Actually, modern Tinderbox should not experience performance problems on modern machines, even with thousands of notes.
If you do experience problems, get in touch.
If you have hundreds of thousands of notes for a single project, Tinderbox might not be a good fit. But of course there’s no known way to display an information visualization of that many notes in which individual notes play a meaningful role.
this makes me happy. i’m concerned that some of my files may become unwieldy.
each file is discrete, yes? or…can we link files? could i create a master file called latin.tbx and create containers such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc, and then in each container link the appropriate files: verbs.tbx, nouns.tbx, adjectives,tbx and so on?
i don’t think i’d need or want to embed the files, just link them so i can access them when necessary without creating 100,000 notes in one file?
i just found this article:
so if i can paste note URLs, surely i can link a note.
and that said, my inclination is to keep everything in one file per mark’s comment.
I’ll give you an example. I have parsed the “Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science” which in its original format wold total to around 800 pages of simple dictionary like book format. In Tinderbox the book contains 8733 words (1 container per word) with the description of each word residing in the text pane. The maximum depth of the outline hierarchy container is 1 (with two top containers for organizing purposes). I have no actions, a couple prototypes, and 23 aliases.
I didn’t even consider creating links and attributes to use in the hyperbolic & attribute views because it’s already to slow. Create some actions and the project will load from pane to pane yester-year; the “beach-ball” effect will become your best friend. I stopped using Tbx for this very reason. I simply cannot split a document for performance benefits when that document has relationships which are not mutually exclusive…that would be non-sense.
mind you I have an extremely capable Mac to handle a full Logic Pro music ensemble loaded with hundreds of plugin instruments. Loading up a virtual machine to test Tbx will diminish performance as well (I use VM for MindManager Windows version).
That’s one book that I have a hard time managing in Tbx. It’s a tremendous piece of software otherwise…
8700 notes is, for Tinderbox, a big document. 1000 notes in a containers is a big container, too; it might make sense to split those containers into smaller sub-containers
Please send a copy of your document; if Tinderbox 8.1 doesn’t perform well with your document, I’ll be (a) a little bit surprised, and (b) will make it perform better.
I do not worry about performances. All notes I have are very un-styled notes (I should say “thoughts”) with a few words. Most of them are in fact just references: book name, relevant page (where I can find highlighted lines in my IRL books).
My concern is about links. I need a tool that enable visual exploration of notes to find new relations. I’m particularly interested in Tinderbox precisely because:
I’m ready to learn a bit of code synthax if this can open the way I look at my notes.
So… I manage to have the VM working, I intalled the Tinderbox trial and tried to design my example:
I realized that this method do not diplay the links in the Agent (see image below). I also see that linking two notes in the agent (Aliases) do not impact the originals. That’s the two things I’d like to be able to do.
Is there something I did wrong? Or do I simply not use the right global approach of the problem? I think I understood aliases as “replicants” but they are not. I’ve found some threads about replicants in Tinderbox and it feels like a touchy question…
I’ve looked over the references given above by many of you but I have to confess that there is a lot to read and learn, too much for a first try (for me at least).
May I ask you some help to buid this simple case?
This is expected behaviour as aliases export but don’t display their original note’s basic links.
Aliases can have their own basic links. If you want to use an agent to create links between the original notes represented by the aliases, after dragging a link, use the pop-up selector on the create link pop-up to choose ‘original’ for both source and destination. The link will be created between the two original notes rather than the aliases but will not show on the agent’s map for the reason already explained.
Tinderbox has no concept of a replicant (such as found in some programs like DEVONthink).
Ok so if I link the two originals (via their aliases) and I also link the two aliases, I get what I want. It just requires 2 linking operation, fine. The link between the aliases are kept while updated so perfect.
However, notes selected by the agent are not initially smartly placed on screen. So I move it by hand but it is all reverted at update. Is there anything I can do to avoid auto-placement at update?
I also have an issue with “thermodynamics” note that is taken by my agent while it has no attribute. (It had the attribute “Author2 == Lavoisier” but I removed it, see image below
To avoid the agent update re-sorting the map see system attribute $CleanupAction and this article.
I may be wrong in my thinking, but I feel that one of the key features of Tinderbox is its dynamism – the fact that as you add items (notes) the results you get from Agents will change, or the Agents will change things (appearance, etc) as you add material or metadata to exising notes. Perhaps the key is in the name – Agents act, they do things. Other programs are static. You arrange stuff and it stays like that. But Tinderbox, I feel, is about exploration, which means that constant change is (or may be) an advantage. But that is just the way I see it, and others may disagree.
It appears you removed the $Author2 attributed from Key Attributes. But that action does not remove the attribute or its value from the note – the action merely hides the attribute from view in the KA table. You will need to remove the “Lavoisier” value from $Author2 in order for the note not to appear in the agent results.
This issue above is a narrower noe - and not arguing against dynamism & discovery. Originally, each update cycle refreshed the agent’s map and in doing so re-sorted it. If the user wants to use the dynamism of the agent query finding the right things but also further working that map, the user ends up fighting the agent or having to turn it off. The re-sorting of the map isn’t a necessity, but just how things started out.
The addition of the $CleanupAction (c. v5 if I recall) allows some flex. IOW, the status quo remains and in most cases the agent just refreshes the map as it sees fit. For those who want to work that map the option exists to turn off the clean-up (i.e. auto-re-sorting of the map). I assume that there is some extra work for the app or likely the new feature would have been a change as opposed to a new option.
Sure – I wasn’t really replying to the narrow issue – merely allowing myself to ponder about the general philosophy of using the program. But I acknowledge that Tinderbox offers a heck of a lot of options, and the way I think about it may be opposite to someone else’s view. And I suppose I found myself wondering if producing a static view using Agents was the best way of doing things. But now I know that it is possible, it adds yet another tool to the box. Cheers! Martin.
Thanks all of you guys for your help. I decided to go for a macbook pro and Tinderbox!
A few questions about a few things I did not manage to do yet:
It seems that clicks on bottom link stub of my notes do not work. Is it due to trial version? or maybe VM? Or did I missed something?
I want to draw a link between nodes stored in separate containers. I guess I have to use the “parking space” but I did not manage to figure out how to use (reading this).
Which stub:
#1 is for creating links. Click and drag to start a link, drop onto the target note or a link park.
#2 is an inbound stub. Click the numbered circle to see a pop-up list of inbound links from links from other maps. Click on an item in the pop-up list to select that note in the text pane. Note: _the map does not shift to the newly select note’s map.
or
#3, as #2 but for outbound links.
An up to date reference for that link is here. The process is in 2 parts:
If successful you will see the link creation pop-up, like below, which lets you complete creating the link:
An action? Yes, see linkToOriginal() but note this action can’t be triggered by a manually linked drag.
If you have more questions, can you please start a new thread for each discrete question. It makes it simpler to treat the questions separately and helps leader readers find answers to the same question. Thanks 
the #3 one. Just clicking (as I do with #1 stub) and no pop up menu.
Odd. The feature pre-dates v8.0.0 and certainly works here in v8.1.1 on macOS 10.14.6.
Are you still running in an emulator? That might be an issue.
Nice! Without wanting to preempt things, but there will be a possibility (not a guarantee by any means) that in the early days you will think you have made the wrong choice with both. If that happens, I can almost promise you that sticking with them will pay off very well. The Mac is a beautiful system, and Tinderbox is beautiful software. Getting to know both is well worth it, in my opinion.
