Hello everyone! I’m hesitating about whether to try TBX and would like to seek some opinions from the community.
Background: Simply put, I’m looking for a tool that can ultimately archive complex content and themes. Here are my two main use cases:
University Studies: I want a tool that can be used for researching highly complex topics. One of my needs is that I really like the Outline + Zettelkasten format, while also being able to freely switch to a map mode similar to Curio. I might add various tags (I remember these are called attributes in TBX) to my notes, and I hope to have something like a Kanban board to help me categorize them.
Long-form Writing: Specifically, I’m currently building a new work, which includes a complex world-building (various genres, character relationships, historical events, etc.). I find Ulysses very difficult to organize this content. I noticed TBX and really like its Timeline view.
I’d like to ask if you think TBX is suitable for these two use cases?
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to compare TBX with other tools or “presuppose” its use. It’s just that the trial version doesn’t seem sufficient for me to fully evaluate it, and the high price makes me a bit hesitant. If it meets my needs, I will purchase it and start learning it.
Additionally, I have two small questions:
I noticed that TBX seems to struggle a bit with attachments. Compared to Curio and Evernote, does TBX require some extra setup for attachments? (I’ve noticed in past community posts that many people mentioned using URLs. Honestly, I hope it can embed notes… I’m just not sure if this is feasible).
TBX seems to use Apple Script. I’ve written some add-ons for Marginnote in the past – can I also use my own plugins in TBX? (Especially for customizing the user interface to make it easier to use, etc.).
Additionally: I major in Computer Science, so coding should be okay for me.
Welcome to the Tinderbox community! I’m in meetings all day, but there answers to the above, and hopefully others here can address them as i can’t just now…
I think you’ll like Tinderbox both for your studies and for world building. I think it excels at both (I would!).
There’s not as much user interface adaptability in Tinderbox as there might be in web apps. The tradeoff, though, is you do have native interface tools and native performance.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by embedding notes. Of course, a Tinderbox note can contain as many other notes as you like, and these notes form the implied hierarchy you see in Outline and Chart view. There remain some reasons to keep original media files — images, pdfs, videos — outside Tinderbox, but these reasons are less compelling than was once the case. It’s no big deal either way.
Thank you for your reply! I’m very flattered. Please allow me to clarify:
Yes, one of the reasons I want to switch to Tinderbox is that I don’t particularly like Electron apps. However, my question isn’t really about that: I’m actually curious if TBX provides APIs that would allow me to add “plugin-like” functionalities to accelerate my workflow. (For example: I might want to add an add-on or script that automatically uses the Gemini API for OCR on any image I add to a note, or uses some NLP to automatically add Attributes based on note content.)
Regarding the second point, “embedded note” actually refers to placing files directly within the TBX note. I’m used to pasting images directly into notes. In Curio, I can directly paste PDFs, videos, etc., and preview them right there – that’s the kind of “embedding” I mean. However, when I was browsing community posts before, I noticed that quite a few experienced users suggested using HTML-style images like <img src=> instead of pasting them directly into notes (as it seems to lead to unusually large file sizes and performance degradation).
My consideration for the second point primarily stems from my desire to migrate brainstorming and content generated in my Curio Idea Space to Tinderbox for further refinement and introspection. (While Curio is excellent for unstructured visual work, my in-depth use has revealed that it performs very poorly when handling structured content. This is one of the main reasons I’m looking at TBX.)
From my perspective, it absolutely is. I wrote my doctoral dissertation in Tinderbox. I’ve also written and am writing several books with Tinderbox, e.g., my textbook “mobile marketing essential” and a book on cybersecurity that I’m ghostwriting. In fact, I’ve been writing a publishing system—5Cs of Knowledge Management—that I find invaluable to my work.
The key is to remember that Tinderbox is a “toolbox” to empower your thinking and contributions.
You have several free and commercial resources to draw from.
Free Resources
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A Tinderbox Reference File (aTbRef), is a pre-built document template or example designed to showcase features, structures, or workflows within Tinderbox, serving as a guide or starting point for users to manage their notes and projects effectively.
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Tinderbox Forum, the TBX forum, is an online community where users of Tinderbox, the note-taking and knowledge management tool, share tips, discuss features and exchange ideas to enhance their workflows and productivity.
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Tinderbox Community Videos Part 1, A directory of over 150 videos drawn from Michel Becker’s training videos and the weekly Tinderbox meetups. We hit a limit of characters in the Discourse forum, so we split the directory into two parts (See Part 2).
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Tinderbox Community Videos Part 2, a directory of additional videos drawn from Michel Becker’s training videos and the weekly Tinderbox meetups. We hit a limit of characters in the Discourse forum, so we split the directory into two parts (See Part 1).
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Tinderbox Meetups (See weekly Tinderbox Meetup Calendar), The Tinderbox community hosts a weekly community meetup (every other Saturday and Sunday from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM PST, and the first Friday of each month at 4:00 PM PST). See the Tinderbox Meetup Calendar (2024, 2025).
Paid Resources
Tinderbox Backstage Community (PAID), gain early access to Tinderbox release and collaborate with the community at the edges (worth every penny and more!!!).
Yes, you can embed notes; however, if you’re leaning toward publishing and management your notes as reusable assets, from personal experience, I HIGHLY DON’T RECOMMEND THIS. After years of refinement I’ve developed a strategy for working with media in Tinderbox, that keeps the original media on the hard drive or in the cloud. You can, of course, embed your images, but this method comes with several consideration that may impact your downstream publishing effort.
Thank you for your detailed reply! I’ve actually been referring to your tutorial videos to learn TBX techniques. However, I haven’t seen this particular episode yet. I’ll definitely make time to study it in detail!
Glad to see you’re getting some input. As regards the ‘is it like Curio’ aspect, bear in mind that what you think you need is most often what you are used to doing most often. So, things like Evernote and Curio are more of an ‘everything bucket’. That term is not negative, but usefully descriptive. Another, and perhaps superior tool in that group is DEVONthink (DEVONtechnologies | DEVONthink, professional document and information manager for Mac and iOS.) which is used by quite a lot of Tinderbox users … for all their info bucket needs. So why use something >1 tool? Well, one size doesn’t normally fit all, so a presumption of using fewer tools is not necessarily more productive efficient. Why? Because it is best to use tools for what they are best at. As such, more important is the tools play nice with each other. Some noting/data tools get a rep as being data roach motels: info checks in but not out, i.e. export is not so hot. For your academic studies you’ll be writing essays where you’ll definitely want to draw info from your noting tools (if you can’t write assignments directly within them).
So what sort of things do you want to put in your doc: images, text, data? Does the image have to be in a note, or simply visible in the context of where you note (you can always link the two). IOW, need or simply past experience? If text, why embed it as an object when you can simply put the text itself into a note if you need to do close referencing. The source doc (PDF?) can still sit in you everything bucket and easily opened if/when needed. Again, do question assumptions masquerading as fixed needs.
University study implies tasks with citations, so consider a Reference Manager in your mix. The explanation is in the name. If you don’t already have one, getting one will save you much pain. A popular (free) choice is Zotero (https://www.zotero.org). Personally, I use Bookends ($$) (Bookends — Bookends for Mac) which I’m impressed by but realise budgets vary.
Another current assumption is we need everything everywhere or every device all the time. That is really just avoiding understanding one’s real needs. But you want to know your mobile noting tool allows meaningful export.
Anyway, Tinderbox can certainly help in both your tasks. It’s well worth giving it a try and the community here in the forum can help with getting started question and I see you’ve already been given links to plenty of (free!) resources.
Totally get the “everything bucket” vs. specialized tools point. My move from Curio to TBX is exactly because Curio’s great for visual brainstorming but falls short on structured content – that’s where I’m hoping TBX shines. I’m already using DEVONthink for my “info bucket” needs, so good to know many TBX users do too. The goal is definitely for tools to play nice.
On the embedding/attachments: You hit the nail on the head with “need or simply past experience?” My “embedding” desire comes from Curio’s direct paste/preview, which is super convenient for quick visual reference during brainstorming. But yeah, if it means bloat/performance issues in TBX, I’m open to linking. My main concern is less about the file being in the note, and more about how easily I can interact with it visually within the note’s context.
The API/scripting side is where my CS background kicks in. I’m less worried about manual linking and more interested in automating things like OCR/NLP on linked/referenced images/docs to auto-populate attributes. That’s the real workflow acceleration I’m looking for.
And yes, citations are key for uni! Already on Zotero, so that’s covered.
Thanks again for the insights and the reminder to question assumptions. Looking forward to diving deeper into TBX!
Sounds as though you’ve covered/are covering the bases re spread of app. If you are/will use DEVONthink then I’ve a hunch using that locus to do your OCR/NLP might be as good better. I’m not an expert on DEVONthink by any means. Anyone with deep DEVONthink like to chime in on this?
You’ll want to leverage two attributes for this $Fill, which will fill the note visually in Map view with the image, and $HoverExpression, which will show a pop-up of the image when you hover over it. These are EXTREMELY useful. Both these methods are used in my media library, https://youtu.be/WsNz82kf8wE.
There are several ways to auto-populate attributes, especially using natural language taggers and stream parsing (I do both all the time—especially when pulling in references from Zotero and meeting notes form Obsidian—there are some old meetups on this and I’m working on some new libraries).
When writing long form content, however, I find it better to have notes created and linked from the values in the attributes. This then lets me automatically create and curate my resources folder (aka zettlekasten), generate glossaries and all kinds of interactive indexes (people, organizations, regulations, technologies, figures, tables, references, etc.) that can be formatted as tables, lists, or be alphabetized (I hope to get this library release this weekend):
BTW, there is a great Pandoc integration using Zotero. Also, BetterBibTex is a must: Better BibTeX for Zotero. I done several meetups on this integration.
+1 for BibTeX output as I note OP is doing CompSci and LaTeX+BibTeX is generally the preferred writing method for theses/dissertations and journals/proceedings papers.
