I installed Twig – eastgate.com/Twig/ yesterday, and am trying to work out how to integrate it into my workflow. It’s a mini version of Tinderbox, and should be useful to writers.
Over the years, I’ve never used Tinderbox to its fullest, so I’m hoping that Twig might be the solution for me.
It could be a good brainstorming tool to use in conjunction with Scrivener – I like the word cloud.
At the moment, I’m just using it as a note-collector; it’s snappier than TB at first blush.
It looks interesting. I’d be curious to hear how people take to it. As someone who uses Tinderbox quite a lot, there really isn’t any need to invest time and money in Twig, so I’d love to hear how others are getting on with it.
Hmmph. IMO, Tinderbox has added so many features that it’s all but unusable by novices. That doesn’t make me terribly interested in spending $70 more for Twig, no matter how wonderful it might be.
For someone like me who doesn’t usually need the full power and complexity of TB, a cheaper, simpler substitute would be appealing. But discussion on the Tinderbox forum centres on Twig’s use alongside TB rather than as a substitute for it. This appears to be reinforced by the fact, as I understand it, that Twig can’t export in a word-processor-friendly way other than through TB - logical in business terms, but less attractive for users.
However, perhaps future versions may unlock this apparent restriction.
I’ve been playing around a little with Twig. I use Tinderbox frequently for project-specific analysis and brain storming. Truly, I don’t see Twig being of much use for someone who also has Tinderbox. The only feature it has that TB does not is the “Noter” which is essentially a feature grab from Notational Velocity – that’s not a knock on Twig or Eastgate… I think it’s smart to incorporate that kind of functionality into Twig. But is it enough to warrant spending an additional $70 for Twig?
If you don’t currently use Tinderbox, Twig might be a nice addition to your arsenal. It has basically the same outlining function as Tinderbox, which puts it among the elite outliners available, in my opinion. The export issue mentioned by Hugh is worrisome. I haven’t checked that out yet to see what, if any, decent work-arounds there might be.
I like the idea of shooting off notes quick and easy, with no order or structure in mind. Simply just a glorified Tinderbox “Inbox” for projects not ready for Tinderbox. Whereas Tinderbox is for my projects that aren’t ready for Scrivener.
Being able to open Twig documents in Tinderbox and vice versa is neat, too.
Tinderbox has been a slow, but worthwhile learning venture for me. I’m still extremely weak when it comes to 95% of the features TB has, but it’s starting to become my program because I just like the challenge it gives me to learn and I like the rewards it reaps back to me once I’ve “learned”…
And the interesting thing about that: Tinderbox now supports SimpleNote integration now, which means none other than Notational Velocity can act as a free front-end.
Looks promising. There is definiteley a market for a ‘light’ version of Tinderbox. For many people, including myself, Tinderbox is just a little bit ‘too much’ of everything: to much complexity, too many features, too steep learning curve. I own Tinderbox, but I never use it.
But the fact that Twig data can only be exported to Tinderbox, is (for me, at least) an absolute deal-breaker. And it makes Twig self-contradictory: it is presented as an autonomous application, but in fact it isn’t.
I shall return to Twig as soon as it will have decent export possibilities.
Timotheus, I completely agree. The whole thing is really confusing to me, as the website seems to be offering it as a light alternative to Tinderbox for those that do not have it, or an inbox for those that do. As an inbox, I suppose I can see the merit in that—the Notational Velocity style method is quite addictive and useful—but that’s an awful lot of money for that kind of thing. The price seems to be more pointed at people who want a powerful notebook style collection application.
But as you say, without export (okay, so it has an exporter, but the exporter costs $250 USD and is one of the most complicated information management interfaces on the Mac) that makes no sense at all. I wonder if perhaps that is just an artefact of it being a pre-release? There was a comment in the Twig forum which could be taken to mean that East Gate simply hasn’t finished the export interface yet.
This lack of export options for Twig is certainly baffling, and really makes the application useless for anyone without Tinderbox and for those with Tinderbox… well, you already said it: there’s the free Notational Velocity. This is such a strange decision by Eastgate, that I keep checking Twig to see if I’ve missed something. Not so far. And the help file actually says when you want to export your Twig notes, there’s always Tinderbox! The truth is that it would make Tinderbox more useful for a lot of us if we could open a TB file in Twig and easily export it to a useable format, instead of having to live with the complex – though admittedly powerful (if you can figure them out) – export tools for TB.
I think the explanation can only be that Eastgate doesn’t want to damage sales of Tinderbox, an understandable sentiment but one which may result in Twig being much less useful, as you say. I’m hoping that as the software moves out of beta, it will acquire some limited export ability — OPML and csv, perhaps?
Those are my thoughts about their software in general
I remember almost buying Tinderbox for $90, and these days that’s the price for just the upgrade. I never made my purchase, but really liked the software. I’m still hoping to see Tinderbox at a reasonable price one day…
The price of Tinderbox is (very) high indeed; there is absolutely no doubt about that.
But on the other hand: the Tinderbox company is free to ask whatever it wants to ask, and we, its potential customers, are free to pay or not to pay. It’s as simple as that. And it must be admitted that Tinderbox is a quite unique application. There is no choice between Tinderbox and another similar application; there is only the choice between Tinderbox and many other, but always quite different applications.
But there is another thing I don’t like about Tinderbox. In my opinion the Tinderbox company should become definitely more customer friendly. It should put at the disposal of those who are willing to pay the price they ask 1. a decent User Manual, and 2. a couple of tutorials worth the name. And presently they do not. And that’s a shame.
I have no problem with Tinderbox costing as much as it does. I’d rather a developer stay in business than to get a bargin and then have the developer disappear in a year or two because their business model is not sustainable. As Timotheous says, it is a program with features you just can’t find in any other application. If you like those features and find them useful, the price isn’t too terrible.
But I also agree that customer service is lacking – although I don’t think it is by design. If you ask a question, you get a quick response. I sometimes think that Tinderbox is even overwhelming to the folks at Eastgate.
Did you see the very nice tutorial about how to export an article as HTML, here:
The author does a great job, but it shows what a double-edged sword Tinderbox is. It has a lot of power and flexibility for those willing to wrestle with it and learn, but for the rest of us it is a mighty struggle. And the thing that’s most telling, after outlining all these steps, he skips one of the most crucial – how to write the export code in the template – saying it is beyond the scope of the article.
I don’t have a coder’s mind. Maybe many people can quickly figure out how to write this code for various purposes, but I’m not good at it, so even if I were to commit all the steps to memory, I still wouldn’t be able to adequately output an article using this method… not unless I also learn the proper coding!
That’s why a few simple, common export options in Twig make so much sense (they also make sense for TB). So, Hugh, like you I am hopeful that that will come along down the road.
I almost jumped in yesterday to say what Vermonter17032 as put forth. Support is actually very good in the grand scheme of things. When I fire off a question to Mr. Bernstein, I typically get a response very quickly that is accurate and helpful. On the forums, you get a lot of support from both the Marks as well as the community at large. It is not uncommon to see an issue get multiple, lengthy responses on the various techniques that can be used to solve it.
Where things have taken a step backward, in my opinion, is in the manual itself. It used to be they had a nice PDF that was released with every major upgrade. But I gather Eastgate was doing that entirely by hand in Acrobat or something and it took a lot of effort to keep it up to date. The switch to Apple’s Help system is, again in my opinion, not an appropriate venue for complicated software. Every since Apple made that window the superFloat monstrosity it has become, I’ve seen more and more software packages producing their documentation in PDF format, at least as an alternative. Even Apple produces documentation for their serious applications in PDF format. Tinderbox is one of those programs that really suffers under the Apple Help system. You can’t even search a document for a term! This makes long documents in it really hard to deal with. Anyway, that’s another rant.
Honestly I never use it. What I do use is Mark Anderson’s excellent TBX-based reference file. It’s all the documentation you’ll ever need, neatly written up in a Tinderbox file that can be exported into a large website if you don’t want to read the raw nodes. It’s kept very up to date, and couple with TB’s own data management systems, is quite efficient for finding obscure things.
Beyond the mere description of features, tokens, and syntax though, I again agree with Vermonter. It’s really difficult to document Tinderbox in a functional sense because it really is more akin to a programming language than ordinary software. When learning a new programming language, you focus on syntax and features, but the next step is very hard to address because due to the nature of a language, there are a zillion ways to do anything, and every solution is going to be different because every programmer has a different idea of what the implementation should look like. Tinderbox isn’t quite so bad as that, but it’s not far off. The interface is a set of tools, not a set of systems, and so building an implementation is learning to use those tools to accomplish what your vision is. That really isn’t something you can fully “document” outside of tutorial style abstracts which are hardly ever useful outside of the tutorial, except to help teach the concepts of implementation.
This is why you see things like “this is beyond the scope of the tutorial”, because once you get to a certain point, past the point of theory, every implementation is going to be different and the best you can do is just demonstrate a simple example that probably won’t work verbatim for anyone. Personally I like to take that extra step in the examples I produce for the Tb forum. I like to demonstrate how Attribute X will end up as Appearance Y in the final result, but this is just to show one possible way out of thousands.
I think TB 4 and 5 has made good strides toward that. There are number of prebuilt exporters that are always available, and now there are a number of prebuilt prototypes you can use to get your project going quicker. Tinderbox has always provided some default templates, but I think they integrated those in a much better fashion in more recent releases.
On price: I have no complaints about Tinderbox’s price. I usually skip every other year so I end up paying around $45 a year to stay up to date. That’s extremely reasonable for me, considering how much use I get from it.
Thanks, Amber, for your thorough explanation! But … where is this “TBX-based reference file” you are hinting at? The most recent reference file of this kind I have been able to find, covers the development until version 4.6.2/3, but the present version is 5.5.3!
Which illustrates neatly what Steve and others say above:
a) This file wasn’t easy to find. (I eventually found it by clicking on a url that I found in an old Tbref file that I found in the signature of a post by Mark Anderson that I found in the documentation section of the TB forum… There must be easier routes to it, but I couldn’t easily discover them.)
b) Unlike, say, Scrivener’s documentation, it’s not very clear how this material fits into the rest, for example the Manual. And the “Cookbook”? And the Wiki? And the book? Lots and lots of material, but it’s of different vintages and doesn’t always lock together.
For inexperienced users, it’s sometimes like having multiple and competing versions of the Rosetta Stone.
What’s needed in my view is a comprehensive structured up-to-date A-to-Z. TB is a wonderful piece of software. My limited use of it has taught me that. But there is an inescapable issue with it when so many otherwise intelligent users seem to find that understanding and applying the rules of usage are more challenging for them than getting to grips with the ideas and data that they want to put into it.
Thanks for the comments on Tinderbox and Twig. Eastgate is certainly listening and open to ideas.
When we designed Twig, we wanted to create a tool that was aimed more at quick-capture and was less intimidating to new users. We also wanted to provide a lower-priced option for users who didn’t need all of the features of Tinderbox.
Deciding which features stayed and which ones were left out has been a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, we don’t want to leave out the features that allow Tinderbox to be the open and fast tool that it is. On the other hand, we want to make things more simple and leave out features that are too advanced or intimidating for beginning users.
We’re still deciding which features are left out and which ones are reduced or scaled down.
Consequently, we’re still trying to decide how much, if any, export is appropriate for Twig. Tinderbox export is very rich and versatile. It is also extremely difficult for new users to understand, though we have been trying to make things more simple in past releases, as Amber mentions, with built-in templates and prototypes.
Documentation is a bit difficult, as with any open-ended tool. As Amber mentions, there’s often not a “best” way to do something.
There is a lot of information available on Tinderbox, but admittedly much of it is scattered, so here is a list of some of the available resources:
The help manual - gives a basic overview of what Tinderbox does and how to do things.
A Tinderbox Reference (aTBRef) by Mark Anderson - provides a reference guide for expressions, attributes, export, etc. Gives pretty comprehensive explanations of the “coding” stuff.
The Tinderbox Way by Mark Bernstein - Tinderbox is a unique piece of software. We find that many of the problems arise not because people can’t figure out the syntax, but because they’re not used to their software being malleable and conforming to their work (not the other way around). This book offers the design ideas that went into Tinderbox and suggests ways to approach the software.
The Tinderbox forum - We have a very active and helpful community who will give you a more thoughtful answer than you probably expect.
The Tinderbox Wiki - a bit outdated, but getting a facelift soon. Still, it offers useful examples and tips on applications of the software.
Screencasts- these range from simple how-tos to more pragmatic usage demos. We are working to expand these as well.
Tinderbox Cookbook- something like a workbook for the “code stuff.” This is a great hands-on way to learn Tinderbox’s export features.
Tinderbox Weekend events-these take place every few months. They provide an opportunity for Tinderbox users to get together, ask questions, exchange ideas, and talk about Tinderbox applications. There are usually multiple ways to do things in Tinderbox, so having different perspectives is often helpful.
Tinderbox CDs (available on the Tinderbox Weekend page)- we offer a new CD every few months. Each CD contains screencasts, sample files to give you new ideas on how to solve certain problems, how-to walkthroughs, and previews of upcoming releases.
Of course, we also welcome questions and comments by email and phone as well.
Thanks for chiming in, Stacey. I was wondering when Eastgate would jump in here.
In my opinion: you could serve the goal of having Twig not stomp on Tinderbox’s territory, while also providing a good workflow for non-Tinderbox users, by having some very simple pre-baked export options that produce either selected node, or “folders of RTF/plain-text files”, with the option to export all attributes in a “field: value\n” method in the top of the file. There are no templates, and thus the complexity of TB’s export is removed (and as well, TB’s power remains unique for those who buy it), and meanwhile Twig users are not stuck with locked-in data (XML accessibility is only relevant to a small, small fraction of users). They can use Twig to keep notes and brainstorm ideas, and then have those ideas come to fruition in other tools (possibly TB, but maybe Scrivener instead ).
Proposed menu structure:
Export >
Selected Note...
All Notes...
Option one exports a single RTF or plain-text file with the option to include meta-data (all or nothing). Option two builds a folder structure matching the outline hierarchy and fills it with files using the same options as #1. This is not too dissimilar from Tinderbox’s full HTML export, except it is just a regular file export with no templates.
There must be easier routes to it, but I couldn’t easily discover them.)