You said here:
« At the risk of reducing everything to a crude level, it seems that you use DEVONthink to collect things, TheBrain to connect things, and Tinderbox to analyse things. »
In my recent new experiences, it seems that Tinderbox is for me now what it does best in its field, but that I tended to minimize or ignore: analyse things (tags, dates, names, authors, references, keywords…).
When it comes to visualize datas and notes that have to be seen in a contiguity space or for their contiguities, it is incomparable.
If you just need to connect things between them and freely associate one to another, TheBrain is a very good tool and I’ve been using it recently alongside Tinderbox. That said, I think that an analyst, or a psychoanalyst has to be able to write down things as they come: memories, associations, thoughts and so on. In that perspective and in my experience — but if I write in the field of psychoanalytical researches in the sciences of education and training, I am not an analyst —, Tinderbox is really a box that presents some similarities with what analysts call psychism. If I had time, I’d love to write a paper about the way users tend to feel Tinderbox as a “second psychism”.