How to do basic things - not the the theory of the Tinderbox Universe

100% true.

Except when it’s not :slight_smile:

As everything else with Tinderbox: it depends. If a user needs an outline and is not attempting to correlate notes one-to-another, then an outline can be fine and Attribute Browser can be used side by side as another way to view notes. If a user is building a set of notes to export, then an outline is just fine – and somewhat essential for blog or Word or website or other highly structured exports.

Not to be a curmudgeon about this, but I’ve lots of document that are definitely best done in Tinderbox and definitely best done as hierarchies. And others that do not require outlines.

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Hello Sylvaticus:

Is there a video you are referring to, and if so do you have link?

Agree. Everything in Tinderbox depends on the user, the use, the particularities, etc.

(A blessing that can initially seem … if not a curse, at least a challenge.)

For me, personally, when I am making straight outlines, I’m often using a straight outliner, like OmniOutliner, or maybe Scapple. So my own uses of TB are more likely to be of the connecting-things-in-varying-ways type. But always YMMV.

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It’s also worth noting the effects of scale. A map with 50 notes is great, 5,000 notes is a different matter. As the number of notes grows, the abstraction of ideas and topics into discrete attributes (as described above by @JFallows) becomes a more important tool. I also find that as the note count grows (my research docs have c.5k notes) pragmatically, an outline becomes the most effective organisational/storage method. If that sounds constraining, it isn’t. You can use AB view (for attribute data) and hyperbolic view (if making explicit links).

So another axis along which “it depends what you are are doing”. :slight_smile:

We are, I fear, straying into the theory of the Tinderbox Universe despite the OP’s desire not to go there, but allow me to just add that one of the strengths of Tinderbox is that it allows you to start with one type of organisation or structure of the data and morph to another if that is later revealed to be expedient or useful. I was reflecting on this today, as I started out a file by beginning to arrange things in a hierarchy, knowing that I would later turn this into another kind of arrangement when I was able to distinguish the wood from the trees. No doubt it would also be possible to go from Attributes to hierarchy if necessary.

It seems to me that it is important for the new user to know that they do not necessarily have to decide on an organisational method for their data before they start out. That is perhaps the biggest difference between Tinderbox and other sorts of program. Incremental formalisation.

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You are so spot on with this:

This means few are prepared to embrace the app as a toolset but rather want to be handed (only) the subset of tools they imagine are pertinent to (just) their perspective.

In hindsight, I think this is why I’ve had my 7 years + 3 weeks journey with TBX. I’ll look back at this time as BTBXE (Before Tinderbox Enlightenment) and ATBXE (Afer Tinderbox Enlightenment). It was not the tool, but me that was the problem, me that had to change. My approach was off. I was carrying so much pre-conceived baggage and expectations to the tool that there was no way it could succeed in solving my problems. I first had to change. I had to wipe the slate clean, get a begginers mindset, not just with TBX but with how I am approaching my problems…how I communicate, track, use language, use other tools, etc. Now that I’ve made this shift I am seeing fundamental changes everywhere. Not just with using Tinderbox, but also with use with other tools, who I communicate; the veractiy, volume, and value of both my inputs and outputs has significantly improved. I would say, now between the 6 TBXs I’ve setup, I’m spending 80% of my work day in TBX capturing and currating knowledge and only 20% of it in other tools (email, excel, PPT, word, phone, zoom) to refine the output that comes out of my TBX files.

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The above is key! It is what you want. You want a tool like Tinderbox to be able to adjust with you as your thinking matures, not the other way around. Per my comment in another thread I find that I’m often the one putting the constraints of expectation on Tinderbox vs. the other way around. As soon as I drop my exceptions the answer often comes, but then it may take me time to implement the answer.

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Yes, just want als0 to underscore that for me, grasping this point was the main “aha!” moment long ago. (I started using the program around the time I switched from the ThinkPad world to the Mac world, while living in China back in 2008. For the only time in my life I was quite sick then, and as a present someone gave me a MacBook Air, which I figured I was morally obliged to learn how to use.) Before that I had used a series of “info organizing” programs: the sublimely elegant Lotus Agenda in the MS-DOS era, Zoot software under Windows, then Tinderbox.

You put the information into Tinderbox – in whatever way you want, with whatever extra material you want (“tags,” hierarchy, links, visual cues) – and then you get a look at it, in whatever slice or arrangement or relationship you want. It’s hard to think of another program that is quite so free-form.

The idea that this is an endlessly malleable system for looking at info is the hardest part to get used to–really, it takes deciding, on your own, to change something about a file (categorizations, attributes, views, you name it) that you hadn’t imagined when you created it. Once you do that, you think–whoa! I can keep on doing that.

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I agree…that is what makes this forum so terribly interesting. :slight_smile: Per @mwra comment I find that Ruler comforting, initially at the beginning for its familiarity. I am finding that I’m using it less and less, but I still like it there for bullets. But, it may just be a mental crutch.

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I think this might actually be one of the killer features of writing with nvUltra, Obsidian, and Roam Research! As I write, it may occur to me that I need or want an article about x. As I’m writing I wrap x in double brackets and I now have a link—but no article (document) exists until I click on it, thus creating the document!

It’s the ultimate shorthand. And it allows me to acknowledge (respects?) that I have a branched thought I want to spin off and pursue—after I complete the thought I’m creating and writing right now! If I decide that the branched thought I want to create is more powerful and more important to capture while the muse is upon me (:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:), I can follow that branch instead.

I’ve been playing with all three apps, and I can’t say how much this ability has helped!

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This is exactly the problem I’ve had for years, and Tinderbox, nvUltra, Obsidian, and Roam Research are guiding me out of this problem.

I have to say that keywords (tags) have provided tons of flexibility, not just in notes I create but in my task manager too. I use OmniFocus. I can slice and dice tasks 100 different ways depending on how I want to display (or share) what I’m doing.

I’m looking forward to grokking what Mark and Paul keep repeating about the power of attributes!

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Yep! I’m so sorry, John, that I’m behind in all the posts!!

Here’s the link from our 2020-09-19 meetup:

Map view and hyperbolic view allow you to drag a link onto the background and make a new note. In Map view if you make a text selection and drag from the text pane link park to the map background that makes a new note with a text link from the first note.

This explains another disconnect. Most people tend to only think of the app from a single input perspective. To the ardent typist everything is/should be a key input so the link drag method gets boos. To the ordinary typist, most of the extended syntax of ziplinks doesn’t help as the menu closes or auto-finishes in odd ways if—as may be natural—mouse and key inputs are mixed. Some folk can’t do without RTF, others want only plain text, etc.

I think that unpicks the point about making implied links, i.e. wiki-type [[ link mark-up for a note/agent not yet made. That makes some sense in a wiki, as it has no index or hierarchy and only the links you give it. The ‘red link’ is a wiki affordance to get around the fact you can’t see what isn’t yet there and in fact you can’t ‘see’ it at all as you only view a single page at a time.

Tinderbox has all sorts views that means if you need a note you can easily link to it or add new linked content. This leads to the next aspect of such branching work: new (side) notes are “too time consuming” “break the flow”, etc. I’ve heard the debate many times over in the forums and whilst I’m all for everyone following their own style, some of these justifications about how a feature ‘must’ work seem a bit post hoc and instead more readily reflect where people previously did their work. The tools we use shape our perceptions, make us productive where we embrace them, yet also blind us as to other possible approaches. We then invest as much/more time justifying our acquired assumptions than we do learning [sic] things that might help. Thus, at times the forum feels like working in a cheese shop where the customer only ever wants to buy fish, and despite the sign over the door saying ‘cheese’ they are sure there is fish but it’s just being hidden from them. :slight_smile:

Habits are hard to break!

I think the ‘maturation’ of granularity and abstraction goes like this:

  • Titles used as text (i.e. very long titles)
  • Discover there is $Text. Now try shorter titles and lots of text. But, everything becomes a text search (regular expression, for granular search work are not easy to master).
  • Other apps have ‘tags’ Yay, Tinderbox has $Tags too! Now we start putting various bits of info into $Tags. Now all the tags are in one (per note) un-segmented tag bucket. Again, searching becomes as much about excluding false positives as things finding things we want. Do your tags on Ovid or patient diagnosis need to use the same bucket as your grocery to-do? Probably not. If only…
  • Aha! User attributes. Now discrete strands of tags can ‘live’ in discrete buckets, even if we just treat them as tags. Master Yoda nods approvingly.

Cool result. With the last step new achievements are unlocked in your Tinderbox usage development tree:

  • Now we have scope for much more targetted search, as we can target just one attribute (or more if we choose) rather than the bigger target of all $Tags or all of $Text.
  • With information in these user attributes, they are more easily showing in Displayed Attributes (i.e. attributes displayed in a note’s text pane), or shown in column view (in Outlines and Attribute Browser (AB) view), and can be used to fine tune things like AB view or Crosstabs view.

Yet, no one has to use all these features. If just making notes on a map with no $Text works, then it’s likely good enough! But for those who want or need it, more depth is on offer.

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Good information thanks for sharing
vmware

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Hi @MorpheusTinderBox, I stumbled across this post and wanted to share this with you: Meetup 18SEPT21 Lesson 1: Blogging [Basic] with Tinderbox - Setting the foundation. We are kicking off a course, through the lens of blogging, to address your fundamental question “how to do basic things in Tinderbox.” I think you’ll find it valuable.

Seeing this post now is crazy. Amazing how much can change in a year. I’ll have to remember this. I’m excited to see what next year brings.

I’m coming to this post over a year later, but I just wanted to share my experience and maybe make a contribution. I will avoid the “philosophy of data and apps” and just go into what’s helped me the most when using Tinderbox.
What I would suggest you do, practically, to help you leverage Tbx with the Music and Bands example you gave is:

  1. Draw 3 separate tables on paper or in excel or whatever…(I find that doing it physically on paper helped me the most to engage with my data)… One table for Bands. One table for Music. Another table for Band Names.
  2. For each table, decide what information you want on the rows and columns. E.g. under Table “Bands” it could be that each row is a band name, and columns could be “Genre”, “Album 1”, “Album 2”, “Album 3”, “Lead Singer”… etc.
  3. Do something similar for the other tables…So you’ll end up with 3 tables…in excel or on paper or whatever.
  4. Transfer the information to physical index cards…Not all of it. Just some. Just one index card for each row of data. And let each column title be a field on your index card. And title each field on your index card with a $. e.g. $Album3: … $Genre: … etc…
    To save time, maybe only do one index card (i.e one record) for each table… taking one record from each table and putting it on an index card… So you’ll end up with 3 index cards.
  5. What you’re looking at now, in your hands, is a physical representation of a note in Tinderbox. Each field that starts with $ corresponds to what’s called an attribute in Tbx.

What Tinderbox then offers is a tool to store and build up all your information about Music, Bands and Band names. Imagine you had 100 index cards, and wanted to do a quick search to find, for instance, any bands that had the same lead singer. This is what would be difficult to do with physical Index cards, but with Tinderbox, it’s done using what’s called an Agent. And the “agent query” would be $LeadSinger=“John Smith” for example. Then after that you can start having fun … e.g. if you want to “Index cards” whose lead singer is “John Smith” to change their colour to red, you’d run an agent as follows:

Query: $LeadSinger=="John Smith"
Action: $Color="red"

(Note my code syntax is probably wrong but the algorithm is what I’m trying to communicate)…
[Edit: code edit by moderator]

There are countless ways to use Tinderbox.

When I did the physical exercise of physically breaking down my data to the atomic level on physical index cards, it forced me to engage with my data, and make no assumptions about what the data is, and what I am using it for and why it’s important. It’s been an epiphany for me, and I thought I’d share it. For example, when you draw the table about “Music” and make an index card from a record on that table, you may realise that “Music” isn’t simply a folder or container containing Bands and Band Name. It’s an idea consisting of several other ideas such as “Genre”, “Time Period”, “Geographical Origin”, “Spin offs” etc. etc. That’s what I mean when I say Tinderbox forces you to engage with your data. I hope this helps, a year down the line.

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Thanks for this.

I fixed up the code sample for you—no censure intended. :slight_smile:

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:joy: Thank you @mwra . One day it’ll be second nature to me…! :sweat_smile:

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No worries. All of us here have been through the same learning cycle. It’s just practice … and degree of need!