Tinderbox

Not even Universal? You charge this much just for old Macs or the current Mac Pro? Do you know how to compile?

very expensive note organizing software. Not competitive with anything similar. Sure, it is very different, but still would prefer it priced more competitively and reasonable. Looking at number of downloads here, it's just half of the more popular Devonthink Pro.

Good app.Simple and convenient. I recommend

Great tool! Recently purchase and it's been a complete star helping keep my notes and documents neat, tidy, and organised. Would highly recommend. Worth the cost!

This app is steep, deep and relentlessly powerful. If your task is to turn diverse ideas and random thoughts into cohesive instruction or persuasive rhetoric, this is your tool! Don't let its storied steep learning curve put you off — you can immediately start at the top level to harness its inherent power and later bring in the heavier tools as you press the pedal down further with each use.

If it's your lot to assemble little bits of rock and packets of dust into some sort of linguistic classical statuary this tool should be in your pouch!

I have been eyeing this software for many years. About a year ago I decided to finally include it in my workflow as a designer and engineer in the audiovisual industry. Now, a year later, having completed my biggest project to date in my career, I can honestly say that I will never again be without this wonderful tool. I have managed meetings, construction and project planning in addition to gaining insight using agents on all data accumulated over the past year that has all been added to this software. It does take some effort to get to get to a level where one might feel a real benefit from it, but in my opinion that effort has paid off. For me, my employer and most of all, my clients. Give it a try, you just might find it useful.

Tinderbox 6.6.5 is full-featured and again stable, which stability allows it to reclaim its ability to empower its users to create, visualize, and transform data of arbitrary complexity (within reason).

There was definitely a rough patch between version 5 and early 6.x versions, but this patch has been smoothed. As a result the wisdom of rearchitecting the windowing UX mechanics is also proved.

Exports and templating is still a somewhat confusing affair, but it is stable and experiment tolerant. I still wish external files could be specified as templates since Tinderbox 6.x is not a strong programmer's text editor. It is a good for authoring moderately complex styled text, and its ability to include inline images with OS-level affordances such as image markup is a welcome improvement.

This is software for your mind and, once again, its quality and feature set make using Tinderbox an exciting and rewarding adventure.

Invaluable tool to digest, map out, and process textual information. The main reason i stick to the mac, actually.

This app is really expensive for what it does. I downloaded the demo and you can do the same things with other apps, some of which are listed in the similar software section above. If you're going to pay this much for an app to store information, then you might as well buy FIleMaker Pro and build your own database because you'll spend about the same amount of time learning this app and setting it up the way you want.

Version 6.0.4 is out

I bought Tinderbox in 2011 after I had tried what seems like an endless list of other products that promised to achieve the goal of taking and organizing information. Circus Ponies’ notebook, OmniOutliner, Curio, DevonThink Pro to name a few. Some of them I used for more than a year before I finally decided that they wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do. Tinderbox was the last I tried and it has stuck with me. It provides a way to organize my notes and make sense of them in a way that I have not been able to do with any other piece of software. I attribute that to the fact that Tinderbox provides an environment to work in that allows me to explore ideas and find connections in my notes besides providing a mechanism to jot information down for later retrieval. I’m mostly referring to the map view (which is my favorite for that type of activity). Being able to lay out notes in 2D space, attributing them (color, shape, subtitles, captions), badges and connecting them via links or simply through proximity or grouping in adornments is already extremely powerful, although that is only a small subset of Tinderbox' capabilities There isn’t enough space here to review all the other features, or talk much about the ability to have “agents” or “smart adornments” search for and organize the data to provide a different view (no better way to find new connections by displaying the same information in a different way). I have been using Tinderbox for my daily work journal, to design software, keep track of projects (Tinderbox allows to build a nice dashboard to display the metrics you need to know), online research of all kinds, etc. Some of my Tinderbox documents are pretty big, the largest holds >1600 notes, more than half a million words, with almost 50 agents searching through the data without Tinderbox breaking a sweat. With version 6 it has made a big jump forward in providing a user friendly GUI. And different than the previous reviewer, I didn’t have a crash yet (I’m a daily user since the day version 6 was released). Support by the developer is very good, response time measured in hours, and the forum is active and populated with helpful people. The only negative I have to mention is that it takes a while to learn how to use the more powerful features, like writing export templates, or performing complex queries with agents. However, if you subscribe to the saying: "Easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible", you will be happy with Tinderbox.

Current app (6.0.x) is not fit to purpose. As a long-time user of Tinderbox and material supporter of the beta effort, I am enormously disappointed in the quality and feature set of version 6.0, which feature set is in some ways regressive compared to version 5.x (e.g. external templates are not possible available in version 6.0, a feature I requested be re-included early in the beta development cycle). But this disappointed review is not about "I did not get the feature I wanted". Once version 6.0 became publicly available for purchase, I tested the software and in 30 minutes uncovered one crasher bug and a number of glitches, anomalous behavior, and poor functional interface design. Because I have neither time nor inclination to submit reports for the bugs (crasher or otherwise), I recommend you form an opinion of the software by using it yourself. May your experience be better than mine. I will re-rate and review this app once it is again stable. Until then, I will consider Tinderbox 6.0.x unusable and will continue with Tinderbox 5.x.

Changes in minor Tinderbox revisions aren't usually listed under WHAT'S NEW so here's where/how to find them: Tinderbox Forum - Where do I find Tinderbox release notes? http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/forum//YaBB.pl?num=1339719633

I would describe Tinderbox as a monster truck for the mind. In Tinderbox you create notes (things with attributes, like a text, a color, a whatever) and it provides a set of tools for them. Although not very beautiful and suffering from some usability problems, it's the most powerful and open environment for information management. It allows you to progressively discover the structure of ideas and experiment with them. I make Tinderboxes for managing my to-do lists, writing my web site, taking notes at work, and I just regret it doesn't wash dishes for you. While not exactly a perfect program, notably because of crappy support for anything graphic or external scripting, among other things, it's still the closest thing to perfection. You learn to live with it. Plus, this artisanal software is made by only one guy who spent some decades researching about this kind of software. He obviously knows what he's doing. If it sounds interesting, try it, then either love or hate.

I use Tinderbox as an outliner. It is the best outliner on the Mac, albeit a rather pricey one. But there is more, much much more. I peeked my head beyond the safety of the land of Outline View. Some of these other lands are knows as Map View and Timeline View. I've even seen dragons there. One day I'll doff my helmet and trusty view and do battle in these faraway lands.

First of all, version 5.9 is much more than a maintenance fix and polishing, as it states under "What's New." Tinderbox is one of the more inspired programs you can use for managing your notes and information on a Mac. It's true that to harness all its power takes a steep learning curve, but you can get a great deal of use from Tinderbox using its most basic features. It's my go-to application when I have a problem that needs solving or if I have to make sense of a tangle of data.

I have been using Tinderbox for five months. What a power house! I am only at the edges of what it can do, but I am growing more fond of it all the time. Along with the stability and value, this makes Tinderbox one of my first choices for most projects.

It's worth going over to Eastgate via the link below - Twig looks very promising, and there appears to be a 25% discount if you buy before release (which is probably why it's not been put up on MU yet). I'm still playing with the all the bells and whistles, but it has great functionality.

I've been trying to use Tinderbox for a few years, loved the cloud view and the capacity to create connections between texts, ideas, thoughts, notes ; but the learning curve is so steep (well, for me...) I tried to suggest Twig as a similar app but it does not seem to be present on MacUpdate. A pity, because the app looks very promising as a mixture betwween Tinderbox and Notational velocitiy!

I would define Tinderbox as an integration of four things. - it is an outliner in the ordinary sense with tree structure. It is a particularly rich outliner compared to others, with clones and special tools. Each note is cleverly designed to have an open set of attributes and everything is an attribute: note location in the hierarchy, fonts, colors badges and so on. Most of these are changeable by the user or automated agents. Attributes provide a deep, consistent and easy way to work with outlines. - it is a typed link hypertext environment. You can make links, usually by simply dragging, among notes and text blocks. These links have a user-definable type system, which is about the closest you can get to a machine-understandable structure that reflects human cognitive constructs. This is a hyper-text or better, “meta-text” system. - it is a programming environment where the programs understand attributes and links and can act on those, changing some. A built in language, tailored for this is provided, and you can move to shell scripting for a greater capability if you wish. The native file format is XML, and you can manipulate that directly as well. Most attributes associated with notes can be modified. This programming power extends to Tinderbox publishing and export, making it the most powerful XML document producer I know. - it is a graphical environment for spatially presenting and creating concepts and their relationships. In this sense, it is more Mac-like (in terms of the System 9 Spatial Finder) than the Mac currently is. If you are limited to thinking about files with static tags, you will find this challenging. If you are looking for something strong in snipping and media management, look elsewhere for a complimentary application (I use EagleFiler). If you are not prepared to think seriously about you work and can improve how you work - and invest in growing as you tailor this tool, you will be better off using something simpler out of the box. The price is trivial if you use it and it enhances your creativity even a small amount. In my case, I am an order of magnitude beyond that threshold.