Hi Eric,

Thank your for sharing your insights! Tinderbox does look interesting,
albeit a bit overkill.

*without* later discovering some
> free open source software that did the same thing better.


Care to share which?

Thanks,

Marcelo.

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 04 2012, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
>
> > Hi list,
> >
> > I've recently found out about Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/
> > Tinderbox/), a personal information management application/framework
> > for the Mac. It looks very interesting in its visualization
> > capabilities.
> >
> > Does anyone in the list use it, and if so, care to share a bit about
> > the experience?
> >
> > Perhaps it could serve as inspiration for orgmode extensions/
> > integration ideas.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > - Marcelo.
>
> I used to use it, when I still used a Mac. Despite the price tag, it was
> the only piece of software I paid for, *without* later discovering some
> free open source software that did the same thing better.
>
> Tinderbox has some feature overlap with Org, but not a lot. It's much
> more a generalized note-taking/data collection program -- it can and
> often is configured as a TODO machine, but you'd have to build in much
> of the stuff that comes with Org by default. On the other hand, it's
> much more powerful and flexible when it comes to (re)organizing chunks
> of plain data. Tinderbox notes are comparable to a single Org
> headline-plus-text-and-metadata, but they can be arranged and related
> much more flexibly. Tinderbox doesn't have spreadsheets, tho -- not as
> far as I remember.
>
> Multiple views on the same data is something that Tinderbox also does
> very well.
>
> One interesting distinction is Tinderbox agents. Agents are notes that
> are mini-programs: they collect other notes according to various search
> criteria, and the act on them according to various rules. They make
> Tinderbox powerful, but they also make it confusing: the search and
> action rules are written in a mini-programming language that is a bit
> perplexing.
>
> But there are interesting implications for Org. Org agenda views are the
> equivalent of agents, in the *collection* sense: you give it search
> criteria, and it gives you what is essentially a set of symlinks to
> other headlines. Action is done by the user, of course, with Agenda
> commands.
>
> I've daydreamed about this before: what if, instead of agenda views, we
> took a page from the Tinderbox method and made "agendas" simple
> headlines, with some cookie saying "I'm an agenda", and a property
> containing the search string. Instead of having an ephemeral *Org
> Agenda* buffer, your "agenda views" are simply another in-file headline,
> whose children are TODOs/headlines that match the query. Multiple and
> persistent agendas are suddenly a matter of course.
>
> It wouldn't work well for date-based Agendas, of course. In fact, it
> would probably turn out to be a bad idea for reasons I haven't fully
> thought through, yet, but it was an interesting daydream.
>
> E
>
> --
> GNU Emacs 24.2.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.11)
>  of 2012-09-04 on pellet
> 7.9.1
>
>
>