Mark you totally misunderstand my comment about “forced” use. I have NO complaints about Tinderbox and am deeply grateful for the help I have gained form your work and comments, and many others. Neither I nor anyone else is forced to use Tinderbox. I don’t see anyone using Tinderbox as a victim.
My comment referred to Computerized Medical Records in particular which doctors are compelled to use in hospitals, clinics and even solo practice. Many articles exist in the medical literature and unexpected effects on medical error and patient safety, and impaired communication in patient encounters. There are big problems for program design as all patients are individuals and especially in initial encounters do not necessarily “fit”. Even if they do they want individualized treatment. Older patients have multiple diseases, drugs, etc and well as unexpected reactions.
I found exploring Roam useful but would not see it as a substitute for the elegance of Tinderbox.
Please don’t close down this topic. If I can figure out how, I will try to post a usage example from Roam and explain why I think it is relevant, although Off the Wall, to Tinderbox.
Some notes after having tried Roam out for a few months:
definitely speaks to people who like a “use it anywhere” web interface
wouldn’t trust data with it yet
Eastgate can do a better job of show how all these things (links, date pages, collecting incoming links) are very easily replicatable within Tinderbox
The biggest attraction for me was how easy it was to just bang out a bunch of notes (I can do that in Tinderbox too, and then “arrange” them etc, and this is just a special case where the notes look like lines of text, but … it does make for a faster “brain dump” experience sometimes)
I’m confused again, what needs to be explained? If you could give a more coherent explanation of what you don’t understand how to do in Tinderbox then we fellow users might be better able to help.
Please also note, that this is a user-to-user forum. If you’ve a beef with Eastgate’s marketing or support please mail it in to the company: this is not the place for such things.
As a long term owner of Tinderbox, as opposed to user, I’ve tried to introduce TB in my workflow in fits and starts, and it never quite gelled. The alternative of course is that today i have thousands of bits of notes with no way to link them or to pull them in a coherent whole.
When I heard about Roam, i was interested, and I started playing with it - with similar conclusions to many people: the paradigm is easy to use, the “on the fly” bidirectional link creation is very good at helping create a brain dump, and there is no way in hell i’m paying $30 a month … until I realised, again like others before me, that TB was probably pretty close to the local Roam instance I was dreaming of, without the “viral marketing hype” that is frankly a little grating, and with immense teaching resources.
And so for the past week or so, I’m invested - again - in putting my stuff in TB, and for now it’s working.
But I want to address @Agam’s comment re “better job to show how these things are Replicable”. I absolutely see where this comes from: Roam’s value, for me, was to click together the puzzle that was TB in my brain for years. And for all the value that aTBRef and this forum represent, there’s always been the feeling that we were missing a simpler way to start scaling the mountain.
I’d really like this NOT to be about Roam but to be about TB, so I’m going to open a new thread about it (A TB Starter Kit?).
If it’s not an imposition, I think many would be interested in more depth on this. What sort of work do you work? In retrospect, what was once unclear that now is clear?
I think the gist of it is the frictionless notetaking afforded by typing [[blabla]] and having a note named blabla created in the system, complete with bidirectional link to my current note.
I often have to deal with short term projects, involving people who I may or may not already know, for organizations I may or may not already know.
Creating the organisations and people ahead of time for each project is a very high friction point of my current IT system (whose replacement, as a side job, I’m supposed to manage this year). Having to do it in my own note tracking system was too much: so I have a loose collection of hundreds of .md files, and I’m way way way behind on everything.
The ability in Roam to just type in some info on the project, then come back afterwards and fill in the correct details is priceless.
But then I realized that Roam has none of the data management chops that TB would afford me. (don’t even mention the whole Cloud vs Local debate). My first impulse was to look up the dimly remembered wikilinks in TB - which I didn’t realize had been deprecated, and bidirectional links - which I understand are not necessarily on the roadmap.
The point of TB, of course, is that I can make all of this happen programmatically. So now I have a clear view of WHAT I want out of TB, and it’s getting easier to build it in my daily routine.
Special mention to Hook.app, as well, which is invaluable in bringing links to my IT system (no API, of course), my OmniFocus task management system and my Office 365 (files and emails) into one place
100% agree – would be an excellent added feature in Tinderbox.
(FWIW, no doubt Roam gets this from Media Wiki and/or Connected text and elsewhere in the hypertext canon. Roam is an imitator, not an innovator. IMO all the (annoying) hype about Roam is about this feature.)
That’s fair comment. The implementation is very easy to understand and work with at a fairly simple level (which si all a lot of people need) and it’s very frictionless - to a point. If you’re within that boundary, it has its attractions.
After that point, it’s all hacks and handmade little bits of tweak on Github. ne might hope it’ll mature beyond that, but it’ll be some while, I think
I agree. I use TB for many tasks, but have yet to optimize it as a knowledgebase. In Roam, the frictionless creation of bidirectional links, and the listing of clickable links immediately below the text, are very powerful features. The listing of “unlinked references” is also very useful. Achieving something similar in TB would be a very welcome addition.
If I remember correctly, tinderbox 5 had a button on the note window that pulled up a clickable link list. I wonder if adding a button on the note window that pulled up roadmap would make it more intuitive to find for new users and let it serve a function similar to a link list?
Yes.
More generally, Roam reminded me where I was “locally”, in relation to my immediate surroundings. This is done through the “Daily Note” gimmick, were you’re encouraged to ground your notes temporaly, and the “linked references” and “unlinked references” post scriptum, which show your immediate conceptual surroundings.
One common complaint about Hook is that the local network is not visible. You don’t know what’s linked and what’s not. When I try to link together some e-mails, some text files, a webpage and an omnifocus task, I don’t want to have to remember to link each bit to each other bit.
In TB this is also true, although agents and maps and adornment should provide good building blocks.
In Roam, the “unlinked references” is great at jogging connections (but again, in a more limited, albeit more directly marketable, way).
I guess I’m adding this to the pile of little problems to solve.
With all this discussion of linking it’s ironic that Tinderbox’s maps allow for spatial hypertext where no links are needed to make sense of relationships, with position, colour, shape, etc., doing this task. That’s not to say links are bad. Quite the opposite, they are a fundamental part of the notion of hypertext. Nonetheless, they aren’t a requirement for all uses of the Tinderbox.
Meanwhile, for those who are link-centric in their thinking, check out Hyperbolic view. It is a fairly recent addition to the app (new in v8) and has the attraction of showing the link network, and breaking out of the fact that a map only even shows one container within the document.
Please do not construe these musing as a criticism of TB and its unique strengths. They are meant to be constructive. I realize that what I need can be accomplished in TB, but I am attempting to reduce the friction. I’d like to roam through my TB without having to constantly create tools (e.g. Agents) or open and close windows (e.g. Roadmap).
My usage scenario: Define a concept (keyword) in a note. Link that concept to all other notes mentioning that concept, by simply tagging that concept (e.g. [[ ]]). Find all other notes that mention this concept by simply clicking on the link I just created, without having to create an Agent or searching for it. Navigating to that concept’s page will reveal not only the note’s name, but the text in which it is embedded. Importantly, the concept I navigated to will also reveal links (and the text in which they are embedded) to other text that include this concept.
Maps, and Hyperbolic, are very useful, but are not very practical for larger datasets. And they display only $Name, and limited $Text.
Without the cost of engineering new features, this is doable via the view pane Find (invoked by Cmd+F). In fact typing [[concept]] is no keystroke saving over [Cmd]+F and typing the concept string and hitting Return.
How is this concept to be defined within $Text? ‘[[’ is already used as the trigger for quick-links so using [[ ]] as a marker wouldn’t work - at least not without destroying a different existing feature.
Mark: You are, of course, correct that a search produces a list of (clickable) titles of relevant notes. The friction arises from the fact that these results are impermanent, and the search has to be repeated each time. A lesser point of friction is that, in TB, the results of a search are displayed as a series of $Names. To determine the context in which the searched, one needs to click on each title to reveal the note. In Roam (and VooddoPad and others), a new note is generated—and is continually updated—as the link is defined. In a sense the knowledge base grows, creating new notes, as these links are created. It is possible to achieve this by creating an Agent, but this requires a few steps. Again, trying to reduce friction for an function that exists in TB.
A function that is missing is the ability to easily track and follow both inbound and outbound links (“bidirectional links”) that are clickable. Roadmap and Browse Links are useful, but require multiple steps to navigate across a lage file.
The Quick Link ([[]]) feature in TB is very powerful, although it links only to existing note, and cannot be used to create a link to a new note. This, too, is only an issue of friction, and not function.
All the features of Roam, the usage scenario mentioned by @AsafKeller, and many more features, can be accomplished with MediaWiki – and other options too, but MediaWiki is well supported and pervasive. I have MediaWiki installed on my personal NAS and it does very well. There are very inexpensive hosted-MediaWiki options as well. Far less than Roam’s theoretical monthly cost (if the owner can be believed). I do not use my personal MediaWiki instance in alignment with Tinderbox, my wiki has a different focus.
Just pointing out that there are tool options that do not require much effort to set up, and do not rely on vapor to operate.
I second @AsafKeller’s points. I also understand that there is, by design, a heavy bar on engineering new features in TB. I think we need to make a use case scenario where our “missing tools” would truly benefit users, and the workaround are difficult to manage.
To be honest, doing this is more difficult than I imagined, and frankly, my appreciation for the Socratic nature of this forum goes up every day.
It seems to me that the big feature that TBX is missing here is the ability to create text links with action code. If this were possible, it would be a relatively simple task to create an edict that adds links to all incoming notes to $Text.
For example, here is a TBX document that has a note that uses an edict to collect the names of the notes that link to it with a link of type “tracked”, and puts their names in a LINKS section of $Text:
Unfortunately while we can put the names of the notes into $Text, we cannot link to them because adding text links with action code is not supported. However, given that we can now format strings with action code via string.bold et al, this seems like a natural extension of functionality. @eastgate is there any chance of getting this functionality?
I like the idea in general, but how practical/easy is the idealised case in a real world setting. How are we, as the user, defining the anchor text. In simple examples like above, “Note 1” occurs once in the $Text but it’s not realistic to assume such a uniqueness for anchor text in actual use. The move (circa v5 era) from essentially plain text+limited emphasis to an RTF $Text space make it harder to quickly/easily track character-offsets in the run of text. Indeed, the TBX stores a ‘plain’ form of $Text as well as the RTFD data presumably for this purpose as links are defined by character offsets.
I can see that I might ask for for a link to be added to (the end of?) $Text and supply the anchor text. However, I feel that only partially matches the idea above, but might be what is practical.
FWIW, I like the general idea lest the above make it appear otherwise.
