This. The more the powerful a program, the more approachable it needs to be. A new user may not be able to fully exploit the capabilities of the technology right out of the box, but they should be able to do something big enough to be useful to them. Tinderbox itself is an amazingly powerful program, but its interface design and help materials are embarrassingly awful.
Katherine
The point Hugh made is essential for me too, and should be taken into due account by the Tinderbox team. When so many otherwise intelligent users, who are willing to invest a considerable amount of time and money into Tinderbox, continue to feel ill at ease with the application, there is definitely something important which is wrong.
And I agree with Katherine that the whole interface and the help materials are in urgent need of a complete revamp. As far as the interface is concerned, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask advice to an expert in the field of layout and typography. Tinderbox would greatly benefit from it: it would become less awkward and more attractive to the eye of the average user.
And as far as the help materials are concerned: personally, I prefer one decent User Manual which can be printed out to many documents full of hyperlinks. The used to be such a User Manual, but at a certain moment it hasn’t been updated anymore.
And finally: it would be very useful if the Tinderbox site contained a generous amount of rather detailed databases built with the program. These would give the average user some concrete ideas of the possible directions to take.
That’s all an incredible amount of work you’ve put out there, Timotheus! 
What did you mean by this, though:
How would a printed out document have hyperlinks?
Amber, what I meant is a User Guide without hyperlinks, of course; a User Guide like those for Bookends, Mellel, etc.
Ah, yes that makes more sense. A comparative ‘to’ not an productive ‘to’ (English, got to love it!). With that I agree. Hyperlinks are not a bad thing, but a manual that can be printed out, or has proper paper-compatible cross references, like “see page 83”, is good. I actually prefer a combination. I like it when a PDF has hard references, but is augmented with internal clickable links so it is both useful on a computer and as a desktop reference. EagleFiler has a good manual too, in this regard. As do many of Apple’s more high-end products. Aperture’s manual is just amazing, and amusing coming from a company that ships computers with a leaflet that basically tells you to press the power button to get started.
Perhaps you’re making it reasonable by NOT upgrading.
As I mentioned, I like Tinderbox. I’ll add that I found support to be great. I’ve had 2 or 3 questions and Mr. Bernstein promptly answered them. I just can’t imagine spending $229 on it, or in 2 years look back and realize I’ve spent $409 on Tinderbox. I would also skip upgrades!
Maybe I’ll give it another try by version 6
Well, price is all relative. I’ve foolishly bought applications that are a lot less expensive than Tinderbox, which I end up never using. Which is costlier?
[I may have already shared this story. If so, I’m sorry for the redundancy.]
I am the head of a committee for a nonprofit organization which is working to get a history book written about a local historical site here in Vermont. We hired an author and last June he turned in the first draft. After each member of the committee read the draft, I had a collection of six different sets of comments. It would have been cruel to have just handed these over to the author for him to make sense of – not to mention entirely unproductive. But how to collate such a variety of input, which included comments on factual errors, content (missing or unnecessary), style, and organization. I puzzled over this problem for several weeks, until I belatedly realized that Tinderbox could be very helpful. Going through one critique at a time, I clipped each discrete comment as a separate note into a Tinderbox map. It was then a snap to organize these by subject and type using prototypes, adornments and key attributes. I then exported the results into a word processor to dress it up. In one afternoon, using Tinderbox, I had produced a five-page, comprehensive and – most important – coherent critique to let the author know the will of the committee.
I truly don’t think I could have done this – at least not nearly as well – without Tinderbox. For this project alone, Tinderbox was worth every penny.
I certainly see the benefits in terms of functionality, but can’t recall another application that had a 58% price increase while moving up 2 version numbers. Additionally, I tend to avoid applications with yearly upgrades. But if this pricing/upgrading model is working for them, more power to Eastgate 
I did put the effort to go through the manual, book, help, online resources, etc., but in the end it was price (initial + upgrades) that turned me away.
I do have more expensive software, and recently paid $200 to upgrade some software that IIRC cost me around $1200. It was one of the best upgrades I’ve ever purchased.
I’m pretty sure that I’ll eventually buy Tinderbox. Perhaps by version 6, and skipping versions. I did like the software and the support.
We don’t have “yearly upgrades”.
We are constantly improving our software, and try to issue upgrades as soon as the version we’re using is clearly better than the version you have.
Looking over the release logs, I see 14 upgrades in the past year.
Well, yes, that is kind of my point, but I worded it poorly. I didn’t mean for it to apply universally. $45/y is reasonable for me. The upgrade fee is entirely voluntary. A lot of people look at the price of Tinderbox, and then the one-year-of-upgrades cost, and think they’ll have to pay this all of time to keep using it. If you upgrade every year, yes, it is expensive. If you can’t afford it then you can space things out until it is affordable.
Another reason I take a year off is because Tb updates so rapidly and constantly. I’d rather let things get all lumped up into something that feels more like an upgrade where I can sit down and study the changes, rather than stringing them out all through the years one by one.
This kind of work is perfect for Tinderbox. Tinderbox is a perfect tool for people with complex data and serious work.
I think this is also a good point to make. If a few minutes in Tinderbox saves your tech writer from doing an hour’s worth of work at $150/hr, suddenly the software is not as costly.
Vermonter, I’d be interested in hearing more about how you use the software, and perhaps doing a case study. I’d love to continue this conversation offline.
Stacey Mason
smason@eastgate.com
I think that what we’re referring to is that “Tinderbox comes with a full year of free updates.”
As far as I can tell, if any of those improvements falls outside of the full year of updates, customers have to pay $90 in order to benefit from such improvements. Maybe I’m just used to more generous policies (Sonny Software, Mellel, Ergonis, Microsoft, Nisus, etc.)
Completely understand. That’s what I’m doing with Panorama. I’m using 5.5 and will upgrade when version 7 comes out, probably in a couple of years. Meanwhile I’m very happy using my older version
I think you’ll find our upgrade policy is actually more generous than most of the companies you named.
I just wanted to interrupt very quickly to say an official welcome to Mark and Stacey of Eastgate, and to compliment them on a great program. I’d never used Tinderbox before, and have still to scratch more than the surface, but Ioa - who has always been a big TB advocate over here - has introduced it for tracking Scrivener 2.0 bugs internally at L&L and its versatility is quite amazing. Right, normal programming may now resume.
All the best,
Keith
(Scriv dev)
If that were the case I would have purchased Tinderbox a long time ago
Sonny Software. I purchased Bookends in April 2005. Upgraded in October 2007 for $29, which is 29% of the regular price. I believe the previous version (10) came out in July 2007 and received free updates until January 2010.
Retail price change since 2005: 0%
Mellel. “All the updates and upgrades, major or minor, will come free of any charge for two years.”
Retail price change since 2005: 26% (Arguably, Mellel has been under-priced, and the increase in dollars was only $10)
Ergonis. “If you purchased your license within the last two years, the upgrade is free for you.”
Retail price change since 2005: Don’t know, since I bought their bundle for 15 Euro (on sale) if I remember correctly, and not each application separately.
Microsoft. I think I paid $120 to upgrade from Office 2004 to Office 2008 Special Media Edition when it came out. I also got a free upgrade to Expression Media 2 once it came out. Since Office 2008 has been out for a while, their prices are even lower now. An upgrade to that version is $75 at Amazon. The full version costs $170 now.
Retail price change since 2005: N/A. I upgraded from a different version and Office 2008 Special Media Edition was the most expensive version when I made my purchase (MSRP $499)
Nisus. I have not paid for a single upgrade to Nisus Writer Pro. I bought my copy in 2009, but as far as I know they’ve sold it since 2007 and all updates have been free so far.
Retail price change since 2007 (first release): 0%
All of these companies have also offered special promotions in terms of bundles and discounts (e.g., Ergonis Productivity Bundle, Mellel + Bookends, Microsoft Black Friday sale, MacUpdate Promo, etc.).
I hope you find this useful, and if I can be of any further assistance just let me know by private message. I do wish you much success with Tinderbox and your other applications. I really enjoyed Tinderbox when I tried it
Hi,
I’m not entirely sure this is the right place to debate the pricing or upgrade fees of another piece of software, really, especially when the creators of that software are nice enough to pop by. It might be better to take discussion about price and upgrade fees to the Eastgate forum or to take it up directly with the Eastgate guys, and to keep this thread about Twig and its relation to Tinderbox. (For the record, though, companies promising two years of free upgrades are rare - I’d certainly never do that, even though it’s inadvertently ended up like that with 2.0 taking so long. )
Thanks for your co-operation.
All the best,
Keith
I do apologize Keith, and agree 100%. That’s why I mentioned that I’m available via private message.
Sorry about any inconvenience.
No need to apologise Eddie, I just wanted to keep things on track (I know, not something I do often ) - many thanks for your understanding.
All the best,
Keith
Since both Lit&Lat and Eastgate officials are here, is there an opportunity to talk a little about the chance that their products become more and more integrated over time?
As for me: Tinderbox is tempting, but a bit over my abilities (not having a programmer’s mind). Twig looks like what I’m looking for: a mix of outliner, note taker, Tinderbox maps and other views. The visual outliner that is what I like more in Tinderbox, and that I need the most in Scrivener.
Can they become totally integrated? Can I see the Scrivener’s Binder in a Twig map? Could I quickly mirror the changes I did in Twig in the Binder? Are there way to implement these features in an easy way?
Paolo
This makes an assumption that a programmers mind is a good thing or that having one is helpful. Dubious assumptions both.