and extending our knowledge.
"I laughed aloud as I realized Tinderbox had just done exactly that for me. Its "agent" feature was allowing me to gather a better understanding of this view of "smart agent" technology. How wonderfully recursive!
New Tinderbox weblog
June Lester's Afterhours is made with Tinderbox. She explains that
"I have an eclectic collection of interests in education, mathematics, design, art, and other subjects, and I'm sure I'll write about most of them eventually, especially about how they play themselves out online."
Support!
Doug Miller from iRobotics recounts a recent problem he had with Tinderbox. He got an exciting idea from a science fiction novel, and implemented it. Some things seemed difficult, so he sent Eastgate an email query.
It turns out we were able to suggest a different way to accomplish what Miller needed. Tinderbox is like that -- there are often several different ways to tackle a problem with Tinderbox. Sometimes it fresh perspective helps. "Since I was stuck, I fired off an e-mail to Eastgate, describing what I was trying to do in general terms, and asking if it was possible in Tinderbox... About ten minutes later, my office phone rang. Much to my surprise, it was Mark Bernstein, Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems and primary developer of Tinderbox! Mark had received my e-mail, and tried to send me a reply, but he'd been caught up by the new anti-spam blacklist filters we'd put on the mail server this week. "First, Mark Bernstein is a great guy; one who really understands what interacting with his customers is all about and one who genuinely wants his product to be first-rate. A lot of other people would have given up when that e-mail bounced. Mark took the time to look up my office telephone number and call me to discuss my question. In the course of the discussion, he could have said "Sorry, Tinderbox just doesn't do that." Instead, he sought to understand what I was really trying to accomplish, rather than just looking at my methodology. By doing so, he was able to steer me in a completely different direction to achieve the results I wanted. How many representatives of companies have you dealt with in the last five years that have been able to provide that sort of service? The first thing I did after getting off the phone with Mark was to collar a group of my colleagues and tell them about what had happened. That's how we want our company to interact with people. Mark has passion for what he's doing, and it shows."
Digital Literacy
Digital Literacy, a new weblog by H. Lewis Ulman, is made with Tinderbox. He wrote to say that he "just wanted to let you know how impressed I am with Tinderbox.
"I needed an easy way to create a Weblog of reflections about current news reports and events related to digital literacy. I want to convey to my students in a class on digital media and English studies something of how digital media constitute a 'medium' in which we think about ourselves and our culture, not just a means of communication."
Szpakowski and Scriban
Mark Szpakowski speculates on Tinderbox's role as an personal information tool. "With Tinderbox", he writes, you could have a personal info organizer (a nonlinear geography) with RSS streams coming in and weblogs going out. Tinderbox is XML based, so it could bve open ... and interoperable enough to be a real winner."
At the same time, George Scriban picks up on the importance of agants -- a Tinderbox feature that seems excitingly exotic today, and that we'll all take for granted in five or ten years. " Tinderbox 1.0 ... [is] a personal content management assistant built by hypertext pioneer Mark Bernstein. The idea behind Tinderbox -- agent-based adaptive organization of notes -- is interesting, and could make a huge difference in the way you approach writing and sharing frequently-updated content (like weblogs).
Miyazaki
Miyazaki Municipal University's Hugh Nicoll writes of Tinderbox: With the launch of Tinderbox .... and the support of its early adopters, the web logging/hypertext community seems to be gathering strength as well as a very interesting new tool.
Dave Fultz
Dave Fultz, Source Design's senior director of technology, calls Tinderbox a "tour-de-force" in today's mailbox.
Tinderbox is a truly elegant thinking environment: multiple, cleanly designed views of your data; extensive linking mechanisms to objects both inside and outside of the program; fluid data entry; a most intriguing agent technology; and powerful html export functions.
Tracking URLs
Anders Fagerjord discovers that you can drag bookmarks from your browser into your Tinderbox.(22 March) Another undocumented feature of Tinderbox: I use five different browsers on two different machines, and keeping track of URLs is hard. So I downloaded a good shareware bookmark program for OS X. Then it occured to me: why not try to just drag the URL from the browser's address window into Tinderbox? Of course it works. Now I can annotate the URLs, sort them, search them, manipulate them, collect them with agents, use them in Web pages. Increasingly, Tinderbox becomes my memex. It is always running, and where everything is. I agree with Jill, it should be an operative system. It should run on my Palm. But I would be happy if I just could get a browser as good as Tinderbox.
A host of applications
People are finding lots of ways to use Tinderbox. The Tinderbox mail page has a new note from journalist David Berreby on language learning: with Tinderbox, you can review your notes in ever-changing ways, so they stay fresh. And information architect Victor Lombardi, fresh from the IA Summit, reviews how information architects need to refine their craft and finds an intriguing role for Tinderbox:
Experiments like these not only make a point about what is possible, it's an opportunity for designers to practice our craft. And it doesn't have to be hard or time-consuming. We could employ tools like Tinderbox for rapid prototyping new content architectures.
More from Miller
A week after his enthusiastic review, Doug Miller revisits Tinderbox. We get a great peek at his Tinderbox file, too! He writes that:
I'm loving Tinderbox more every day. I'm using it to write longer posts for the Notebook, to publish a klog at work, keep a daily journal of work tasks and events, make meeting notes, collect random thoughts, collect quotes from the web I might want to remember later, index important e-mail, track to-do items, and then link the entire mess together. 
One of the ways I can tell a piece of software is excellent is if I find something new to do with it almost every day.
Miller
Doug Miller writes a detailed review of Writing In Tinderbox.
"I can't express how happy I am with Tinderbox. I've only covered the highlights of Tinderbox's features in this review; there's really deep functionality in this application that I haven't begun to explore. When a native OS X version ships, I'll be overjoyed. Tinderbox allows me to manage my ideas, thoughts, notes, and reminders as I prefer, using structures and relationships that make sense to me. It lets me keep tabs on news and blogs I find important at the same time I'm writing and reviewing other notes. From that perspective it excels as a personal knowledge management, planning, and writing tool. After all that, I can turn around and share pertinent information with a larger audience easily, making it an ideal blogging tool or allowing me to integrate information into enterprise knowledge management systems.
Ulman
"Tinderbox is a unique and powerful application, an elegant convergent of hypertext authoring, Web authoring, concept mapping, and database tools." -- H. Lewis Ulman, Assistant Dean for Research and Instructional Technology, Ohio State University
Rau
"Do you know those little information-snippets you get from newsletters, online magazines, incoming mail, and 'blogs? At home, I just drag them into my Tinderbox. At work, I'm lost. I save little Notepad-notes....it's just depressing." -- Dr. Anja Rau, Frankfurt
Anders Fagerjord
Anders Fagerjord writes in his elegantly fascinating surftrail that "This Blog, and increasing portions of my Web site is made with Tinderbox. I have been using the beta for months, and I really love this powerful little program."
Surftrail is an great example of a highly focused, highly professional web journal. Fagerjord is one of the leading students of Digital Media Rhetoric.
David Rogers
David Rogers writes in his weblog, Time's Shadow, that "I've been playing around with Tinderbox. It's pretty damn cool.." He's working on memes, social organisms, and The Lucifer Principle, and plans to use Tinderbox to develop examples he's sketched in his web log.
Tinderbox in libraries
Jamie LaRue, director of the Douglas Public Library in Castle Rock, Colorado, is a big fan of outliners. "Between 1982 and 1991", he writes, "there flowered a golden age of software...[Outliners] have always fascinated me. Recently, I spent some twenty hours or so seeing what was still out there, and writing up my thoughts on what I found."
The original note on antique programs that still work generated lots of mail, and now LaRue reports on Tinderbox in the Brave New World of Outliner Software. He spent some time with the Tinderbox demo, and reports that "this set off a pretty intense day of intellectual stimulation....There was a time when automation saved libraries money. For the past 10 years, it has COST us money. (It has also, of course, allowed us to offer new services.) But I begin to see a way to make it more cost-effective."
Impressions of Tinderbox
Dou Miller, CTO of iRobotics, has written a long and thoughtful review of Tinderbox.
"The beauty of Tinderbox, though, is that this capability is married seamlessly to a personal productivity application that can be used for managing all sorts of information and content, any of which can be easily published to a web page or blog as desired."
Working with Tinderbox can keep you awake!
"Tinderbox box is the kind of software that you normally don't see outside state-of-the-art university and corporate labs. It is enabling technology, pure and simple! Working with Tinderbox makes you wake up in the middle of the night with ideas you'd never have though of before. Saying it is a Personal Content Management Assistant barely scratches the surface of its full potential. -- Peter J. Wasilko, Esq., Director, The Continuity Project
Slick!
New in mail: "This is one slick piece of software!" -- Doug Miller, iRobotics
Weblogs and dates
Tinderbox lets you include dates anywhere in your Web page. You have complete control. Here are the details.
"The tool I've been waiting for!"
Clifford Wulfman, a researcher at the Perseus Project, writes:
I've been playing with Tinderbox for a few hours now, and already I can tell you've done it: you've taken away my last excuse for not doing my research. I've always been fussy about my tools....No more; this is the tool I've been waiting for....a superb work of software.
Letting Tinderbox do the work.(18 Feb 2002)
The list of sites made with Tinderbox on the Tinderbox weblog page is itself a little weblog. Each site is a separate note, all gathered inside a container called "MadeWith".
The container keeps the sites sorted alphabetically. The container that holds this note keeps news items sorted by time (and automatically timestampts new items as we add them).
That makes it less work to keep this page up to date. It's a small difference, but a difference that will save us a little bit of time and money every day. Tinderbox 1.0.(18 Feb 2002)
3...2...1....ship it!
We're here! Tinderbox 1.0 is ready to roll. Simple Weblog.(17 Feb 2002)
Release 2 of Simple Weblog tweaks the page template for clarity and flexibility. Now available in Downloads. Tinderbox updates.(16 Feb 2002)
Tinderbox customers will get a year of free updates.
For an entire year from the date of purchase, Tinderbox updates are free and automatic. Just download the new version, and away you go.
Weblogs in business.(14 Feb 2002)
The Mouse Driver Chronicles is a new book by John Lusk and Kyle Harrison about "the true-life adventures of two first-time entrepreneurs. As they started their company, they kept a journal: There's only one thing that Kyle and I did that most entrepreneurs don't do: we kept an ongoing record of what was happening with out company. We started a diary during the first summer of our venture, making entries roughly every other day, just as an exercise in collecting our thoughts and blowing off steam. We wrote about the realities of everyday life as entrepreneurs -- the screwups and masterstrokes, the boredom, excitement, dumb luck, humor, and mood swings that crom from creating a product and a business out of an idea.
In time, they began sharing the journal with email subscribers; now it's a weblog. Mood meter: ...The economy sucks, the instability of entrepreneurship is starting to wear on us, and this whole "work out of your apartment" gig is getting really, really old. But...never in our lives has either one of us been this excited. |
Eastgate Systems Inc.,