Hello,
It looks like topics for Saturday’s session have been identified but if there is time this week or at some future point, perhaps folks could begin to discuss typical errors that novice users tend to make. This kind of discussion could be of use when designing tutorials.
Here are 2 issues that I have had this past week but that I have sort of solved. I say “sort of” because I feel like I have just stumbled on some fixes. Also, perhaps my somewhat lengthy explanations will show the kinds of seemingly haphazard problem solving approaches that I, a novice user, tend to make.
(1) I wanted to import some survey responses that I had in an EXCEL spreadsheet. I tracked down some helpful information on Mark Anderson’s Reference file, I.e., Spreadsheet (Tab-Delimited Text) Import
What I was stymied about was how to get the relevant response in the text area of a note. In addition to the target response there were a number of background indicators, i.e., attributes. After failing a few times, I read Anderson’s explanation a bit more carefully. He pointed out that the default is that first “column” of a spreadsheet becomes the name for the note. Given that apparent clue, I tried to put the target response as the second column and then as the final column. Needless to say that didn’t work. Anderson also mentioned that, as typical, the first row of the spreadsheet becomes the names of the attributes. So finally, the thought came to me to name the target column as "Text:. And lo, that worked.
While I modified my CSV file so that I only had 1 target response, the survey has probably 10 relevant items. Being lazy, I thought that perhaps I could simply label two columns as “Text” and have both of the text responses be included within the note. Obviously that didn’t work. But also, somewhat to my surprise, it looked like Tinderbox took the second instance as “Text” but not the first.Then again, perhaps it took the first instance and when it encountered “Text” again, it overwrote the first instance. Is this what really happened? Is there a way to “combine” notes - either in terms of the text and/or attributes?
I assume that many new users have some existing data. If so, perhaps it would be useful to have a series of videos/tutorials showing how to import data from various type of sources, e.g., databases such as DevonThink, note apps, word processors, etc.
(2) Once I got my items into Tinderbox, I wanted to visually label them within the map view.I wanted to use badges but the only place I could find information was in the tutorial. However, what I wanted to do was have multiple badges on each note. (I realize that I could have done things by combining color, border, shape, etc, but I thought that the easiest would be multiple badges.) Well, I quickly learned that I couldn’t have multiple badges! However, my “real problem” came when I tried to remove the badge. It was a “problem” because I had used an agent to assign the badge based on a query… When I manually tried to change the badge it would only change temporarily. 
I realize now that the agent remains active and keeps trying to do its job as long at the query is “valid” but that wasn’t a salient thought at the time. After hunting for more info about badges, out of apparent desperation, I clicked on “get info” and hunted for “badge”. I found it and there was an option for “none”. So I created a QuickStamp with Badge= none. In an of itself this stamp wouldn’t have worked because of the active agent. However, I realized I had some error in the agent’s query so in the process of hunting for a way to remove the badge, I had deleted the agent! Thus my Quickstamp could work. However, at the time I didn’t realize that deleting the agent was “solution” to my problem. I’ve seen some things about controlling the time(s) when agents are active but I don’t quite get how that would work and be “written”.
Since agents are such a key feature of Tinderbox, perhaps some systematic videos/tutorials could be prepared for new users.
I hope that I haven’t rambled too much.
), and the concept of bottom-up emergent knowledge.