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 <e...@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 > > >
