When I started learning Tinderbox earlier this week, I took notes about Tinderbox in a Tinderbox document.
So I got curious: maybe it’s possible to create a Tutorial for Tinderbox in Tinderbox? After all, its a tool for mapping complex space, for explaining how things work.
I played around with the idea for a couple of hours, to see if I could draft a tutorial and a conceptual map of Tinderbox.
I am curious for feedback to see if it makes sense to put some more work into this. It’s under a Creative Commons license, feel free to do whatever you want with it.
Yes! It’s a solid starting point for the rest of us to build on. The right kind of information, well put, and the right challenges placed in the right places. Like Justin, navigating the work taught me a couple new practices. Thanks -
Thanks for the positive feedback. I have cleaned it up a little, and added a new tutorial about Adornments. I’ll guess I’ll tackle links next, and then take a look at actions, probably sometime next week.
You can find the latest download in the first post above.
That requires a text link and those do not work within text displayed as part of the map icon.
The original and more normal navigation method is to use the right-arrow to select the next note (and this doesn’t even need a link and an explicit text label.
~~
Interesting as this document is, I’m not sure it’s as helpful as intended to be for a new user as it map-centric and so ignores most of Tinderbox’ powerful affordances whilst also making it appear that the main role as as a form of box and line diagramming tool. Whilst one may show (some) note $Text as well as the title in a map icon, I’m not sure that’s the first/most useful thing to teach a new user. My 2¢, anyway.
In the current version the notes were not sorted, but for the next version, I have fixed the order of the notes in each tutorial so that the user might advance with the arrow keys, although I don’t think that is necessary, in these Tutorials all the text of the notes is visible in the map. so so it’s simpler to just drag and zoom the map as required.
We are discussing an early version here, of course the tutorial is far from complete. At the moment, I am working on a tutorial for the Hyperbolic View, because that seems rather intuitive as a next step, and I have concepts for how to explain the Outline View and the Attribute browser.
My approach was to start simple, and Map View is familiar to most people. It’s obvious what’s going on, and the user starts experimenting with Tinderbox almost without noticing. That’s much harder to achieve in other views.
Well spotted, thanks. I fixed that for the next version.
A good idea. For the existing tutorials I would imagine it’s not even necessary to actually select the next pane, as all the text is visible in the map (there is one exception, I believe).
However, for upcoming tutorials that teach other views, text navigation as you suggested will be essential.