How do researchers/students in computer science and maths use Tinderbox?

I’ve been curious about Tinderbox for a long time, especially in finding out how people in scientific and technological fields might use it.

Personally, the study (and teaching of) mathematics and computer science (in particular - but not limited to - programming) are most relevant to me.

Any students/academics/independent researchers using it in the aforementioned areas? And if so, what do you like/dislike about it?

One deal-breaker for me to even consider using Tinderbox would be that I should be able to input and view nicely typeset mathematics and code (re code, syntax highlighting would be a plus but not a deal breaker) . I’m quite comfortable with markdown with MathJax support and don’t usually need the full power of LaTeX. Would Tinderbox be able to provide this in an easy-to-use way?
(At the moment, Typora is my go-to program for writing notes, and I love its “seamless live preview” capabilities.)

I understand Tinderbox is scriptable and as someone with a bit of background in programming I might be at something of an advantage, but the question is, what kind of things could I do with this capability?

Thank you,
AK

If Typora is what you want, use it!

Tinderbox is a general-purpose tool for visualizing and analyzing notes; it has not built-in facilities for typesetting mathematics.

Well, I’m genuinely interested in knowing how people working in the aforementioned domains might find Tinderbox’s visualizing and analysing capabilities useful. Maybe it’s obvious to people who’ve used your software, but I’m just an outsider trying to look in.

I’m not here to promote Typora btw. It has good typesetting facilities and the seamless live preview (for me) is its killer feature, but its strengths don’t extend beyond that.

Well, for starters, I planned a refactoring and port of a 150,00-line codebase to a new operating system and framework in Tinderbox.

Mark Bernstein: Planning

Peter Wasilko spoke at a Tinderbox meetup a couple of weeks back about using Tinderbox as an IDE for a functional Web app package. I’d probably prefer something like Panic’s Nova, but I can see the attraction.

My recollection, from past posts here and previous fora, is people use the map view to explore and map out flows and relationships in software systems. Prototypes make for simple standardisation of both the visual (shape, colour, etc.) of notes representing different types of objects as well allowing standardising of per-type Displayed Attributes.

In a teaching context, people make syllabuses, class schedules, and reading lists. If there is a temprarl aspect, e.g. when theories or proofs originated, you can use the timeline view.

It’s hard to generalise here as, being a toolbox, where you choose the tools, even two people doing notionally the same task may generate very different looking documents. I say this as people set great store by seeing things. Oddly, this is true even for uses where the real value isn’t really visual.

Aside, you might be interested in Compositor, a nice Mac WYSIWIG LaTeX editor that supports maths equations [sic]. See https://compositorapp.com.

HTH

There is also some interest in using Tinderbox with LaTex e.g. scientific writing (see for instance the link mentioned here)

…which loops back to one of my old demos :rofl: . BTW, relevant to the latter are my notes on LaTeX for export.