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His first point is one too seldom mentioned when we talk about weblogs: the place you need the computer to help isn't in designing the page or serving it. We need help with the hard part of blogging: writing. Moore uses WordPress for his weblog. What he needed, and built with Tinderbox, was a tool to keep track of what he was researching, what he was writing, and what he was blogging:

• It needed to show a progression of the process.
• It needed to be visual using colors, grouping and locations so as to convey at a glance the current status of any items.
• It had to be simple.
• It had to be efficient. There should be enough automation to make it easier to use then not.

Moore literally builds an idea factory, with adornments for Receiving, Manufacturing, Packing, and Shipping. New ideas and links go to the adornment labeled "Receiving", which adds some metadata to mark status and timestamps. When it's time to start an article, the parts are dragged into the Manuifacturing Department. Finished articles go to Packing — Moore, a manufacturing veteran, calls it "pre-staging" — where they are held for at least 24 hours, giving time for editorial review and second thoughts. Then, on to Shipping and the queue for posting to the Web.

Tinderbox's spatial mapping and color coding help make relationships clear without getting in the way of the unpredictable process of research and writing. Small assistants are easy to add as well; for example, Moore wants to add an agent to the Packing Department that will set an alarm if an article has been waiting for more than 24 hours. "I like," Moore concludes, "that Tinderbox encourages you to think about your data, and provides the tools to let you look at it your way.")

Tinderbox 4 adds badges in maps and outlines. Badges are small symbols or icons can be used to distinguish special notes or to add a new visualization dimension. Tinderbox comes with a portfolio of fifty nice icons: "calendar", "home", "people", "camera", "database" and so forth.

You can select badges with contextual menus. Badges can be inherited from prototypes, and they can be chosen automatically by agents, actions, or rules. So, instead of just flagging notes, you have a rich vocabulary of flags that you can add yourself or that Tinderbox can add for you.

This is why we emphasize that Tinderbox is a personal content assistant. Automate the tasks you want Tinderbox to handle, or do things yourself: it's up to you.

You can even redefine the visual symbols — or add new badges — by dropping .icns files in ~/Library/Application Support/Tinderbox/badges.

Badges add (literally) a new dimension for visualizing relationships among notes. Just as important, you don't have to choose every badge; I expect that most of the time, people will let badges be set by agents or inherited from prototypes.

Tinderbox 4 is a major update with more than 100 new features and improvements. Everything is better: maps, outlines, charts, agents, rules.

For starters:

• What's New
• Using Tinderbox (with lots of new case studies, from forensics to job hunting)
• Application note: A Task Assistant
• Application note: Email and Twitter from Tinderbox

The Tinderbox manual has been extensively revised and improved, and there's a new Tinderbox Forum to supplement the wiki.

Another fresh Tinderbox experiment went out to the testers today. Here, we add badges — small icons — to notes in the map and outline view.

Each badge has a name. Agents and actions can easily set the badge for a note, so you can use badges to highlight especially significant or urgent notes, or simply to reflect what kind of note each item happens to be.

An interesting tension in supporting badges is that the vocabulary of badges needs to be sufficiently rich to express what you want to say (and to look as you'd like things to look), but not so vast that you can't find the badge you want to use. Another tension, inevitably, is the contest between symbolic and realistic drawing, and between big badges (which look better) and small ones (which are less disruptive).

People who work with dates will welcome a new feature of date arithmetic in actions: subtracting two dates and assigning the result to an integer yields the number of days between the two dates.

Separators are now hidden in map view. A variety of details have been improved, especially in printing, spreadsheet import, and date handling.

Oh YAY! I finally got around to upgrading my trusty copy of Tinderbox! And what a leap it is....I am already enjoying the new test window layout that has a buch of useful controls to the left. Like the quick attribute access, grouped logically.

He was concerned that the upgrade might break his complex weblog templates, but all went well.

Ohm uhm. Now that was easy. Zero changes, all still working as before. Almost disappointing in it's uneventfulness. We are so used to fixing minor and major upgrade hassles... it's almost a downer if it JUST WORKS.