Tinderbox is the most powerful knowledge management tool that I’ve ever come across—especially in that it works nicely with other applications and paradigms.
At first glance, it can seem daunting in its interface, but the design leans toward elegant simplicity rather than simplicity. @eastgate and the TBX community have spent the last two decades navigating the world of complexity to get to this elegant simplicity.
Tinderbox is a toolset that empowers you to get close to your thinking. To look at your thoughts through the 10 built-in views, your own templates, and an infinite number of open-source visualizations. It offers action code to automatically help you work with your thoughts and a templating layer to help you transform these thoughts into contributions.
You will find many people pine about the “steep learning” curve of Tinderbox. But, I think it is less about learning Tinderbox and more about learning about your own mind—metacognition—learning to ask yourself the “right questions”, to start viewing the world through the lens of metadata, and finally taking on the responsibility of adopting the right tool for the right job and leveraging community when you need help. Through Tinderbox, it is my experience that you can learn the languages of computing and knowledge management, learnings that extend far beyond your use of Tinderbox and into the rest of your life.
There are MANY resources to help you with Tinderbox:
- Our video library
- Tinderbox Weekly Meetups (see Calendar), Tinderbox Meetup Calendar (2024, 2025)
- The Community, i.e., this forum, https://forum.eastgate.com/
- The Tinderbox Way, Amazon.com
- A Tinderbox Reference File, aTbRef Site Map
- Tinderbox courses that I teach and consulting that I offer, https://5cs-of-knowledge-management.teachable.com/.
Again, it can take some time to familiarize yourself with Tinderbox, but once you do you can save time, generate better insights, create a lasting asset, learn new skills and ways of thinking, make friends along the way, and SOOOO much more.
Tinderbox has an internal mind map called Map View; Map View lets you build all kinds of mind maps. But it does not stop there; from there, you can take the same work and then create lists, presentations, tables, reports, and so very much more. I’m not familiar with MindNode, but I suspect we can find some nice synergies between the two tools. The case would be to leverage images between the two.
I would very much like to set up a call with you to discuss your cybersecurity interests. I’m involved in this field as well. I’ll DM you. Perhaps we can set up a Zoom call and discuss Tinderbox and Cybersecurity—and exchange ideas.
Best of luck on your journey!!!