Date of viewing note

Off the Wall
1

I have a large database of notes now available for quick searches:

  1. Date of note creation
  2. Date the note was modified

And it would be great to have:

  1. Date the note was viewed

Is this possible?

2

There is certainly no built-in viewed date. In the old app design (until v5) there was a history view that showed a list all note visited, albeit only in the current session (see here).

This topic comes up occasionally and tends to founder of what a ‘visit’ is. We most easily think of deliberately seeking/reading a note. But there are all sorts of ways one might traverse through a note accidentally or in the course of reaching another note and still clocking up a visit. In the old app design, what is now the text pane was a separate window you had to open to see (visit!) the contents. Now merely select a note in a view—deliberately or not—means that note is visited.

So the question becomes, how does the app know what is a deliberately visit to a note.

At a slight tangent, Tinderbox does have a system attribute $Visits. It is in the ‘Storyspace’ group as it is for Storyspace compatibility. However, looking at this in current (v9) Tinderbox I don’t think $Visits is affected by Tinderbox use† and remains at the default zero.

†. I do wonder if this is an accidental effect of the v6+ Tinderbox app redesign. As in the above, what is a ‘visit’, as opposed to an incidental selection.

3

The criterion for viewing a note can be scrolling in the text of the note

4

I’ve just updated the aTbRef note on $Modified as it may not necessarily change according to an individual user’s assumptions. See the linked article for detail as to why this is so.

5

Yes, though as general Tinderbox suggested style is to use short $Text many notes won’t scroll as all $Text is visible in the Text area of the text pane.

So scrolling could be a trigger but not a reliable one for all users.

6

Or you can make a tricky trigger like this:
Move the mouse to the $Text area?

7

As I’m just a user, not sure about engineering, but as an indication of user intent it seems a reasonable trigger if the concept of a last-viewed date/time ($ViewedDate?) were to be adopted.

1 Like
8

That would be handy.
In the meantime, I now actively use Agents that track all notes created a given number of days ago and Agents that track all notes modified a given number of days ago

9

I think what might be viable is to record the last time the note was selected. Would that be helpful?

2 Likes
10

Great option!