My first real TBX: using Tinderbox to understand local wildfires

After joining the Tinderbox Meetup on 2021 09 25, I finally “got” a few Tinderbox concepts and started building a small TBX document to track wildfires in Oregon and California.

With just 11 notes in the document, I used Outline View and Treemap to understand acreage and containment.

Yes, a trivial example–but a good learning effort.

Wildfires 2021.tbx (97.4 KB)

I’m still working on using sorting in the Outline view with data columns …

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Well done! Lovely to see someone using treemap view.

Unless you ingested all the data via an imported table, you might find it useful to set Displayed Attributes ($DisplayedAttributes) for your prototype, like so:

That makes it easier to see the column view data when a note is selected (in other views). Like so:

Wildfires 2021.tbx 2021-09-29 14-31-27

Plus, as numbers of notes rise from a few to 100s or more, outline scrolling can get slower with column views on. Should that start to occur, another trick is simply to toggle the columns off whilst doing lots of scrolling and turn on again when done - the outline will remember the last-used column used fo column view.

At present everything is in the root (i.e. top-level) of the outline/map, and that is fine. But as you add other things, e.g. an agent, you don’t want them in your treemap. So, in the file attached below I have:

  • Added the default Prototypes folder (by adding a built-in prototype (File menu), then deleting that prototype and moving your prototype into it. This not a location but again, it keeps the prototypes out of the way of your data.
  • Set Displayed Attributes for the prototype as illustrated above.
  • Made a new root level container ‘DATA’ and moved all your per-fire notes in there.
  • At the same time, in your treemap view I have ‘hoisted’ it, so that it now looks only at the contents of ‘DATA’ so things like your prototype don’t show up in the Treemap where they aren’t really pertinent. Similarly, if you add an agent in the outline root, it won’t show in the treemap.

This file shows those ideas: Wildfires 2021 - ideas.tbx (99.5 KB). The above are not corrections! Just ideas to help you explore your data.

This is actually a really interesting project owing to the geographical aspect. You might like to look into getting address data for the fires, Geographic adornments,attributes Latitude and Longitude

Good luck with your project and thanks for sharing a really interesting file.

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Good going, @ptc97504!

What @mwra has added to the project is great! I also wanted to point out that once you start working with Container-level sorting (use the Sort option, Cmd-3 then Action Inspector, last tab), there’s no going back - it offers a next-level overview from spreadsheets, in that the Notes in successive Containers can each be sorted according to the priorities you need for each specific Container… hope this makes sense :slight_smile:

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