Good tip for some, I assume.
No. Haven’t needed a public library to 15 years+ Our locals are used only by people looking for internet access to find jobs, etc., I sure wouldn’t go to the library to access Lynda to see if I could learn to use software. I use the reading rooms at the LOC, but they don’t have Lynda.
For BPL and others, I just login to Lynda from home using my library card number.
Getting back to the main point of this thread, which was started with a plaintive appeal for easing the burden of climbing the TB learning curve: I have sympathy with both sides of this debate. There are those who are frustrated by the challenge of learning this tool, and those who advise taking the time and utilizing this forum and the host of other resources mentioned above.
I have little to add except the perspective of having used ConnectedText, a Windows program, that to me is the closest thing I have seen to TB. It is complicated, brilliant, sophisticated and has a steep learning curve. It too is a flexible tool that defies an easy way to teach it for all the reasons that have been outlined above. It took me 6 - 9 months to “get it” and to feel that I was able to use it with enough proficiency to meet my needs. Unfortunately it is no longer being developed, and this is in fact the primary reason I switched “sides” to Apple in order to find a good alternative
I find myself much more challenged by learning Tinderbox, and feel that in large part this is due to the documentation issue. CT had a good, but not great “Welcome” file, that was in essence a a help file. In addition there was/is a robust forum that one could go to for additional help. So when I hit a brick wall, I could go the help file, and would be able to answer my questions 80 or 90% of the time. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was difficult. On those occasions when I could not answer the problem I was trying to solve, I could turn to the forum, and receive the same generous help that is offered here.
By contrast, when I am stuck in TB, I find I go to a minimalist help file, then the Getting started and Actions and Dashboard tutorials, then ATBREf, then this forum to do a search, which usually leads to me to interesting reading for a few hours , but only solves my problem a percentage of the time. Then I either go to the one of the multiple other sources, or on occasion to ask a question on the forum. Perhaps it is partly my fault because I inherently do not want to bother folks who I assume are as busy as I am. In other words, the frustration comes not from the learning curve, but the complicated, time consuming and haphazard way the information is currently made available. I do believe it is incumbent on Eastgate to figure out a way to solve this problem, not any of the folks on this forum. ConnectedText cost $60 for a license and allowed for a much easier learning curve because the documentation was better organized and the workflow to find answers was much simpler.
I looked at Connected Text. It doesn’t appear to work on Macs.
Correct, but that wasn’t the point
[Disclaimer. I am the author of aTbRef, and am a volunteer here (i.e. not an Eastgate employee)]
Tinderbox is a toolbox, not a one-task utility. So, I believe you should expect to need to ask questions, not least because we users are all doing different things. I looked at the two previous threads here to which you posted. One is on time/calendaring, which is actually a very complex issue, and the other on an obscure UI aspect. Both are things where I’d not necessarily expect a detailed answer. Plus, aTbRef—as a result of your question here—now explicitly covers the problem. Asking questions in the forum are not a failure of an individual’s effort or of comprehension. Documenting everything Tinderbox might do is a Sisyphean task given the open-ended nature of the app; I’ve the scars on my back to underwrite that view.
It’s good to ask questions, not least (in my experience) because explaining it to another clarifies understanding of the task. My observation is this forum is responsive and helpful - certainly where people ask understandable questions.
If you’ve a particular problem with aTbRef by all means ask here (in a discrete thread in the relevant sub-forum), but bear in mind that aTbRef is not a task-based ‘how-to’ doc but a description of the toolbox to enable you to pull the necessary patterns your for your discrete use.
meanwhile, if you’ve a problem with Eastgate’s own materials (which I don’t think are exactly lack given the nature of the app), a polite email to support is a likely route to faster resolution of your needs.
Last time I looked, the Tinderbox help file ran to about 200 print pages. Hardly minimalist.
Let me try one more time to make the point that I think I and others have tried to make.
Consider me as a newbie who has invested some time and effort to learn the basics (Still am, but have been using the program for a few months):
I want to do what should be a fairly simple and routine task, to move a note to another container.
Here are the steps I might have to go through:
I don’t recall if this is exactly what happened, but it illustrates the difficulty.
I realize that a program of this complexity needs time to learn, but it is the lack of a unified source of help that can give me answers that seems to be missing. It is also the middle part of the learning curve that is difficult. The easy simple . stuff is documented well enough. The complex uses do have to be gained through personal development over time. But the time spent between simple and complex is made unnecessarily challenging. Personally, I would willingly pay for the next upgrade if the only new change were a more user friendly help system.
As it happens, using agent actions is an interesting edge case and not a common task. Understanding rests on understanding:
… I could go on. I appreciate I’m citing aTbRef but as it is included in the blanket condemnation of its usefulness, I think it only fair to debunk that assertion.
The disconnect, if there is one, it to treat the app as transactional rather than a toolbox for doing things, i.e. starting by saying “I want outcome X” rather than “how do I go about achieving outcome X”. If Tinderbox billed itself a a “tool for doing X” then I’d understand. But it doesn’t, so I think this characterisation is fair. Still, trying to help people isn’t a task for those looking for praise.
As it happens, the “fairly simply and routine task” you select here had, for many years, a simple answer: “you can’t do that.” (That’s the answer adopted by many Tinderbox alternatives for many, many Tinderbox tasks.)
I don’t think that actions that move notes to a different container are a good idea. They’re certainly not routine. I don’t believe I’ve every used this kind of action myself. For years, my answer was simply that, if you want to do this, you’re doing the wrong thing. Don’t move notes around: use their aliases. That’s what agents do.
Nonetheless, a few expert users really did want to move notes around. So, we made it possible. Clearly, you think that was a mistake and that I am a fool for undertaking the task.
The problem you encountered in the second part of your exercise is straightforward: you wrote one thing and you intended to write another. All Tinderbox designators are lowercase; every Tinderbox designator is described in the current Help, and every Tinderbox designator is demonstrated in the Cookbook and document exhaustively in aTbRef. That said, I run into issues of this general description all the time — as do almost all people who use procedural languages.
But, to repeat myself, this task is not meant to be regarded as simple and straightforward: it’s an esoteric task for expert users that was only made possible on the request of specific export users.
FWIW, designators are described in the app Help: Help -> Queries and Actions -> Designators. For reasons I don’t fully get, the page doesn’t show if using the Help windows’s search box. The designators are listed in the correct case and in ‘code’ typeface indicating the value (case) to use. As the listings are all lowercase with some mixed case, this alone ought to indicate the terms are cases-sensitive, even if the article doesn’t explicitly state that face.
It’s quite interesting: I had exactly the same. Only the last point was different: I did not curse, but I was happy 
It can be tedious sometimes to find the correct solution, but you get rewarded with a great software, that does in the end exactly, what you want it to do! And: You can accelerate the process immensely with the help of this forum: Without the forum, especially @mwra (or the support at @eastgate), I think, a lot of people would be lost…
FWIW, and recognizing that I’m responding to the actual creator of the program!, I have a stamp that I routinely use to move notes to a different container. It’s an archiving stamp, and when I’ve marked item done and handled other housekeeping, I apply this stamp to one or more selected notes: $Container(original)="\Data\Archives\"
That’s a way of getting notes out of whatever working-data container they are in, to a different archives area. (And then, periodically, I manually collect notes from Archives and copy-and-paste them to a different Archives.TBX long-term storage file.)
Also I recognize that I am talking about a stamp, which you have to use intentionally, rather than an action to move items around in the file, which could have unintentional results.
My curse was the amount of time it took to get to an answer. Just to clarify to everyone. My issue is certainly not with the voluntary contribution of anyone on this forum, nor with the content of the responses which is universally knowledgeable, prompt and valuable.
My issue is that so many questions have to be answered by hunting in so many different sources. This tool cries out for a comprehensive go to source in which 80% of answers can be found. This is solely the responsibility of the developer, not othersEven the comments above about the fact that my efforts to solve the problem of $Container(original) was not routine, begs the question of “How was I, as a newbie, supposed to know that?”
I have tried to make my point. I am convinced byt his exchange that the help I and others have asked for with respect to documentation will not be answered, and I will need to stop trying to learn the program. For me, the reward is not worth the enormous effort required.
I understand how you feel. I am fairly new to Tinderbox and have decided on a one step at a time and slower learning process when it comes to Tinderbox. It sounds that, like me, you haven’t got much time to sit down and work through the documentation. Experimentation can be enlightening but also deeply frustrating - especially with a live project.
What would be ideal would be a series of ‘how to’ training videos on something like lynda.com and I am hoping to make some videos in the future as I discover new ways of using Tinderbox. The problem is, of course, time. I am so busy doing other things, I can never find the time I need to create videos or do many other things that are on my general ‘to do’ list. In a perfect world, I would stop everything I was doing (or trying to do) and concentrate on just learning Tinderbox. That isn’t going to happen!
I see Tinderbox as a valuable tool and it becomes ever more useful to me but it is taking me a long time (and much longer than I thought) to get to grips with it. I’ll probably never master it fully.
My advice would be, stick with it and if you’re stuck, work with others to find a solution. I’m finding it is the best bit of software I have for collecting my thoughts and data.
Richard
Don’t give up too easily! As you point out it took you 6-9 months to get proficient with CT.
It would help others here to help you if you gave more of an idea of what you are expecting except ‘better’. I’ve a hunch part of the issue is trying to map your deep expertise with CT onto a another deep problem. From the little I could find online, CT appears be wiki-based (or similar to a wiki). Tinderbox, IME, rather different to wiki in terms of how you write it (I spend a lot of time in Wikipedia & wikis as part of my current PhD). Given the multi-facetted nature of Tinderbox, it isn’t practical to document every outcome. ‘Popularity’ doesn’t help much as after >10yrs helping new users I see little commonality in the outcome of people’s work; it is the methods involved where common activities occur. Learning the latter is the fast way to bootstrapping Tinderbox knowledge.
Edit:
I found and downloaded the CHM Help file from CT’s website to a PC and I can’t say I’m much the wiser as to where to start with it. This reinforces the notion that he likely underlying problem is as much familiarity with CT and using it as an (unwitting) reference model as it is the organisation of Tinderbox help data. Using [some other app] as a reference model is a regular stumbling block for starters as they try and make Tinderbox work like the app with which they are more familiar rather than work with Tinderbox own design intents.
Anyway, don’t give up. We’re here to help. 
Thank you. You are probably partly correct in that I may be trying to duplicate my CT experience onto TB. However, I am no spring chicken, and over the years have tackled some fairly complicated programs, and become proficient enough to meet my needs. I think TB may be the most complex, but to sound like a broken record, I feel that is not solely due to my old brain slowing down. Thanks for the encouragement. I’ll try to stick with it.
Take a look at this link: I see the CT and TB in a very similar fashion as outlined here:
I’m curious, how do you see it as rather different?
Personally, I absolutely see Tinderbox as a wiki (or at least, one of the ways I see it is as a wiki). It doesn’t have the versioning, but in terms of linking between notes it works the same.
The one thing I see that’s a bit different is how in wiki you might create placeholder links while writing… but even that’s possible in Tinderbox using the “Add footnote as sibling” command – just select some text that you want to link to a new note, run “Add footnote as sibling” and keep editing the current note.
Aha. Reading the article I can see how the comparison is made. I can also see how it can be, quite unintentionally, misleading depending on your frame of reference. Indeed, the author notes re both apps: “No they do not look alike or even behave alike.” The similarity is that you can use metadata (attributes - both built-in and user-added. The difference is how you make links and interact with metadata.
CT uses wiki mark-up in an edit space where both text and metadata are set. TB uses a rich text [sic] text space for a note’s text and links/metadata are handled by other parts of the UI. So, actually quite a different means to a convergent end. Thus CT knowledge doesn’t necessarily help get you traction in TB except you will be used to defining and using attribute values. I also think the network (map) view in CT is different to TB map views which show a single container s a network (though see also the Roadmap and the new Hyperbolic view view).
TB does have a wiki-like method for adding in-text links to other notes (Quick Links). The method will likely seem familiar to you, but note it is a recent addition to TB so using it won’t necessarily help bootstrap you to understanding other features. TB has two forms of internal link: basic (note-to-note) and text (text-to-note, or text-to-text). Text can also have external (Web) links.
If you haven’t already (I think you have?), do work through the two tutorial PDFs accessed via the health menu. Don’t worry about whether the end result is relevant to your work, but rather concentrate on the individual tasks as these are the building blocks of TB use. Also, do lots of small test files to try new (to you) techniques before you apply them in a larger file to help avoid having too many possible things to figure out when outcomes aren’t as expected. Once you understand the technique you can ditch the files.
(FWIW, I too have been learning new apps for some while - since the late 80s for me. Frankly lots of them were hard - until I got initial traction on how their individual design worked)
@pat, we may be arguing angels on pinheads here. I guess it depends on experience & POV. Wikis date from 1994. Tinderbox draws from Storyspace (still around) which was first shown at HT’87 (but dates back to c.1982). I see some extra hypertextual features in Tinderbox vs a wiki but I don’t think it’s a point to stand on.
Actually, I drew the distinction above because CT is much more similar in method & markup to a ‘normal’ wiki. So both apps may general sets of linked notes but how they do that is subtly different and Tinderbox is not necessary to someone well versed in CT, MediaWiki, and the like. The aim at present is to help @lsebba get some traction in Tinderbox and get comfortable with its slightly different approach.