Tinderbox Fan Mail
"Working in Tinderbox 2 is like having a paid Web developer on your staff who can sweat all the details, while you focus on fine-tuning your designs and developing substantive content." -- Peter Wasilko
JB and MacNetJournal mentioned that a new version of Tinderbox was out (version 2.0), which has a load of new features. Naturally, I raced to download it, and I must say that I'm very impressed! .... You can post your notes directly to MoveableType, Radio Userland or Blogger. No more dragging and dropping! It will even fetch your recent posts with a single command. It's all rather slick, and seems to have a huge speed boost over the previous version! -- But She's a Girl
"The most valuable tool for information architect...including the incredibly useful map view." -- Jorge Arango , Jarango Information Architecture.
A real powerhouse of a tool. I only wish I had time enough to explore its full potential instead of just scratching the surface. I put Tinderbox in the same league as other apps such as Photoshop and Excel.... -- Tim Clements
"It's amazing! It lets you capture your notes easily, arrange them in multiple ways (maps, outlines, etc.), and add attributes to each note. Powerful agents can sort, order, and categorize via multiple criteria. Plus with your data stored in XML and the ability to export to any text format via templates, your data is certainly 'uture compatible....It has definitely changed the way I work." -- Matt Barger, post on O'Reilly.com
Peter Brusilovsky (Carnegie Mellon), one of the world leaders in adaptive hypertext research, has been exploring Tinderbox.
"What a nice system! I was waiting for it for quite a while. It is close to perfection! I am tracing different concept-map drawing tools coming from several fields -- education, semantic web, CSCL, office tools for diagrams -- yours is really the best."
"I took a bit of a leap of faith, and purchased [Tinderbox] a few days ago after a one-day trial. I've spent a good part of this weekend wrapping my head around it and moving some of my notes in, and I can honestly say I can't remember the last time I have felt this excited by a piece of software.
I'm a recent switcher to the Mac / MacOS X platform, after 20 years of using PC's. The entire experience has been amazing and Tinderbox is the icing on the cake. -- Doug McLachlan, Director of eAppliances, TAP Ventures
This is a cool and extraordinarily powerful product. Mark Bernstein is another auteur. I want to use it. I want to master it. -- Russ Lipton
"Tinderbox is getting 'oohs' and 'aahs' from people who happen to be looking over my shoulder in meetings." -- Thomas H. Ptacek, software architect
[Tinderbox] drag and drop is awesome... I dragged over 300 messages from Entourage at the same time and it automatically inserted them into individual notes, with the right subject headings! Great for grabbing pieces of information, whereever you might be working. -- Jeff Forte
"[Tinderbox is] one of those 'use every day, what-the-heck-did-I-do-before-this-came-along' kinds of software. Very cool." -- Alwin Hawkins, critical care nurse and weblog writer, Oregon.
"This version [1.1] of Tinderbox not only runs on OS X, but seems faster and more responsive, as well, which is a neat trick, since it was already fast and responsive." -- Doug Miller
I just got the program yesterday and it's an incredibly intuitive and useful way to store things. I started in on this project this morning and within hours I learned how to store all my book reviews in Tinderbox and provide a wonderful export of them to HTML with next/previous links and everything. It was incredibly simple. If I would have tried to do this with a database-backed website, my previous tool for these jobs, it would have taken me days or weeks. Thanks to Tinderbox, I can spend the rest of the day working on something else. -- Aaron Swartz
"I'm really enjoying Tinderbox and I am eagerly awaiting the Mac OS X release! This fall I begin a graduate program in Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College and I intend to use Tinderbox to manage the information I'm integrating from various disciplines such as psychology, creative writing and the use of technology to foster community. " -- Scott Youmans, Goddard College
"I discovered Tinderbox over weekend, and I love it.
"I have been trying to persuade my wife to try hypertext tools such as Storyspace, palimpsest, and others for her writing, but the interfaces and complexity have always put her off. One viewing of the Tinderbox tutorial and she asked me to buy it. Tonight.
"....Keep working 24 hrs a day on it ;-) Actually keep very calm - and don't bloat it with features. It is already beautiful and elegant." -- Dave Garbutt, Basel, Switzerland
A software developer who prefers to remain anonymous writes:
"I'm tired of publishing tools that force you to organize their way. Tinderbox allows me to publish the way I think. However I'm organizing my thoughts, Tinderbox can match me and publish directly from that structure. It's really great!
"For a week, I searched for a mindmap/chaos-sorting program for my head and my Mac. Then Hannes recommended Tinderbox. I'd say it was one of the most useful bits of advice I'd heard in a long time. Tinderbox is exactly what I need to deal with information overload -- namely organization of my work, which means mostly dealing with lots of bits and piece...It didn't take more than a couple of afternoons to get a good feel for the program (and I got the basic idea in about a half hour). The documentation is top-notch, and making it work is very intuitive. This is really a wonder tool, priced just right." (Peter Praschl, Le Sofa Blogger) (comments translated from the German)
As an analyst for the Burton Group, I'm finding Tinderbox to be helpful in organizing my thoughts on various technical issues as I prepare some of my reports. There are times when I've delved too far into the details ... I think Tinderbox has a great potential to help me recover the bigger picture.
If I can find the time, I plan to use Tinderbox to organize some of my thoughts on some subjects other than computer networking, and these might prove to be the basis of other articles or books in the future. Who knows? But I love Tinderbox and its capabilities! I'm watching what's on your Web site to see what new things people are using it for, to see what features I've missed. I feel as though I've only scratched the surface of its capabilities.-- David Kosiur, author of Understanding Policy-Based Networking
"I'm very satisfied with having Tinderbox to work with the "Nut" site (Ntteside). I have several different kinds of items that are updated quite often, and the update process of the site with Dreamweaver was quite laborious. With Tinderbox, it is a breeze." Prof. Tellef Kvifte, Institute for Music and Theater, University of Oslo
"To organize [my notes], I'm using Tinderbox, an innovative personal content management system from Eastgate that fits my working style perfectly: lots of 'scraps' of ideas organized associatively rather than hierarchically, which Tinderbox's attributes and agents pull into coherence. An amazing tool for working with 'piles, not files!'" June Lester, Dept. of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University
"For several years now I've been periodically looking at PIMs, hypertext engines, and other similar systems. I never found anything that didn't drive me to distraction either with its complexity or with its banality. A year or so ago, out of frustration, I started building my own. After a month or so of idle development, though, I realized that the time to build it would far exceed the time I would use it. Reflecting that someone would eventually come up with what I wanted, I regretfully put the project aside.
So, I click on the link, look at the site, and realize that Tinderbox is very, very close, indeed, to what I wanted. I downloaded the demo, played for an hour or two, and promptly bought the software. I never buy software that quickly, it always takes a few days of rumination. Tinderbox is a truly elegant thinking environment: multiple, cleanly designed views of your data; extensive linking mechanisms to objects both inside and outside of the program; fluid data entry; a most intriguing agent technology; and powerful html export functions. What a tour-de-force for a version 1 release! -- Dave Fultz, Director, Design Technology, Source/Inc.
"Tinderbox would be excellent for language study. The ability to make aliases and mark neighborhoods means a student could get what she needed to recall or work on ad libitum.
"Maybe you remember it's a verb, maybe you recall it was in Lesson Three. Maybe six months into the course you decide you need to create an agent for prepositions, so you can work on those. See what I mean?
"Tinderbox can be the link between the course as presented and the course as the student needs it to be personalized." -- David Berreby, journalist
"Tinderbox is a unique and powerful application, an elegant convergence of hypertext authoring, Web authoring, concept mapping, and database tools." -- H. Lewis Ulman, Assistant Dean for Research and Instructional Technology, Ohio State University
"I can't tell you how excited I am about Tinderbox after using it now for a couple of weeks. I've written some of my impressions of Tinderbox in my blog, Erewhon Notebook.... Thanks for such a wonderful application!
Tinderbox allows me to manage my ideas, thoughts, notes, and reminders as I prefer, using structures and relationships that make sense to me. It lets me keep tabs on news and blogs I find important at the same time I'm writing and reviewing other notes. From that perspective it excels as a personal knowledge management, planning, and writing tool. After all that, I can turn around and share pertinent information with a larger audience easily, making it an ideal blogging tool or allowing me to integrate information into enterprise knowledge management systems." -- Doug Miller, CTO, iRobotics
"I can't express how overjoyed I am with it so far. This is just the software I feel like I've been waiting 15 years to have....This is one slick piece of software!"-- Doug Miller, CTO, iRobotics
"I'm already in love with Tinderbox." -- Dr. Anja Rau, Wordwrap, author of What you click is what you get? - Die Stellung von Autoren und Lesern in interaktiver digitaler Literatur.
"I've been playing with Tinderbox for a few hours now, and already I can tell you've done it: you've taken away my last excuse for not doing my research. I've always been fussy about my tools....No more; this is the tool I've been waiting for....a superb work of software." -- Clifford Wulfman, The Perseus Project, Tufts University
Tinderbox is in my opinion the most promising weblog tool ever! -- Thomas Madsen-Mygdal (CommonMe.org)
The more I read about Tinderbox, the more I like it: "Tinderbox has Agents that constantly scan your hypertext, collecting notes that match their criteria. An agent might collect all the recent notes, or all the notes marked as urgent, or look for notes about aardvarks. Agents help automatically organize your notes."
"Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It helps you gather ideas and notes. It helps you organize and understand them. And it helps you share them. The personal aspect of Tinderbox is very important. It doesn't organize ideas for the enterprise; they've got to be your ideas, first. It doesn't scoop up content and repackage it; it helps you say that you want to say. Your data is yours, and it's always right there with you; no delays, no downtime. And since Tinderbox files are XML, you don't need to worry about getting at your own ideas."
Now I'm convinced: Tinderbox will probably be the hottest/most inspiring thing in Personal Publishing in the next few months. langreiter.com
"Ceres lets me put all my notes in it, give them keywords, map them out as a spatial (and colourful) hypertext, link them, search them, decorate them, build agents to keep track of them - and publish the ones I want to make public as posts in a blog, putting lots on one page, or as separate pages, like with the list of email narratives. It's really cool."
I'm using Ceres constantly - I wish it could be my entire operating system!
I much prefer the Map View of all my notes to the dull old desktop. Topics I'm working on sprawl around, comfortably nestled by adornments, while last week's items of extreme interest are tucked into boxes and stacked neatly aside for future reference.
I used to writing in Word, generating hundreds of small quickly-forgotten documents. I'm working on a PhD dissertation so I have a lot of writing to do. Now, I'm only using Ceres for writing. I paste articles from the Web into individual notes, type quick comments and link them up. I type quotes from books I think I might need some day (but who really knows?). And I have a more generously sized note, always growing, constantly being revised, that will some day become another chapter, or part of a chapter, in my dissertation.
I can instantly see how much work I've done, research, thinking and writing.
Over in another corner of my screen is the blog section, where I have aliases of posts there that are relevant to my current work over in the sprawling part. I couldn't do that with Word. No wonder I haven't launched Word in days.
Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway ("Ceres" was the pre-release codename for Tinderbox)
"I'm very excited about the attributes and the agents. So much of our information is crammed into a hierarchy but it might serve us more naturally in a heterarchy, with relationships possible between all notes. This is the single biggest advantage of Ceres over other systems, and what would be laborious to build from scratch." -- Victor Lombardi, Razorfish
"What do I enjoy the most? HTML publishing and the ability to add attributes. The publishing is fantastic. I can see it as providing a very powerful and effective way to write an ongoing project that is republished regularly. Being able to add attributes makes it extremely customisable." -- Prof. Adrian Miles, Royal Melbourne Insitute of Technology
"A beautiful application!"
-- Anders Fagerjord, research fellow, Dept. of Media and Communication, University of Oslo
"I am very keen on Tinderbox...the thing I learned about Tinderbox is that I want to live in it! .... What I want to do is use it to capture fleeting and/or fragmentary thoughts; it's the first piece of software I've found that would let me do that.
Dr. Tim Topper, Yukon College, Canada
My favorite.... I like [it] primarily because it is visual; it inherits the visual modality of Storyspace .... I spend a good deal of my time organizing the webpages it produces dragging notes from here to there. It is really visual editing of text; as I said.... There isn't much that you can't change.
[Tinderbox] has great power and promise as a note-taking assistant. With the aid of its agents, notes can be organized in dozens of ways and places.
-- Ken Tompkins, Richard Stockton College
This is a rocking student note-taking tool. University level, maybe high school. Not that I'm a student, but I wish this stuff had been available when I was.
-- Miguel Marcos
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