Tinderbox 4.6

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 8, 2009 at 02:16 PM

Hugh wrote:
>Steve
> >You may be interested in this page, just added to the Tinderbox wiki, which
>discusses what Tinderbox
>“is”:
> >http://www.eastgate.com/wiki2/?LearningCurve
>

Thank you for the link, Hugh. Others interested in knowledge management, not just Tinderbox, might also find this article of interest. The basic premise of the article is that the user needs to find the right metaphor for thinking about Tinderbox in order to “get it.” I would agree with this—in fact it is true for most software, I imagine. However, the “web” metaphor suggested doesn’t necessarily make the most sense to me. Afterall, I would say that a personal wiki is much closer to the web metaphor than is Tinderbox, especially since Tinderbox also claims as one of its strengths the multiple ways of viewing information (outline, tree diagram, etc.). Additionally, linking information doesn’t seem as fast and painless as in a personal wiki. In fact, it seems to me that one way Tbx could be vastly improved is to implement a wiki linking scheme.

The other aspect of Tbx, and also seems true of knowledge management application in general is the conflict between comprehensiveness and comprehensibility. Here is what I mean by that:

In this article about Tbx and in articles about other applications, such as DevonThink, we are told that to really get the most from them, we need to load them up with a lot of data. As the author of the article says:

“... the more information contained within a Tinderbox document, the more useful that document becomes. More information, more notes, yields more opportunities for interconnections, more serendipitous discovery of those connections, and more results returned by the program’s agents as they look for those connections.”

This argues for creating just one, massive file (database, document, whatever they are called by the individual developer). Yet, when you do this, you start losing the big picture. With Tbx, having the structured view of an outline is supposed to be as important as having the map view. But an outline of a thousand notes becomes incomprehensible. This is not a specific criticism of Tbx… this is an issue no matter what application you are using. Cross database searching can help with this problem—and I understand that DevonThink 2.0 will eventually have this function. Tbx does not, and that seems to me to be a weakness.

My point, which is really a philosophical one, is that it is one of the challenges of using any of these tools to find the right balance of comprehensiveness and comprehensibility. It is one I struggle with, and one reason I’m so grateful for Zoot on the PC—it provides a strong search function across databases. Despite its lack of a graphic card metaphor, Zoot remains the closest thing to Tbx, in my view.

In fairness, it must be noted that there are tools that can help make massive files more comprehensible… hoisting being one, and saved searches being another. Both of these are available in Tinderbox.

Steve Z.