Re: [O] [OT] Does anyone use Tinderbox?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Tue, Sep 04 2012, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> I've recently found out about Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/
> Tinderbox/), a personal information management application/framework
> for the Mac. It looks very interesting in its visualization
> capabilities.
>
> Does anyone in the list use it, and if so, care to share a bit about
> the experience?
>
> Perhaps it could serve as inspiration for orgmode extensions/
> integration ideas.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Marcelo.

I used to use it, when I still used a Mac. Despite the price tag, it was
the only piece of software I paid for, *without* later discovering some
free open source software that did the same thing better.

Tinderbox has some feature overlap with Org, but not a lot. It's much
more a generalized note-taking/data collection program -- it can and
often is configured as a TODO machine, but you'd have to build in much
of the stuff that comes with Org by default. On the other hand, it's
much more powerful and flexible when it comes to (re)organizing chunks
of plain data. Tinderbox notes are comparable to a single Org
headline-plus-text-and-metadata, but they can be arranged and related
much more flexibly. Tinderbox doesn't have spreadsheets, tho -- not as
far as I remember.

Multiple views on the same data is something that Tinderbox also does
very well.

One interesting distinction is Tinderbox agents. Agents are notes that
are mini-programs: they collect other notes according to various search
criteria, and the act on them according to various rules. They make
Tinderbox powerful, but they also make it confusing: the search and
action rules are written in a mini-programming language that is a bit
perplexing.

But there are interesting implications for Org. Org agenda views are the
equivalent of agents, in the *collection* sense: you give it search
criteria, and it gives you what is essentially a set of symlinks to
other headlines. Action is done by the user, of course, with Agenda
commands.

I've daydreamed about this before: what if, instead of agenda views, we
took a page from the Tinderbox method and made "agendas" simple
headlines, with some cookie saying "I'm an agenda", and a property
containing the search string. Instead of having an ephemeral *Org
Agenda* buffer, your "agenda views" are simply another in-file headline,
whose children are TODOs/headlines that match the query. Multiple and
persistent agendas are suddenly a matter of course.

It wouldn't work well for date-based Agendas, of course. In fact, it
would probably turn out to be a bad idea for reasons I haven't fully
thought through, yet, but it was an interesting daydream.

E

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 of 2012-09-04 on pellet
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