Writer’s Diary #42: Steady Improvements in Tinderbox

I’ve been a long-time user of Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox. At least since 2010, when I first bought a copy to do fieldwork. It’s a tool that I keep coming back to, even if I leave from time to time. Every time I come back, I am impressed, once again, by its steady, evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary improvements. Mark Bernstein has created a brilliant, powerful piece of software for knowledge workers. I think it’s criminally underused by anthropologists. But, that’s for another post. I’ve long thought of it as a Swiss army knife for notes. But that doesn’t really do justice to the software. Do check [Tinderbox] out.

For now, I just wanted to call attention to one of the little changes made over time that Mark has worked into Tinderbox, which make things just nicer.

Between the version I was using, and what I upgraded to yesterday, a small change, is that it is now possible to make the left-hand pane (map/outline/etc any arbitrary width. Before, there was a minimum size. It’s a change that perhaps most users will probably never notice.

But, I write books. And, often, when I am in the thick of writing, I want to make the text pane on the right as big as possible, and make the left hand pane as narrow as possible. This wasn’t possible to do to quite as narrow as I wanted before. It now is. Thank you, Mark. Just one more of the steady refinements that makes Tinderbox indispensable.

Screenshot of narrow left hand side map pane in Tinderbox.