Tinderbox 4.7

What’s New In Tinderbox 4.7

Tinderbox 4.7 brings dozens of exciting improvements to Tinderbox. You’ll have new flexibility for making notes, fresh power for building documents and dashboards that help organize themselves, and even more speed for getting things done.

Fill Materials

Tinderbox notes have a new Fill attribute. Built-in fill materials include wood, steel, water, sandstone, and linen — and you can add your own fills.

Fills aren’t just chart junk or management eye candy. The note Color and Pattern continue to work together with the fill, gently tinting the note to suggest connection and communicate linkage. Fills can be inherited from prototypes, and can be set by agents, actions, and rules.

Also: new color variants let you construct richer color families.

Smart Adornments

Smart adornments help your Tinderbox maps organize themselves, scanning constantly for notes that meet their criteria. Automatically gather, sort, and arrange urgent notes, or notes that mention key tags and topics. Smart adornment actions can then modify the note – extracting information, setting or removing tags, or even twittering!

Just as agents are smart containers, smart adornment are lightweight agents. They search only within the confines of their map, leaving you free to experiment with new structures and to try fresh ideas while exploring your data.

Also: sharp new Chart view, better handling of link labels…

Dashboard Support

Map layout refinements provide better support for dashboards, timelines, and other informative displays built right into your Tinderbox documents.

Notes can display text or important attributes in their title, or beneath the note title. Badges flag crucial notes, while plots and bargraphs provide convenient sparkline summaries while giving you ready access to your data.

Terrific Performance

Agents and actions get a speed bump in Tinderbox 4.7 – a terrific boost for large and complex documents. Mark Bernstein’s weblog used to take 45sec to update; now the agent update time is just 17sec.

Plus: new Cleanup options, conditional DisplayExpressions, and dozens of small improvements.

Seems like only yesterday

Still Fresh: what was new in Tinderbox 4.6 . And, still worth pondering, Michael Bywater on Tinderbox 4.5 .

A big update, A small version number

We’re already planning Tinderbox 5. It’s going be great. But you don’t have to wait: as always, Tinderbox comes with a full year of free updates. And, whatever version of Tinderbox you’re using today, you can upgrade for the same price.