tinderbox

Writer’s Diary #43: Tinderbox 10 and the Guadi View

Daniel Tubb

I’m a long time user of Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems. A Mac app, that is a Swiss Army knife for notes.

This summer, once again, I’m working on the book. I have hundreds (or more) of pages of notes. Now is a good time to find some order in my madness. For that, I really like Tinderbox’s brand new Gaudi view.

The Tinderbox Gaudí View — the first novel hypertext view in years — tessellates the idea plane to keep more notes in sight. Tinderbox continuously adapts the shape and placement of each note to give each a fair share of the available space, while avoiding unwanted distraction. Gaudí view is especially good for brainstorming and conferences!

It is great for brainstorming, for bringing notes that are related together by dragging them while the other notes slide smoothly out of the way, and for lingering and attending and playing with and getting a feel for the notes.

The thousands of new badges, via SF Symbols, are just really nice to have as well.

For example, this is a sample of the outline of the book.

Screen Shot of Gaudi View

Update July 22 at 1:50 pm.

I learn from Mark Anderson’s wonderful TBRef that with a force expression in the Guadi view control at the top, it’s easy to get related notes to come together.

$Tags==$Tags(that)

Notes with related tags, are drawn together. Super useful.
Guadi View, organized with like minded notes brought together.

Writer’s Diary #42: Steady Improvements in Tinderbox

Daniel Tubb

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.