Like a master carpenter’s tool shop, full of weird widgets and bits of steel, the question is not “what can I do with it”, but “what do you want to do with it”? It takes extreme patience and rewards generously if the time is taken. It is interesting to compare and contrast Tinderbox with X (as with DEVONthink in this thread) but, my opinion, at the root that’s a false comparison. I’ve known Eastgate to be very liberal with trial periods and helpful for people who are really are interested in learning. Weeks, perhaps months of work, not hours or a few minutes. Based on their experience I would say the best approach is extensive, focused trialing before committing to purchase it. I’ve known and corresponded with a lot of Tinderbox users over the years. Either the wallet affords it, or it doesn’t. There’s no objective way to price software. But that is the market problem for tinderbox … it has some very valuable and useful capabilities – the problem today, however, is that it makes it very hard for people to discover it (even in the way the website works, price, etc). Yes, for some it will be, and the friction of using tinderbox will be abated by having devonthink feed it. The problem is whether a $300 mind map and metadata visualizer with scripting automation is valuable. To some extent, the collaboration with devonthink may well be a miracle for tinderbox because devonthink’s accessibility and availability - ios, etc. It has even more friction to accessing and extending your data set – has to be on mac, has to be done in the app. It has a lot of friction to get started – heck, even the eBook “tinderbox way” will cost you money on top of the entry fee. It has a method in mind of how you do that. He did not reply on twitter, but I think the point is obvious: tinderbox is great for sitting down at the computer and analyzing a data set. I asked him on twitter if he thought of using his phone or an ipad at any point. He mentioned taking his macbook to do this task. He was going door to door and collecting names and numbers of people as well as taking notes (structured data). Recently, Mark Berstein gave the story of collecting names for a political drive. in fact, it appears that Mark wants to avoid it. I’d like to make a point of usability - it has no iOS interface or app. Devonthink, on the other hand, will make a usable data set for you with almost no work on your part other than putting information into it.Īlso, on your point of tinderbox’s cost. That difference right there is why many people just don’t get tinderbox, or never get very far in using it – developing the data set for tinderbox requires work. At the end of the road, however, out there in the land of a developed data set, tinderbox has some very good features! Devonthink does not require me to structure my data, tinderbox does. The example I gave at the start of my reply thread was getting at this point: devonthink is best at the beginning process of information analysis and the tools it gives (groups, tags, smart groups, boolean search) permit one to get very far into the domain of tinderbox. This pedantic point is the very essence of the difference in the tools. This is precisely my point! We are not being pedantic – there is a huge difference in the usability here and the approach to what your data is. Unless you have a driving need for TB and can investigate the time and effort necessary, I’d recommend avoiding it. But for some people, it’s tremendous value. TB is expensive by today’s standards and is just not good value for many people because the cost of purchase and learning is too high. Pedantic, I know, but it’s the important difference - not where you can get to, but the methods by which you get there.Ībsolutely. You can use DT to carry out similar tasks, but you can’t use t in the same way - DT has a different set of tools.
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