Tinderbox 6.2

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Every facet of Tinderbox has been re-imagined and re-implemented for Tinderbox Six. See the Tinderbox Six page for the details. Tinderbox 6.1 brought lots of good news as well.

HIGHLIGHTS

Import and Export are simpler, yet also provide more flexibility. A variety of new Export tools let you export your work to familiar formats instantly, while the flexible template-based approach remains for demanding export needs.
Map performance has been substantially improved.
A new feature, Edicts, allows you to establish low-priority rules for automatic housekeeping.
Badges can be larger, and can be emoji or other characters.
Text can contain lists and tables.

This release is recommended for all Tinderbox Six users. See the release notes in Tinderbox Help for all the details; here are some highlights.

Actions

The designator child[-1] designates a note’s youngest child. child[-2] designates the elder sibling of the youngest child. (1292)

A new attribute $ImageCount in the Textual category reflects the number of images in the note’s text.

Date formats: new format code U formats the data in Unix style (seconds since January 1, 1970) (1319)

Explode: the explode popover adds an Action field which lets you enter an action to be applied to each exploded note.

Added a new attribute group, Sandbox, to hold several attributes useful for testing and experimentation: MyString, MyNumber, MyList, MySet, MyBoolean, MyColor, and MyDate.(1331)

The attribute $Bend replaces the former attribute $LeafBend. The former attribute continues to work as before but the old name is deprecated. (1355)

Convenience

In outlines and other views, ctrl-Return creates a new note as the elder sibling of the selected note.

Tinderbox now recognizes additional abbreviations of days of the week. For example, in English the four-letter abbreviation “Thur” is now recognized for “Thursday.” (1238)

During long exports, both ⌘-period and Esc cancel the operation. MapItemController has been intercepting the cancellation. (1326,1327)

The tooltip for the text pane note title field is the full path to the note. If the note is an alias, the tool tip shows both the path to the alias and the path to the original note. (1350)

Better behavior for page-up/down (fn-up-arrow and fn-down-arrow) in outlines. (1306)

Support for home/end keys ( ⇧-fn-up-arrow and ⇧-fn-down-arrow) in outlines.

Edicts

A new action attribute, Edict, lets you specify housekeeping actions that do not need to be updated frequently. Edicts are performed soon after a document is opened, and then are updated at intervals of approximately one hour. Edicts are especially useful for chores like archiving obsolete notes which only need to be performed occasionally. (1214)

A new pane in the Action Inspector permits you to view, edit, and enable edicts.

The Agents and Rules pane of the Tinderbox Inspector now reports the edict count and the interval since the most recent edict update. (1393)

Export

Export has been extensively revised to provide simpler access to common export formats.

A folder “templates” is now created in the Application Support folder to hold export templates that are to be shared among files. Shared templates are stored as text files in this folder, and may be added to any document by selecting the file from File ▸ Built-In Templates. If a template with that name already exists, the template’s text is replaced with the text of the template file. (1300)

Export now uses a progress indicator built into the main window. Enjoy this; it was a bear.

Export ▸ As OPML exports the entire document as an OPML file, adding the built-in OPML templates if necessary.

Export ▸ As Outline exports the entire document to a text file, presenting the display name of each note in a tab-indented outline.

Export ▸ As Rich Text exports the entire document as an rtf file, including titles (treated as headings) and the text of each exported note (exported as styled text).

Export ▸ As Rich Text (no titles) omits note titles.

Export ▸ As .doc File exports the entire document in Microsoft Word format, including (treated as headings) and the text of each exported note (exported as styled text).

HTML Export can be cancelled (at last!) by pressing ⌘-period or Esc while the keyboard focus is in the map pane.

A new export method Export ▸ Attribute Browser exports each attribute browser category and the notes it contains.

Single note export now sets the initial export location to the note’s expected export folder. Formerly, the export location was set only of the file already existed.(1325)

Smart Dashes and Smart Quotes are both implicitly disabled (again) in templates.

Import

Tinderbox now imports .webarchive files. On import, the $URL of the imported note is set to the URL of the archive’s main resource, and Tinderbox takes a rough stab at extracting the styled text to the imported note. (1307)

.md, .mmd, and .markdown files are now imported as text.

Tinderbox now accepts file drops of .tsv files (tab-separated values) (1332)

XML-parseable text files, such as many html page templates, failed to import because they are mistaken for malformed OPML. Now, files with text or txt extensions will never be checked for parseability. (1303)

AutoFetch now imports styled text extracted from the target URL, rather than importing raw HTML.

If Tinderbox is asked to parse an invalid OPML file, it leaves an error notice in the text of the imported note. (1302)

When Tinderbox supports tab-separated tables (including drags from spreadsheets), cell values that are surrounded by straight quotes have the quotes trimmed. (1332)

Inspectors

Quickstamp: the search field now offers autocompletion (1377) and updates the current value on selection when a completion is chosen (1243).

Applying a Quickstamp immediately updates the key attributes table, allowing faster feedback. (1254)

Maps

Substantial improvements in scrolling speed, both for mouseWheel scrolling and grabby hand scrolling. Links in complex maps are automatically hidden during scrolling to improve performance.

The tendency of the map view to “jump” after creating new notes in sparsely-populated views has been reduced.

Breadcrumb bar appearance and removal is animated, breadcrumb titles are positioned more neatly.

Emoji and other unicode characters may now be used as badges. In place of the badge name, set $Badge to the unicode character to be displayed in the badge area. Best results will generally be obtained with $BadgeSize of 32 or greater.

Shrink To Fit was far too conservative in using the available width and height of the note. (1330)

If a smart adornment has a subtitle, the layout algorithm now allows space so the subtitle will not be completely obscured.

Better selection of link pads when note edges nearly overlaps, especially when large notes are closely spaced.

Somewhat better map printing.

Smart adornments allow a little extra space beneath the title so that notes do not crowd title descenders.

Outlines

In outlines, ⇧-PageUp (⇧-fn-upArrow) moves to the first item and ⇧-PageDown (⇧-fn-downArrow) moves to the last item.

Double-clicking in the background beneath an outline adds a new note as the youngest child of the parent, not the eldest.

Improved drawing of agent icon in outlines. (1375)

Text Pane

Added Table… and List… commands to the Format ▸ Text menu, providing panels to insert tables and lists in the text pane.(1379)

Scrolling the text pane and then activating it with a click no longer scrolls the text pane to the start. (This was a side-effect of the ruler update workaround.)

And lots more!

Download Tinderbox 6.2 and see Help ▸ Tinderbox Six Help ▸ Release Notes for the details.