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Re: [O] [OT] Does anyone use Tinderbox?
From: |
Eric Abrahamsen |
Subject: |
Re: [O] [OT] Does anyone use Tinderbox? |
Date: |
Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:24:48 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.130006 (Ma Gnus v0.6) Emacs/24.2.50 (gnu/linux) |
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 <
> address@hidden> 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