Thanks for the detailed reply AmberV, I’ve been in rehearsal and only just noticed you posted it. I ended up renewing my license but haven’t had much time to play with TB since then. I’m using the latest beta of 3.6 and I’ll have a detailed reply in a couple of days.
Thanks Again,
E.
So, Eiron, have you gotten around to integrating TB into your workflow? I’ve been looking at it lately, but, as AmberV said, trying to keep the two apps synchronised is too much for me.
I’m still tantalised with some of TB’s abilities though – free form brainstorm, timeline abilities, creating a linked map of all my characters, even outlining the contours of my locales, etc.
I’m using the same setup as you – iMac 24", Scrivener, Tinderbox and DT. The world is too standard these days.
After a long period of hesitation, and after having read a lot of articles and reviews, yesterday I finally took the jump and bought Tinderbox. Why? Well, because I never could get rid of the idea that I missed something fundamental by not owing, not knowing, not using it. Maybe within a couple of months I’ll have to conclude that it would have been better to spend those $ 229 in another way. But in that case I’ll say to myself: it’s always better to regret that you tried than to regret that you did not try!
And yes, it would be great to hear about new (positive or negative) experiences of those members of the Scrivener community who also own and use Tinderbox!
I’ll jump in. I’m a reluctant (and maybe temporary) ex-Tinderbox user. It’s a brilliant program for putting context and order into notes, but for me it has a couple of critical failings.
One: it doesn’t harvest stuff as well as the competition. There’s no Services or hot key to clip material from the web or email, no automatic registering of a URL against a web or mail clipping. It’s still drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste. Once you get used to DevonThink’s way of clipping material, everything else seems cumbersome. (I wished it retained links in web clips, too, but can live without that.)
Two: It collects text (and images), but not whole documents. These have to be linked to notes. So if your references are scattered through a PDF, you either clip the items that interest you into separate Tinderbox notes, or link to the PDF somewhere in the Finder but lose the ability to search for those references in your Tinderbox document. Again, programs like DevonThink swallow and search both text and documents, which is immensely convenient.
Three: the geek factor. I’m decidedly non-geek, and while I can work out how to write agents, I’ve forgotten the language by the next time I need to write one and have to re-learn all over again. A plain language graphic interface would help here.
All of the above could possibly be solved by making Tinderbox a Cocoa program hooked into a database. I’m sure there are good reasons, apart from the pain of re-writing the whole thing, for not doing this. But not adopting all the Cocoa tricks leaves Tinderbox vulnerable to looking increasingly dated, like a film camera in a world of digital imaging. (Which is not to say that film cameras don’t have their virtues. Only my beloved Olympus OM-3 and OM-4 are gathering dust, while my Olympus E-1 is collecting wear and tear.)
Four: My needs are just not that demanding. I read The Tinderbox Way, loved the logic behind it all, but have found that I don’t leverage the power that Tinderbox offers. Every few weeks I fire the program up and look for an excuse to use it again, but inevitably return to the plain digital filing cabinet capabilities of DevonThink (or increasingly, Scrivener).
In a nutshell, I want to use Tinderbox, but I can’t find a compelling reason to continue using it. Same with my old Olympus 35 mm kit. Dammit.
Matt
I have been a temporary ex-Tinderbox user a number of times in the past as well; but I always come back to it and every time I do I am glad for it.
Harvesting difficulties: I really don’t think that is the core goal of the application. It isn’t meant to be something like DEVONthink or EagleFiler. It’s a tool for turning ideas into concrete conceptualisations or implementations. I think it can be used as a research tool, and be quite effective at it, but to me it seems more in line with the philosophy of acting as a concept layer above the actual material layer. Each note can be linked to a file on the drive—and once it is linked it extremely easy to retrieve the file and work with it alongside Tinderbox. The information that is necessary to have expressed in Tb can be copy and pasted into it and become a part of the network. But even in a really beneficial document, there is rarely a need for 100% of it to be available from within the concept network.
In my own experience, encouraging bulk document import tends to lead to data bloat. You get huge databases full of 60% or less useful data. I’d rather just select precisely what needs to be known and link to the file for all the rest. Keep the kernel clean.
As for the actual mechanics of getting data in: I really don’t see what is wrong with copy and paste or drag and drop? These methods are very efficient? How is a clipping service any more efficient? It’s just a matter of what you are used to, I think. Services are non-targetable, due to their nature, and thus require a sorting phase after they have been clipped. Paste is direct to context no sorting required. And if you don’t want to think about it you can always just paste your clips into a holding area. Since Tb creates notes dynamically when you paste into the outline—this is extremely simple and easy to do.
I’ve certainly tried clip-centric programs in the past, but honestly I never got it. Most of the time you have to access the service in some menu with the mouse (or contrive some incredibly arcane universal keyboard shortcut that will not conflict with anything), and unless you spend time keeping that menu clean, it can get really messy loaded up with a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with what you need at the moment. Cmd-V is always there, always doing exactly what you expect.
Difference of habit, I guess.
Well, I’m a geek, so the bit about agents doesn’t bother me. There is a graphical interface for that, by the way, and what it doesn’t address, it does show you how to expand by demonstrating the syntax as you build it with the standard drop-downs. But yes, it is pretty geeky once you get past the basics. I will definitely concede that. But I think it is a valid question whether or not that advanced stuff is necessary all of the time? I have plenty of Tb documents that are extremely simple—mostly just leveraging the map+outline+linking features that hardly anything else does. It’s nice to know that if I need to do something I can, though.
I have to completely disagree with the go-Cocoa+Database analysis, though. I wouldn’t mind the interface getting optimised for say, Intel. That’s my biggest grief with it right now. It runs a bit slow through Rosetta on my MacBook; the fan comes on a lot. But it already does most of the things that Cocoa can provide. What were you thinking of that it is missing? Carbon can be a valid alternative in some situations. As for going database? Ugh. No. 
I love that it is an XML file. I take advantage of that frequently. That was one of the big selling points, for me. I have saved many weeks of manual labour simply by having access to the raw data in a logical XML manner.
That’s true, and so what I’m probably describing is the fact that I need a research repository more than a concept-generation tool.
Nothing wrong with them per se. But compared to, say, Eaglefiler 1.3’s F1+pop-up window to name, tag and direct a clip to a specific destination (or OmniFocus’s neat system), dodging around windows with d&d or c&p feels cumbersome. Because so much of my information comes via the web or email, I want collection to be as painless as possible. If all I’d known was drag and drop, I’d be fine with it. But I’ve been spoiled.
My Tinderbox documents tend to be basic, too. It’s just when I try and get fancy, I have to do a crash refresher course in agent syntax. It shouldn’t be that hard.
To be frank, I have no idea what a Cocoa’ed & databased Tinderbox would look like. I’m just imagining some happy mating of Tinderbox and DevonThink. One thing XML is not so good at is accumulating data mass. My bigger Tinderbox files are taking a while to save (“a while” in impatient computer language - actually, 5-10 seconds) and I wonder about the implications of accumulating further mass. DevonThink eats gigabytes as a light snack. But you’re right: most of the gigs I have in Devonthink are padding - a whole PDF for three lines of quotes, a Word doc for a figure.
Oh no. I feel the urge to take another look at Tinderbox…
Two quick responses:
On data-mass and XML: Definitely, yes! I have definitely run into that problem with Tb in the past where I’ll have a document that is 100k+ words and it isn’t instant like we expect things to be in this day and age. I have since adjusted my approach to Tb, as a result. That file was a journal. I was storing all of my thoughts in it every single day. I’m not sure that is what Tb is best at. I use Journler for that now, and have been largely happy with it. I’ve also dabbled with using Scrivener as a daily journal. But Tb definitely does seem to be happier with lots of little notes, rather than lots of huge notes. A database back-end would help out there—but is that in its core interest? Not sure. I’m inclined to say no, and I think Mark B. would too.
Regarding mail collection, have you played around with the new POP mail synch? It requires a dedicated POP account, but these days free POP accounts are easily obtainable. I just set up a little mailbox specifically for each Tinderbox document (one at the moment), and then using Mail Act-On assigned a keystroke to forward anything destined to that document to this special account. The next time I boot up Tb, that project automatically downloads all of the mail and turns them into notes. This is extremely handy once it is set up. When I’m out in about I can write little notes to myself on my iPod Touch, file them in the Mail outbox, and the next time I’m around wi-fi they all get sent to this holding area where Tb can access them.
just a thought on ‘harvesting’ data into DevonThink, Tinderbox, or wherever. I got a copy of iClipboard bundled with the latest SOHO Organiser upgrade. It’s available as a standalone app. too. it sits off the bottom left edge of my screen, and offers an unlimited number clipboards - . You can also have named clipboard sets. IT’s instantly accessible, and means that you don’t have to do the drag and drop thing all over the computer. IT’s pretty much similar too, but much smoother than, what i used to use a lot, which is CopyPaste, for the same tasks. So if you prefer not to use the services menu, this i think is a pretty practical alternative.
When is firefox going to support services?
Storage and cruft: yes yes yes to the entire 7Mb pdf for one quote… What I need is the actual quote, but then later on I need to know where it came from. Together will let you drag-and-drop a text section from any web page, and even if it’s just a few lines, the URL is imported along with the text. This is really very useful. I wish Devon THink did something like that. Hell, I wish Tbx did something like that, though Keith has already explained why that’s tricky.
Michael, you lost me. DevonThink has always been able to keep the associated URL of some text clipped from some webpage. That is actually one of its strong points, I use it all the time. Like you, I wished that Tinerbox had this feature as well, though.
Or maybe I am mising something here.
Prion
Lordy lordy, so it does. So it is. I am a fool. I suppose there must have been some point in its distant past (I’ve been using it since before v1) that it didn’t keep URLs, and I just never looked again.
Mind you – I just did look again – DevonThink will only do that if you clip to it using the supplied AppleScript. If you drag-and-drop, no source URL is saved. Together manages to grab the URL from any bit of text you drag from the browser. Neat.
At the risk of thread drift, I’d just add that I’m currently working on a G5 20" iMac and Together is unspeakably slow. With a modest collection of about 1,100 items, it uses up to 95% CPU, every byte of RAM it can find, and is still like molasses. I’m a bit disappointed. Tinderbox, with the same data put in as individual notes, is several orders of magnitude quicker even though it is just one vast XML file. I wonder why?
Michael,
you most certainly are anything but a fool. Considering how much I have learned from you, Amber and the generally enlightened ones, I am glad to have returned a favour. Actually, after writing the post above, it occured to me how much we have accepted that in our digital age the pace at which features change has changed the perceived duration of time. Forever, ha. Since 2005 which is when I switched to the Mac and explored the exciting world of information apps.
Last year I went to a small, unsuspecting museum in Uppsala, Sweden, and to my own astonishment found the most excuisite collection of eqyptian mummies and hieroglyphs, Inca knots and what not. The structure of these information tradition systems have changed so slowly that societies evolved away from it. Rather amusing (and disturbing) to think that it is exactly the other way around today. People even get bored if a program does not evolve quickly enough over time.
I am not one to develop instant hysteria over digital amnesia, but I suspect I am growing old enough to get drawn to plain text systems such as Mulitmarkdown and (why not) plain text. Writing languages other than english, even the question of encoding this plain text (UTF-8, ANSI…) can make this seemingly trivial task interesting.
Back on topic: I usually just highlight the text of interest and hit the shortcut (Cmd closing parenthesis) and it gets tucked away along with the URL.
Prion
In Devonthink, using the hot keys listed in the DT Services menu makes clipping completely painless. I have DT setup to clip straight to an Inbox, and anything of note gets sent there with the Cmd-Shift-) hot key combination (or, in Mail, the “send to Devonthink” command under the Messages menu.
Fact is, I haven’t found anything like Devonthink for absorbing information. I’d like file system integration, like everyone else, but I wait and trust for the wizards of Devon Tech to produce v2 and resolve all the issues that v1 users have been whinging about.
and wait … and wait …
I’ve read somehwere on the DevonThink site that the resources that had been devoted to developing a mystery DT spin-off have now been returned to the core task of DT 2.0.
H
Amen for that. I wonder what Tinderbox would be like now if Mark Bernstein wasn’t slogging away on a Windows version. It must be a tough call on whether to diversify the product range and widen your sales opportunities, or focus on making the core product outstanding - and accept that it will have a limited number of buyers, many of whom will gripe furiously over upgrade pricing …
As a user, I prefer the latter model, as exemplified by Scrivener.
Amber: Assuming you are using Mail.app, how do you deal with the fact the Tinderbox cannot read MIME-encoded or html? Is there a script that you can use with Mail Act-On to convert the content of the message? Thanks.
99.99999999% of the time I have zero use for HTML email. In the rare cases where an HTML email is actually interesting or necessary, I have to handle it manually; usually by copying and pasting the plain-text part. Fortunately most email applications are smart about generating a text part. I don’t even have Mail.app set up to view the HTML bit; it drops straight to text by default.
Going back to Tinderbox, I’m also an ex-user, though I do still get the mailings and always go to the web site to see what the new features are. The last time I got excited about it was when I came across an article describing an “nMemodex” (I think) filing system". I followed the steps and duplicated the system, and used it for a while. Essentially, whenever you create a new note, TInderbox assigns the note a serial number one greater than the previous note. So you just need to prepare a stack of clear plastic files numbered sequentially. Whenever a new piece of paper to be filed comes in, you create a new note, give it a suitable name and some tags, and put it in your filing cabinet immediately after the previous file. I guess you could call it an electronic version of the Noguchi filing system. When you’re looking for something, you do a Find on tags or name in Tinderbox, and you’ve found the serial number you know which drawer it’s in.
Regarding its more central concept generating functions, I find I periodically go through these fantasies of what my day should be like. I imagining writing some notes on some interesting papers in my reference manager, then maybe writing a few paragraphs towards my next paper in Journler. I copy all these across to Tinderbox and set up some cool agents to create interesting groupings of notes that help me form clearer ideas. At the same time, all these notes have been synched across to DevonThink, so I can use “See Also” to find some more related passages, and copy the good ones over to Tinderbox. And pretty soon I’m ready to write my latest paper to revolutionize scholarship as we know it.
In reality, though, time devoted to research is all too short and I still find every program switch a little mentally jarring. I find even DevonThink less user-friendly than I think it should be, and I feel I’m re-learning Tinderbox every time I use it. Although I guess my capacity for dealing with multiple sources has increased, research at the computer seems to be becoming a more stressful operation. Occasionally, I feel I might even be better off just with printouts and a wordprocessor.
Each layer of software seems to make sense: Bookends is firmly based on individual reference sources; Journler is for my daily scribblings; DevonThink can hold vast quantities of material and find interesting connections in a fairly automated way; Tinderbox helps to organize groupings of thoughts and concepts in a more manual-feeling way than DevonThink. And then you’ve got Scrivener to actually write a structured piece of work and Mellel to put it into printable form. And all these tools mean that it’s easy to find stuff that I last looked at years ago. And yet something’s not quite right. The tool that is easiest to remove from the mix here is Tinderbox and that makes things a bit simpler. What I think I really need is training from people who know all these tools and how to blend them effectively.
Sorry for the ramble!
That’s my problem with Tinderbox. Unless you’re using it constantly at a level that allows you to learn its language, you have to re-learn that language every time you want to stretch its capabilities. I have decided - several times now - that I can’t justify the overhead.
If there was a GUI interface on queries, I’d revisit it, but for me, for now, it isn’t a useful investment of time. I can handle complexity if it gives me simplicity, but to really get full use from Tinderbox you need to regularly delve into complexity. I no longer want to do that.
Still, I open it from time to time, look longingly at its possibilities - and then quietly close it again.