About the survival of our Data ( when Apps die )

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 16, 2025 at 03:31 AM

Let’s hope Tinderbox lasts a long, long time.

One of the things your app has going for it is a remarkable user community, intellectual, polite, and very helpful. I’ve never made it to one of your meetups, but I often catch them after the fact on Youtube. Great food for thought and a fine showcase for your products.

Much respect for your work.

Looks like there are some cool new features, too. I re-upped my license and plan to dive back in.

All the best!

eastgate wrote:
I believe this issue is far less dire than it was a generation ago.
> >Take Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), which I design.
>It’s huge, opinionated, and exotic. Its documents are XML files.
>If Tinderbox disappeared, you could extract all your data with modest
>difficulty — difficulty that is decreasing every year. (You could
>get much of your data out by opening your Tinderbox documents in
>BBEdit!)
> >Same thing for Scrivener, Pages, Keynote: if you need to, you can get
>your data out. If LOTS of people need to (for moderate quantities of
>“lots”) you can make it easy to get your data out.
> >In addition, a generation ago emulation was pretty much a pipe dream.
>Now, it’s fine and even ubiquitous.
> >Now, this doesn’t mean you’re entirely safe from annoyance
>and inconvenience if your favorite application vanishes. It might take
>some work. But this is no longer something to inspire 7 pages of worry
>in a week.