Isolating the basics for this post has shown me that some things were not needed/ there was some rubbish that had snuck in. One wierd thing is that I had somehow created a user attribute that was creating a prototype out of anything that was in the Note field from Bookends for each reference. I’ve taken the opportunity to tidy this up, change the Prototype name to ‘Bookends Ref’, and upload the file: Tbx Bookend Ref and Explode example v2.tbx (5.6 MB)
You should use this file rather than the first version!
For this post, for clarity I changed my reference Prototype so that it shows various reference fields that have come across to Tinderbox. In the version I actually use, I just have the attribute ‘URL’ displayed, which acts as a clickable link to take me to that reference in Bookends. Note that the Reference URL attribute takes you to the external website ref for that reference.
Serendipitous that you should post this @mwra re. composite listings.I was going to say, In my reply re. the Bookends Ref prototype, that in e.g. the exploded Tinderbox note with the ChatGPT conversation about Business Startup Strategy, with 40 odd follow up questions by me, and with point and sub-point responses by ChatGPT, in outline you can expand all the response notes to a particular question, select them all, and then read the composite listing, rather than just the atomised responses, which isn’t so helpful.
However that seemed like too much detail.
Re. only having one editable field in multiple views of a Tinderbox document, have you noticed that at first you can view the text field of different notes in different windows, but after a while it reverts to showing the same note? I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I wonder if being able to view different text fields in different windows could become an option?
You actually can’t. This was possible back in the day, circa 2005, but as I understand it, changes to the Apple OS made it difficult, or at least at too high of a development cost, to have multiple windows showing different text.
Tinderbox documents have a set of selected notes. These inhere in the document, so all windows for a document share the selection. We intentionally delay updates of background windows so, for a time, you can see the previous selection. , Text Windows will always show their text, without regard to the selection.
I write a bit more about this in Thinking With Tinderbox. Viewed today, this was a plausible but incorrect design decision, but one which is costly to reverse.
Rather than switching between windows, consider switching tabs within a window.
Yes, because… @satikusala’s point above holds true for Tinderbox document windows, i.e those with both a view (left) and text (right) pane. You can open more than one for any document, but all such windows from the same document will use the same selection regardless of the view type/scope selected. For the same reason changing the selection in one window, changes it for all other windows based on that TBX. To open a new window use menu File ▸ New Window ( ⌘+⇧+N).
No, because… you can open a standalone text window via menu View ▸ Text Window (⌘+⌥+X). As a window in its own right it can take focus separately from a document window. A text window can show a Displayed Attributes table but has no linking widget and cannot open a Roadmap.
Tip: if editing something like a template or prototype note to change the inherited values or preview render in another note, open the former note as a standalone window and make edits there. The main doc window can then easily be used to judge the effect of the edits on the latter without having to shift focus in the document window (though you might need to click the view’s tab to refresh the window’s UI).
