Winterfest promotion

Posted by Amontillado
Jan 12, 2022 at 03:30 PM

Regarding Tinderbox’s learning curve, I’m not so sure it should be that big a deal.

You can use it like a 3-D version of Scapple with almost zero investigation. There are immediate uses for Tinderbox without cracking the documentation.

Scapple is very nice and if that’s all I were going to do with Tinderbox the price would be too high.

But a Scapple that lets you stack workspaces, with links that are both visual and can be selected and navigated with context menus, and also lets you write very lengthy notes per object - that was worth the upgrade price of $98. To me, anyway. Particularly since Tinderbox is once again new and shiny.

Add automatic timeline generation, with in-place editing from the timeline, and outlines - that’s enough to make it worth the full price to me.

As a document warehouse, I’m not so sure I’d like it. It’s going to be hard to pull my cold, dead, hands off of Devonthink. Almost everything I want to do with Tinderbox, I can at least sort of do with Devonthink. I can do a one-step export to Aeon Timeline, and I’m pretty sure that with the excellent Easy Data Transform I could do an export to MindNode. To either product, by including DevonThink links, I could nearly get the edit-in-place of DT notes from either Aeon or MindNode.

If your mileage varies, I feel your pain. Mine does all the time, too. :-)

I suspect I may be able to make Tinderbox work as a to-do list that will suit me better than TaskPaper. For that, the fancier features of Tinderbox will prove useful.

It’s probably valid to say Tinderbox has an antique appearance. Ugly, even. I think I see usefulness that will more than balance out the zits and warts. It also has poor documentation, but I think there’s enough community support (and the aTbRef document) that will fill the gap.