Tinderbox Meetup Sunday 3 March 2024: Working with Dates, Hyperbolic Views and Link Types

[satikusala (Michael Becker)]

Tinderbox Meetup Sunday 3 March 2024: Working with Dates, Hyperbolic Views and Link Types

Level	Intermediate
Published Date	3/4/24
Revision	1
Type	Meetup
Tags	5CKMEl, 5Cs of Knowledge Management and Exchange, Dates, Eastgate, Epoch, Hyperbolic View, ISO 8601, Identity Praxis, Link Types, Tinderbox, Unix Time, aTbRef
Video Length	01:36:22
Video URL	https://youtu.be/h0xFXYmmvUo
Example File	LastMonth2.tbx (338.5 KB)
TBX Version	9.7
Host	Michael Becker

In this Tinderbox Meetup, we dug deep into working with dates, Hyperbolic View, and Link Types.

Working with Dates (Demo from Mark Anderson)

@mwra let an extensive deep dive into working with dates in Tinderbox. This includes date settings, data operators, date export code, date formatting, and a little about date history. Remember, to a computer a date is just a number.

Hyperbolic View Discussion (Introduced: Paul Christy and Bruce Gale)

Paul Christy and Bruce Gale introduced a fantastic discussion on working with hyperbolic view and link types.

Resources

• DC Pen Store: Fahrney’sPen Store: Dates:
• aTbRef: Data Type Attributes
• aTbRef: Date.format(formatStr)
• aTbRef: Data Time Operators
• aTbRef: # DisplayedAttributesDateFormat Doc Settings
• aTbRef: Displayed Attributes Date Format Other things:z
• [aTbRef: ](Link creation and parking tools (see all sub-pages).
• aTbRef: Text pane link panel (Cmd+7)
• Browse Links.
• aTbRef: Roadmap Pop-over
• aTbRef: Hyperbolic View
• aTbRef: Inspector
• Site: Epoch, a period of time
• Site: Unix time, Unix time is currently defined as the number of non-leap seconds which have passed since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970
• Site: First day of the week? It depends
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Dates
• How many days between two dates? When countries switched to the Gregorian calendar, 10 days disappeared. For many Catholic countries this was in 1582
• ISO 8601 is an international standard covering the worldwide exchange and communication of data and time
• Interesting calendar details about the Society Of Friends (the Quakers)
• How many days are in September? Popular answer would be “30”. Except before 45 BC September had 29 days

[mwra (Mark Anderson)]

A side conversation arising from this thread,

How do I find all notes with a start date in the previous month?

I have looked all over aTbref, through the forum, and the program’s Help and I still haven’t the faintest idea of how to achieve this. Just to be clear about what I mean by “the previous month”, I mean that when I’m in March I want to look at what I did in February, in April I want what I did in March, and so forth. Any ideas would be welcome.

… reminded me that if stuck, think of the issue as a maths problem. So, rather than ‘last month’ think of ‘this month minus one month’. Doing so might make it easier to see which Date-type action code operators and keywords are pertinent to your task. Remember, the software doesn’t ‘understand’ human dates in the way we do, so the less we cause the code to guess our intent, the less scope for error.

And in the context of month, we may think of hem as January, Février, or März, etc. But in the Western calendar they are also months 1 through 12 regardless of their local name. Also makes the above maths easer to think through.