To make it work (if it worked), one needs to uncheck $ReadOnly in the watched note.
BTW, changes made in Tinderbox to DEVONthink watched documents do not get synced back to DEVONthink, either. (When $ReadOnly <> true)
I’m with you on 1 - I’ve used Tinderbox for many years now but have certainly only ever scratched the surface. However, I use it every day and it’s indispensable for an open-ended history of medicine project which has whole warrens of detours, all of which are kept in easy contact with the main thread and each other in just a few Tinderbox docs. (+ DT3 (holding) + Scrivener (prose) + Drafts (iPhone moments))
I tried Obsidian for a while (and a few others) but - and this might sound a tad odd - Tinderbox is the only software of this kind in which I have never felt claustrophobic or overwhelmed by the mass of material I am working with.
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Hey there, not at all. Tinderbox is extremely useful right out of the gate. It unfolds like a glorious onion with endless layers, not just internally, but it also connects with other apps/experiences and standards. It is extremely extensible. Also, everything I learned I picked up from the community. Ask us anything, and we’ll help you out. 
On that now, what type of work are you looking to get done? I’m hosting a workshop next Friday morning, maybe you’d like to join us.
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Hmm…this is a hard question. It is comparing apples and oranges. Both apps have their place, and I know many people that use both. Personally, as I am focused on not just taking notes to produce publishable output, going down that Tinderbox path is a no-brainer. Tinderbox’s core capabilities (prototypes, attributes, an action code, and export code/templates) have no parallel in any other app I’ve seen. I’ve tried using Obsidian several times and get running into deadends. With Tinderbox I can curate my knowledge and assemble/reassemble it into any output that I want. It can be easy to fall into the trap of this app doing it this way, so I want that app to do it that way, too. Tinderbox is extremely flexible; it just takes some getting used to. Schedule a call with me via DM, and I’ll give you a private demo.
Honestly, and I’m not being melodramatic as the community can attest to my evaluation, Tinderbox, and this community fundamentally and positively affect me and my life. It has helped me see and contribute to the world in new ways.
I don’t think so. I have several TBX files/projects with over 10,000 notes, all linked together. I tend to work in one and then split them off once they start to specialize. By the time you get to this point, however, I’m confident that you’l have all the skills you’ll need to thrive with the tool.
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@dmrogers blog was a deadly link. Olympus cameras are my achille’s heel.
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Sorry to resurrect this thread but I spent a little irritating time with obsidian. I can see why people might like it for linear PKM tasks, but everything about it is obnoxiously narrow to me.
For background, I cut my teeth on HyperCard and was loosely familiar with Mark’s focus on hyperlinking and exploring ontological expressions of thought on computers back in the 90s (back before ultra links and Oakley hyperlinks when I was looking for ways to show in documents what I was able to display in HyperCard stacks that were built by Fortran matrices calculated on a CRAY 3) - Mark has long focused on those two aspects: spatial representation AND linking. The types of links tinderbox offers is unrivaled. And it’s meaningful.
Obsidian has one link type and scripting it like a bolt on after thought to me. For tinderbox (and HyperCard) scripting is at the core and a necessary essence of the heart (cards in HyperCard, notes in tinderbox)
The ontology I love is the ability to define what a “card” (HyperCard) or “note” (Tinderbox) means—tasks, scenes, concepts—without a preset mold. The freedom is crafting systems (hierarchies, relationships) via flexible structures (fields/properties, buttons/links), spatial visuals (cards/maps), and scripting (HyperTalk/agents), all open-ended like a workbench, not a template. Obsidian (Markdown-based, graph-focused) and Notion (database-driven, block-based) feel “unattractive” because they impose file-based or table-like models, with scripting as an afterthought, lacking the hypertext soul and raw malleability of HyperCard/Tinderbox. You want tools that let you invent, not adapt.
I can remember very old discussion lists with Mark expounding on this and at the time I didn’t give him enough credit for this simple tenet of what he’s made: tinderbox has no prejudice of what you need. It’s your job to make that and tinderbox’s job is to give you all the tools to make that. Obsidian has no such concept.
So if I were to bullet list concepts of essence that tinderbox has - at the greats pains Mark has shed to make:
- User-driven ontology
- Hyper-text as a first class citizen
- Spatial and visual thinking
- Integrated scripting as an essence
- Timeless, open-ended depth
I think obsidian and much of the other modern shiny things sucking the air out of the room in PKM lack nearly all the essence of those - HyperCard had it. Tinderbox has it.
Just finding anything else that has the depth of linking tools and types is impossible. But I don’t see anything, especially obsidian or notion that doesn’t require me to make trade offs on how I represent data because those tools were made with their own prejudices and limitations and never considered that I’d need what I’m trying to do (the more cynical side of me that sees modern software as ill-informed and half-baked makes me think the developers never even considered the deeper concepts or encountered such ideas as PARC). Tinderbox has.
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It’s interesting that software that one chooses not to use based on whatever personal standards one has, is “obnoxious”.
Yes, but it’s been that way fro a long time. I suspect such judgement falls out from a zero-sum sense of what is ‘best’ (but: for whom?, by what measure?) and the lie we are told about ‘good’ software being ‘intuitive’. Things not being subjectively intuitive certainly seems to drive a lot of angst, q.v. all the erstwhile anger that Tinderbox wasn’t build around Markdown—that being the ‘obvious’ design metaphor of that time. Happily we’ve moved on, another meme abandoned to the past. Needing to be like [something else] is a fashion/herd instinct, not a prima facie need. Indeed, who cares about that, if the app does what we, individually, need of it?
Nothing is without opinion or design intent, yet I think Tinderbox is—or tries to be—unopinionated. Increasinly, I reflect on how that plays out in the advice often given to new starters that the way to ‘learn’ the app is to have a task, not least as style of use varies more than we thing. It is certainly not a tool where you learn the minimum keypresses needed to get a reward.
Who said that? I was careful in how I worded what I said.
If I had to pick one that has promise in the thinking category as opposed to linear PKM, Tana has a lot going for it - but, for me, the cloud thing is a death knell as it will always have carrying costs to access your data.
I think “extremely unpleasant” might be a little over the top, but that’s the way lots of criticism is written. Adam Gopnick has a wonderful essay on food criticism:
There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher are the masters, is essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.
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Hah! I should have used metaphor instead- too much a litigator - between the linearity of it and the assumptions its form imposes, it’s like trying to carry a box down a very long crowded hallway after a big meal instead of having an open airy field.
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I completely agree with you. I have tried all these tools…and I keep coming back to Tinderbox. Yes, TBX takes time to learn, but so does everything. But once I learn it and implement it in Tinderbox, I can continually reuse the effort (“my future self thanks me”). I struggle with the ability to incrementally formalize, visualize, re-use, and output into any format I want with any other tool. Because of Tinderbox, I’ve been able to build my thinking and publishing system (5Cs), which I use and leverage every day for my work.
Michael
5Cs School (next 5Cs Mastering Tinderbox 6-Week Cohort kicks off April 18th).
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This is a topic that, as far as I can recall, has come up several times. Can we really compare bananas and cucumbers? I’m not old enough to have known Hypercard, but I used Obsidian for about two years to take notes on readings I usually took with Tinderbox and, after a period of astonishment, I was really disappointed by the illusions I had created in it. I wrote something about it. At first, I was amazed by how quickly Obsidian searches through notes and how easily it can create links between notes and visualize these links using a graph. Eventually, I realized that the thought process I usually did with Tinderbox had been completely wiped out. So I went back to Tinderbox, which, even reduced to its most basic functions — taking notes and exporting them into a text editor —, remains for me the note-taking tool par excellence. Now, I realized that I needed to search not only in my notes, but also through my resources: PDFs, calls for papers, calls for articles, bibliographies, etc. And for that, I can’t just rely on Tinderbox, or I would have to combine Tinderbox with another tool and I know that Tbx can easily handle it using SourceURL attribute, for instance.
But, for me, today, as I want to search through a mass of documents and connect these documents together, the simplest thing is still to use a database, and that’s what I do with DEVONthink. To my knowledge, Obsidian isn’t yet able to search PDFs, which DEVONthink does perfectly. The day it does, Obsidian will become a serious competitor. For now, when it comes to take notes for an article or make a concept map—but this list is not exhaustive—Tinderbox remains the King.
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The OmniSearch (free) community plugin for Obsidian will do this.
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There’s a difference!
I suspected that a plugin had been created for this, but I stuck to the system modules. Anyway, DEVONthink is designed for research; it’s in its DNA.
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Yes, I agree. Dealing with PDFs in Obsidian while an app spec-built for this purpose (DEVONthink) sits next door in the Dock, is not on my list. (And, DEVONthink knows all about the contents of my Obsidian vaults for just this reason.)
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Having a portable environment (iOS) for visual notes that I can refer to and edit from anywhere is so important to me that I couldn’t manage without Obsidian.
Having a staging ground where I can quickly work on visual relationships at an exigent yet portable level is also essential for me. Obsidian’s Canvas offers just that, and allows me to link to and develop Notes that I may ultimately graduate to Tinderbox.
Obsidian also allows me to offload the ephemerals, the never-pursued links and the eternally-incomplete thoughts that would make my Tinderbox projects unwieldy. It helps retain focus on my project file(s).
Obsidian‘s vault architecture, although shallow, keeps my areas of interest practically segregated yet sufficiently linked to minimize search and link friction at the early stages. I have several concurrent Tinderbox projects, but just one Obsidian vault.
And that’s not the only other program I deploy extensively. Apple Numbers displays simultaneous views of multiple tables and complex relationships between bodies of raw data that would take too long to cudgel together in any other software (just me). Leave alone the at-a-glance what-if scenarios, lookups, etc that I can easily and rapidly scale, save, and customize.
I recognize that the original thread relates to an and/or examination/evaluation. To that extent I’m content to be in the latter camp, as well as to be able to harness the power of Tinderbox, when I need it.
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See this is where my comparison was pushed - and I think it’s great that DevonTHINK bubbled up in this discussion - it’s another insanely capable example of the kind of differences I was trying to highlight - as a concept of knowledge and thinking using a computer. It’s a concept dovetailing Mark’s Thinking with Tinderbox release.
DEVONthink and DTTG let me do everything with documents and nailing notes on the go. In some ways, it has all the open ended capabilities that tagging and outline are readily there for me also. But that’s a philosophical height aspired to in DT’s essence.
It’s this philosophical goal of these tools that make the magic of using them - that’s what I was trying to capture above.
Nothing is going to be like using Tinderbox unless it sets it goals on aspirations as lofty as Mark has and had in making this tool Tinderbox for us. Similarly, nothing compares to DT because they had a lofty goal from the beginning. As did HyperCard, etc. and that’s why I was using the word linear and other cramped concepts to describe what philosophies inform the development of so many other tools — they aren’t informed by or inspired for this task we want.
That doesn’t mean obsidian and notion don’t make great tools to get a project into a gantt chart or manage to do lists. The issue is whether those tools were made to facilitate thinking - and what the concept of what makes thinking possible happens to be. That’s sort of my lament in this - so much of the modern software is so focused on product for value pricing that they never had any of these aspirations baked into their essence, and to me it is painfully apparent.
I think that’s where my criticism earlier may have been misunderstood. If obsidian helps you categorize and assemble the cites and biography of your thesis paper, great. Use it and be happy. But as far as the work (read “thinking”) of figuring out why you want those cites and those ideas in the paper to begin with, I find it to be like that dark cellar hallway that’s had shelving and crap piled along the wall and a chore to work around. So many of the other PKM products feel like that to me as well and that’s why I wanted to praise and identify this distinctive quality of tinderbox apart from the others - those other don’t have it because the concepts inspiring them weren’t there to begin with. I’ve already mentioned that Tana appears to have some of that DNA but because I don’t want my info locked up in a pay per go cloud, I haven’t played with it as much to see just how much of the DNA is in that young product.
To be clear on purpose: if we’re just comparing the need for a GTD list, then it’s all about whatever works and sure, whatever people like has no bearing on me and there’s all kinds of stuff out there. But the OP was describing obsidian and tinderbox as rivals in full purpose - I think my criticism is objective and grounded on capability. If we are talking about the relative strengths of those products towards all needs in note exploration, note taking, and thinking, there are objective differences and trying to describe that difference was something I wanted to express. Those tools like obsidian or notion are fundamentally something less than tinderbox - and I was trying to quantify what that “something less” really is.
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I agree with you. Personally, I use all the aforementioned tools, several times a week, maybe a bit more, but I use Tinderbox all day, every day—it sits at the center of my thinking and contribution (a.k.a. output) workflow. I’ve yet to find anything else like it.
Michael
5Cs School (next 5Cs Mastering Tinderbox 6-Week Cohort kicks off April 81th).
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