@galen’s points about the experience of using roadmap is similar to my own. It’s one of TBX’s most useful tools but I find it awkward to use. I wish it were always on and providing live ambient info as I worked with my file.
My reaction to the options floated so far for improving it:
“A roadmap view in the view pane”: fine with me with the caveat that my view pane is often extremely wide. So the roadmap view pane would need a width defined on it’s own I think. I prefer the idea of a Text Pane view.
A roadmap view in the text pane: sitting at the bottom of the pane, would be fine with me. In my case, very very few of my notes have enough text to require the full vertical space currently allowed, which means much of the text pane space is currently wasted by short or empty notes. Also, if roadmap were sitting at the bottom of the text pane, it would be easier to rely on basic links rather than in-text links: so all of my notes that simply hold lists of in-text links would become empty.
“add a panel that can slide up from the bottom of the text pane” (@PaulWalters): I love this idea and believe it is a great great suggestion. I’m assuming that once it were open it would be “pinned” and would only close when I closed it explicitly.
I second the idea of a panel that can slide up from the bottom (PaulW and BrianC), with the ability to tear off and view in a separate window (much like find) to allow you to keep it open.
I’d assume that regardless of where in the UI is fits, this setting the new “roadmap-style” listing needs, by default, to slave to the note with current focus (even if there might be an option to do otherwise). IOW, the default behaviour is the display always lists the inbound/outbound links, even if there is an option to go roving the network in ‘normal’ roadmap fashion.
I think hyperbolic view might benefit from this link table as well.
I would prefer to keep it in the text pane area. The visual metaphor that Tinderbox presents (to me, at least) is that the left pane shows the topology of a group of notes, and the right pane shows information about a specific note. Adding the Roadmap to the left pane breaks this coherence.
Echoing other voices here, I would like a roadmap pane as part of the right pane, and furthermore, I’d like the option to be able to resize both the Roadmap pane and the Key Attributes pane. Sometimes I have notes with large numbers of Key Attributes, and it would be nice to be able to only show, say, four of them, rather than showing as many as will fit on half the text pane, as it works now.
This is likely to be backstage for a while. If you’d like to be part of the exploration, you might want to join the backstage program if you’re not already part of it. Tinderbox: Tinderbox Backstage
This thread is getting unwieldy. Shall we move discussion of the roadmap to its own thread?
I started playing around with roam today and am very impressed how easy it is to get going with the tool. That price though is a bit crazy. There is a similar project which uses emacs org mode called org-roam. That has the added learning curve of emacs which, if all you are using is org mode, isn’t that arduous. org-roam is very rough though.
I think that’s one of the main issues - it’s seductively easy to get going and do quite a lot with Roam, but but then you can find yourself with a very large, unstructured collection of data. What do you do with it then? How does Roam help you make sense of the mess you’ve created?
I’m personally finding that the backlink reports at the bottom of each note create a context that gets rid of the “will I ever find this again” feeling that I get from a lot of other systems.
That mixed with linking to what you worked on today in the daily notes pages, and some basic Zettelkasten methodology for things like structured notes (which are often kind of generated for you with backlink reports), strike me as very promising for longer-term structure, but it’s early days.
That’s the point I think we’re collectively getting at. Roam has a few things to teach us in terms of learning curve and data presentation (the “unliked but similar” and a few other things) but ultimately we know TB will handle any amount of data we throw at it.
Mmm, I’m not so sure. The three features of backlinks, block-addressability, and transclusion combine to allow a different way of interacting with data than is possible in Tinderbox.
Backlinks mean I automatically see what other pages in my graph refer to the current page; block-addressability means I don’t just see the referring page, I see the block within the referring page that contains the link; transclusion means that the referring block is rendered directly in the current page, including being editable (with edits being reflected in the referring page, of course).
The result is that a huge amount of editable context is displayed automatically on every page.
So for example, when I open up my page about Tinderbox, I can immediately see the paragraph in the Notion page that I wrote six months ago comparing Tinderbox to Notion. I can make a correction in that paragraph, or decide to move it into this page, or create a block reference so that the paragraph sits in a specific spot in the Tinderbox page. At any point I can open the Notion page in the sidebar and see the larger context of that paragraph without having to navigate away from the Tinderbox page.
Roam has nowhere near Tinderbox’s power when it comes to manipulating and filtering data, creating custom visualizations, exporting data in custom formats, etc. — and Roam is not nearly as malleable a tool. But there’s way more going on in Roam than just showing similar notes. Perhaps this is all old-hat to hypertext experts, but I’ve never seen it implemented before.
Galen’s is a succinct summary of what some of us have been trying to convey in this discussion. The recent, and welcome, TB improvement in Roadmap and links address the “backlinks” issue. It seems that solutions for block-addressability and transclusion are around the corner. For those of us attempting to leverage the power of TB as a knowledgeable this would be powerful.
In the early days of Tinderbox, notes were generally shorter, so linking to a note gave good addressability. Then people started wanting to turn what were notes into richly formatted mini essays. Fine for the latter use case but the app lost some of its tightness as a result.
Perhaps “within” is the wrong preposition, and “of” would make my original sentence clearer?
The point is that you can pull in only the parts of a referring page that are concerned with the current page. Without block addressability you can only indicating that another page refers to this one, which is useful, but requires that you navigate to the referring page to see what is said, which breaks the context. Roam puts a high design priority on not breaking context.
If you want to see the surrounding context of the referring paragraph, you can open up the referring page in the side bar and see it, again without breaking the context of viewing the current page.
I don’t see people trying to turn Tinderbox into Roam. With an open-ended tool like Tinderbox, isn’t it natural to wonder how to implement something you see in another tool? I implemented a GTD system in Tinderbox with a lot of inspiration from OmniFocus but I wasn’t trying to make Tinderbox be OmniFocus. If such public wonderings lead to improvements to the TBX UI, so much the better.
I’ve found this thread to be super interesting, especially in understanding why Tinderbox has worked so well for me for some things and yet for others I can’t quite get it working the way I had hoped. (In some cases it’s a limitation or design choice, in many others it’s because I didn’t understand how to use Tinderbox.)
Actually, Tinderbox does allow links to be made to target anchors within text. It’s just a feature few seem to use. It fact so little that it went away for a bit, until people started writing really long texts ($Text) and complained they couldn’t find to what the link referred (IMO, a self-inflicted injury - use shorter notes!). Anyway, the feature has been back in the app for some while now. For those looking for addressability, give it a try.
Is there a better term for the feature of every page being composed of a bunch of constituent parts, each of which is addressable? I’m not aware of one, but I’m glad to use the established term.
Hah! Storyspace has transclusion in-app, … in reader mode. It uses the same ^export^ code mark-up Tinderbox uses for (HTML) export. Tinderbox offers the same but you’s need to use preview mode to see the inclusions.
I sense this is all getting a bit baroque for little gain to the app. ISTM more fruitful to look at Roam/Tinderbox interchange than adding features just as a me too. As a long-term user, tester, and explainer of the app (and as a Hypertext post-doc) I’m unconvinced there is a clear feature addition defined - as yet. It’s frustrating that hypertext functionality in the app isn’t being used.