Re: [OT] Does anyone use Tinderbox?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

On Tue, Sep 04 2012, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:

> 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?

Well the most obvious example was TextMate, which I was happy to pay for
and enjoyed using, but after hearing it described as "emacs-like"
several times, I googled "emacs" and ended up… here.

Others include Quicken, which I replaced with ledger; iWork, which I
replaced with OpenOffice (actually iWork is much nicer, so that doesn't
count); and some photo editing program I forget the name of, which I
replaced with GIMP.

I never said I'd bought a *lot* of software in the past :)

> 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
>    
>    
>
>
>
>

-- 
GNU Emacs 24.2.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.11)
 of 2012-09-04 on pellet
7.9.1