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?