Thanks, that’s certainly a lot of interesting reading!
Thank you, Keith (and Mark Bernstein of eastlake.com) for the holiday “present” of a special offer on Tinderbox! Like a lot of other Scrivener users, I’ve looked at Tinderbox, gave it a whirl,but was never sure what it might do for me. I think that this time around, it may have more to offer than before, including more illustrations of the possibilities. The previous Scrivener forums on Tinderbox in the last year or two were well worth reading for considering how far Tinderbox has come and whether it was worth a try.
In the past, there have been complaints that it was ugly, but it now appears to be more “blank slate,” and has options for lovely fills and colors:
eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updat … box47.html
In terms of utility, I was impressed by this model for a dashboard to manage a writing project:
markbernstein.org/Mar09/Dashboards.html, and also:
acrobatfaq.com/atbref5/index … ncept.html
There are also examples of using Tinderbox to analyze information (and make displays of it, as in posters for conferences) here:
natematias.com/portfolio/Des … erbox.html
I found after reading Scrivener, searching for reviews on the web, and skip-scanning the manual (which mysteriously doesn’t allow searching but does have a good hypertext table of contents) that starting by going through every single link on the opening page actually yielded a lot of information, some of it from earlier versions.
There’s still a problem of taking all this power and knowing exactly where to start, which probably depends on one’s learning style and experience. (There is a “starter file,” but for the complete novice, it doesn’t seem to be of much help.) As others have pointed out, there is an online “Tinderbox Reference File” that appears to be up to date at:
acrobatfaq.com/atbref5/
I have a couple of different writing projects including an academic book, a co-edited book, an article and a conference paper that I’m working on, so I thought I would plan each project in map view and aim for a timeline for work and, later, a dashboard type of thing to help me keep to a schedule. But I intend to do all this in a pokey sort of way.
Two other reasons that I decided to pick up Tinderbox again is that I would like to learn a minimal amount of programming and also to have something that would work sometime in the future for a blog. I am not totally sure that I would use Tinderbox just to organize my writing because that’s so easy to do in Scrivener. Yet at the same time, I often succumb to a degree of tentativeness, where even the index cards seem like too much commitment. That said, I’m happy to be on break and have a bit of time to fool around!
Happy New Year!
I, too, made the plunge this week and bought Tinderbox. I figure with all my travel and stays in airports and hotels, I will have time to develop at my own pace.
Thanks for everyone’s ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and links.
Thanks for the useful links, which saved me a lot of surfing around. Note that Tinderbox is actually at:
eastgate.com/
I was actually tempted to go for Twig. It costs less than a Tinderbox upgrade, and it looks pretty similar, though perhaps rather more elegant, at least in the style shown in the screencasts. What put me off, though, was that new notes are sized so small that it’s impossible to see what you’re typing, though once you’ve finished typing and pressed Return you can see all the text. It rather amazed me that they would show that so openly on a screencast and not be embarrassed enough to do something about it immediately, but I guess they have their own priorities, and perhaps becoming a charter member would give me a chance to influence design choices such as this one.
eastgate.com/Twig/video/Mapp … encast.mov (from about 1 min in)
I haven’t taken the plunge yet, though I suspect I will, but there is one thing that I’m still puzzling over – is it just me, or is it difficult to link from Tinderbox to individual files and folders on one’s hard drive? URLs on the web seem to be easy enough, but linking to local files seems less intuitive. Or perhaps it’s just my lack of intuition. It would be useful for me to be able to link to files in Devonthink, or items in a Bookends database (without too much faffing around).
Martin.
Well, it IS possbible to link to Devonthink files. Just cmd-click on a DT-File and select “Copy Link” (the entry below “Open with…”, working on a non-english DT 
)in the popup. This you can paste into an URL-Attribute. Not too intuitive, but it’s working.
Thanks, good to know it is at least possible – In fact, I’ve just tried the same thing with Bookends, and it also works for that. Bit of a rigmarole (I’m still blundering around Tinderbox, trying to work out how to do things), but it works. Shame you don’t seem to be able to drag and drop items to create links to them, but never mind.
Thanks again,
Martin.
Thanks, zikade. I had the same question as Martin. So are both of you envisioning a DTP, bibliographic manager, and Tinderbox workflow? I just received The Tinderbox Way in today’s mail. It looks useful; I’m looking forward to reading it.
Well, I’m actually just trying to finish off a project, but for the next one (if I live that long) I would certainly use DTP and a bibliographic manager. Whether I use Tinderbox depends on making a decision to buy it, and I’m not good at decisions … Sadly, I can’t afford to buy The Tinderbox Way to discover how to use the program. So I suppose I’m going to have to take a leap of faith, and also hope that Ioa will share yet more of his extraordinary knowledge. But the combination of DTP, bibliographic manager and Tinderbox looks as if it could be a good one.
Best wishes,
Martin.
You can drop an individual file or folder on the Note Window Sidebar, and that will attach it – one per note. Read about it here.
Yes and no - it works with items from Finder, but not from DTP. Mail works again. Safari as well. I can drop some files into the text area of a note and get their contents display, even from DevonThink. I think Tinderbox has no idea what to do with a link like:
x-devonthink-item://4833E9A7-65D2-4333-8FCA-EDC6C94919EFeven if the OS could give it a hint there. Since, once you have that link pasted into the URL attribute of the note, clicking on it is working.
I suppose you could index your files with DT rather than import them. Then the Finder functionality would apply. As I only ever use DT Pro on one computer, that’s what I do.
In either or both of the DT and TB forums, there are threads on using the applications together.
Hi folks!
I’m Mark Bernstein, the designer of Tinderbox. I’m sorry to be so late to the party, but we’ve been so busy filling end-of-year orders that no one at Eastgate has had much time for anything else! So thanks.
On the subject of linking Tinderbox notes to files, we have two good mechanisms. First, drop the file on the note’s File button; alternatively, drop the file’s URL (attn DT and Mail users) on a note, or paste it into the note’s URL attribute.
On the default size of notes in Twig maps: tastes differ, and what suits someone with a big screen and a small document might not be popular with another user who is trying to map a few hundred notes on an 11" MacBook Air. The default size of new notes is adjustable: just change the default values of Heig and Width.
We’ll do our best to look in here often. It’s a great discussion. But feel free to drop by the Tinderbox Forum as well, or to email info@eastgate.com . Even if it’s not your question, we’d appreciate a head-up email if there’s something here that’s causing puzzlement.
I can’t seem to find the link to the Scrivener/Tbox special offer here or at www.eastgate.com. Can someone send it along? Thanks.
Nuts, I just purchased this week and didn’t know there was the Scrivener-Tinderbox special. I could have saved another $50!
Still great price, but this added discount would have been a nice post-Christmas gift. 
Thanks to the various people who have replied with clarifications. Still blundering around! Sorry if this is a stupid one, but why is the URL button greyed out on most of my notes? I’ve been looking in help and so forth, but I can’t find out how to make the button active.
Thanks again,
Martin.
Thanks 
The URL button in a note’s text window is enabled if the note’s URL attribute isn’t empty. You can add a URL to a note in several ways – with Quickstamp, for example, or by making URL a key attribute and typing the URL, or using the note’s Get Info window.
Dragging a Safari URL into a Tinderbox map or outline view makes a new notes with the corresponding URL already set.
Thanks for the information. I, too, have taken the plunge and paid my money for Tinderbox (at least, I’ve typed in some letters and numbers that will probably result in my credit card company sending me a demand for money at the end of the month. They keep on doing that …) I now look forward to being extremely confused for about the next three years. Actually, that’s no change from the previous few decades, but it will be a new way of being confused. But I have to say that the Tinderbox forum does look very useful, and may reduce the dementia.
Best wishes,
Martin.