Hi, I am close to completing my first 24 hours on Tinderbox so sorry if this has been asked before, I can’t find an answer on this forum or elsewhere.
I am a historian, timeline view was one of the aspects which sold Tinderbox to me. I’ve entered a few notes, messed around with them to open shortcut menus etc, and was alarmed to see that if I drag a note (which may be an important event) the date changes! This is scary. I intend to load a few thousand events and if I accidentally drag one by even a day while viewing I will look pretty stupid when I publish. Is there a way to prevent this happening please, i.e. the ability to lock a start date to a note which cannot change in any view?
Thanks
Hi! Welcome to the forum. There is a system attribute Lock. Although intended originally for Map view, if $Lock is set to true (or ticked in tick-box controls) it appears to lock the note to a timeline (and in other view such as Maps—as they are different renderings of the same underlying data). Tested in v8.9.2.
This topic hasn’t cropped up before but I’ve made a note to add references to this aspect of use to my aTbRef notes.
The original plan for Timeline View was planning, rather than history — for example, scheduling a hospital’s operating rooms so that they — and various exotic instruments — could serve as many patients as possible. The expected application thus involved time as a free variable.
In fact, historical timelines have been important! Tinderbox’s timeline view is probably going to have trouble with thousands of events at once, but can certainly help with slices of those events. And export to Aeon Timeline or Gephi or elsewhere can get you great visualizations plus all the flexibility of Tinderbox.
Hi thanks for replying; I guessed Tinderbox was more for professional project management or similar, and meant to be used in the real world! However its flexibility and organisation is great for past events too. Might it be possible in future to lock dates and text while still allowing notes to be moved in Map View?
You could try to add e.g. $StartDate=$MyDate; to the notes’ $Edict.
It doesn’t prevent moving the note in timeline view, but it will reset the note’s position the next time you select it. Caveat: the note will be placed at the bottom of the timeline view until you switch to another tab once.
@eastgate in my test such an $Edict did not automatically reposition the note after edicts in Inspector > Tinderbox Inspector > Agents & Rules ran. I expected to see it repositioned, at least after switching to another tab. Am I misunderstanding how edicts work?
I’ve faced the same problem: even a quick click in Timeline view can change a date and move the event. Is there any suggestions for TB9 to solve this issue?
I’ve just started using the timeline view in anger, and I’m coming across this problem (notes in a timeline are susceptible to inadvertent date changes through clumsy mousery).
I know @eastgate has said that he would look into locking the dates, but pending that I have a clunky solution (with equivalent steps for Map View):
change to Timeline view
cmd-a to select all the notes
a stamp with $Lock = true to lock the notes.
and I can turn this into a Keyboard Maestro macro to invoke it with a shortcut.
The problem is that I forget to do it… Is there a programmatic way of knowing which View one is in, so step 1 becomes e.g. (if ($CurrentView == 'Timeline')…), perhaps combined with an OnVisit trigger on the parent container?
I don’t believe the current tab’s view type is accessible to action code. But, you might be able to access it via AppleScript’s accessibility, as in addressing label 1 of control 2 of .... I recall doing this, but decades back. Others here are more up to date on AppleScript and may have a script answer.
A note re Aeon Timeline (further to previous comment now this threads come alive). Still good and data translation between the two is possible (though not a ‘canned’ automatic process). But, AT has become a bit of a data prison. The really good HTML5 timeline in AT v2 was dropped (deliberately it seems) in v3, so short of exporting data, seeing your timeline involves seeing it in AT. Not the end of the world, but not what used to be possible. I still think AT is a good app if going more heavily in to timelines as a central aspect of work.
I’d love to see a teardown of how to make something like The Itinerary of King John Project. This is a mashup of SIMILE Timeline and Google Maps. Sadly SIMILE’s funding ran out before code were ported to HTML5: the code is still available if you hunt around. The King John project got updated from Google Mapsv2 to v3, but be aware that past trivial use Google Maps data isn’t free†.
We had fun back in v5 [sic] days making a TBX that exported a complete SIMLIE Timeline website (data and all support files). The user was doing PhD research in Kandahar where the internet—and power—weren’t available 24/7. So, being able to do everything locally on the Mac mattered. It was a nice example of Tinderbox’s flexibility for export.
†. I had a go at this, using Tinderbox of course. Aha, it’s still around, see here. Turns out the choice of subject matter was poor—too much lumpiness in the event spacing and a map that included most of the world. Still, don’t try, don’t learn. Aslo my JavaScript programming skills are minimal at best.
Thanks, Mark – I’ll stare blankly at the AppleScript to see if anything makes sense to me…
As for Aeon Timeline: I’ve just imported a timeline from it using CSV as I’m trying to decide which will be better for this project. I want to know more about Anglo-Saxon era Britain, which as it involves multiple overlapping kingdoms and reigns, and dates and locations are all a bit vague, means that a certain amount of flexibility is needed. Aeon Timeline does a fairly good job at reflecting that complexity (e.g. with earliest - latest dates) and the ability to link everything with user-defined items and to mind map those relationships, so in some respects it would be a good fit.
But data entry is still a bit clunky if you’re adding a lot of data (too much unnecessary mousage), and it’s not really built for note proper note-taking. Tinderbox, on the other hand, is of course, really good at note-taking, so I thought I’d import the Aeon Timeline data and use Tinderbox’s timeline instead.
Most of the basic stuff comes through ok, of course, but the fuzzy dates need careful handling (and several additional date attributes), and I’m not really sure yet how to map the relationships, so in some ways, as you say, Aeon Timeline has become a bit too sophisticated for simple export. I don’t remember the export being quite so complex in AT2.
I’ve only just started on this process, though, so I’m sure I’ll be able to cobble something together…
Aeon Timeline is a pale shadow of Tinderbox when it comes to such incremental formalisation (adding extra strands of metadata). In fairness, it grew out of discussion in the Scrivener forums about narrative planning. Were Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard in the library together—indeed, should they have been? so planning is character centric. It lacks Tinderbox’s wonderful capacity for massive note enrichment (via attributes) only where/when needed.
Also—at lest when last tested early in Aeon Timeline v3—data interchange falls off fast once you move beyond basic build-in fields.
If you can stomach bit, Aeon Timeline—like Tinderbox, uses an XML file form so it can be easier to add the basics to Aeon Timeline via CSV/TSV import and then use the likes of BBEdit (or your similar editor of choice) to add the extra info by editing the post-import XML. Not simple, but if one has the need, possible.
I can see a couple of avenues to explore – the XML route, as you suggest (I’m comfortable with regex manipulation in BBEdit…), but also there’s the possibility of syncing with Scrivener from Aeon Timeline and then converting it to a Scrivener 2 project and importing into Tinderbox.
But I’ve deliberately decided to try the export early in the process to avoid too great a lock-in, so it won’t be too much of a problem to do some manual conversion in Tinderbox at this stage it that proves to be necessary.