Serious noob here, just starting with the trial. I see from the tutorial how to create notes and then create a container into which I can place those notes. But when I move notes into a container, they no longer respond quickly. Outside of the container, they behave perfectly. Inside the container, it takes a series of mouse clicks to wake the things up. Worse, the notes tend to disappear “behind” the container. If I move the container out of the way, there are my missing notes.
I stripped things down to a blank tinderbox file to be sure I wasn’t bumping up against the notes limit for the unregistered trial version.
I’m a one-day-old newby with Tinderbox, but I’ve, um, been using computers since 11th grade science camp in 1972. In other words, I’ve got mouse use don’t pretty well, as a rule. Or do I?
We’re talking map view, of course. Here’s how things work:
To move a note INTO a container, drag it over the container, and drop it. The note — reduced in size, moves into the container at the drop point.
To move a note OUT of a container, drag the note and drop it in your map.
All of this is easier if your container is of ample dimensions
You might expect to be doing this all the time, but dragging notes out of a container is actually pretty rare. It’s often easier to organize the hierarchy in outline view. But dragging notes out of a container is fine.
Thank you, but my problem is that once a note is dropped into a container, it no longer responds well. I can’t read its contents, nor can I move it. It’s dead in the water. But with some persistence, it seems to come around – after which it may well disappear behind the surface of a container. (And, it this point, I feel the container is more like a magician’s handkerchief, except it’s my notes that it’s cloaking and revealing, at the whim of I don’t know who.
You can’t select notes inside a container in map view.
If you want to read their texts, you can
zoom into the container (double-click the background, or down-arrow)
or
switch to outline view (either switching tabs, or ⌘-⌥-O) and select it there
You cannot click-to-select a note inside a container. “Why not?”, you ask. The problem is that it’s hard to see what’s selected inside a container. Then, you press [Delete] for some reason and a note you didn’t know was selected is deleted. Yikes!
This arrangement has been in place for something like 20 years; it’s second nature to many of us. The constraints of displays (and mice) from that era made it a good precaution. I think it might be time to revisit the question.
But there’s still the problem that a container’s map might be much larger than its viewport. So there’s often no good way to see or manipulate all the notes inside the container in map view.
OK, thanks for your patient explanation of what must be like using a toothbrush to you folks. I’ll keep at it and see what I bump into tomorrow. Sorry if I bothered you after hours. I’m in GMT+1, and it’s well after midnight here.
Outline vs. Map Interface is a whole section of articles on navigating the two oldest views in Tinderbox.
Most apps have a single presentation of their data. Others, like Tinderbox have multiple views. Essentially it is the same source data presented a different way. No one has to use them all, but the neat part is they are there for when a given view lets you do something you can do in the current view. although a document only shows one view at a time (in the left, view, pane) you can have multiple tabs/windows each with a different view and/or scope of the document.
As you’re starting out, don’t overlook the two PDF tutorial/expalnatory articles in the Help menu. For general reference about Tinderbox check out aTbRef (source† of the above links).
†. Disclaimer: I’m aTbRef’s author. It covers the app since 2005 (the Tinderbox app came out in 2001). The current site describes the app as at v10 and changes since.
