Adventuring Into Tinderbox
Over the last few years, I've been on a journey to wrangle the many digital assets that make up my work. After a short dalliance with DEVONthink, this journey has led me to implementaing PARA in Obsidian. However, I've struggled to find a good way to capture and curate long-term notes and visualize their relationships. So, I've determined, after much consternation, to give Tinderbox (TBX) a try.
Unlike Obsidian, Tinderbox doesn't have first-class support for Markdown. However, with a little bit of action code, Keyboard Maestro Markdown shortuts, and a bit of perserverance, I'm fairly confident I can bend TBX to my will.
For me, the appeal of Tinderbox is five fold:
- Exportability. It's export system is impressive. Done right, for each TBX document, I can generate a custom, static website. I could see this being really useful to share information with several audiences I interact with regularly.
- Note visualization. I want to experiment with visualizing large collections of notes in TBX's map view. I suspect for certain projects it will help me conduct better "forest management" of my various projects and passions.
- Custom attributes. Every note in TBX can have one or more custom or built-in attributes. These attributes can be used to track discrete note properties and metadata. I can see this being particularly useful when creating goal trackers. For example, I would like to experiment with using TBX for tracking the progress of my team's quarterly assigned OKRs and SMART goals.
- Programmability. TBX has extensive support for performing various types of actions on notes. While Obsidian is also programmable, TBX makes it trivial to tinker "under the hood." As a software developer, this appeals to me immensely, making my note repositories infinitely extensible and malleable.
- Importability. While TBX doesn't have a mobile app, it does provide ways to ingest notes via a watched Finder folder. Done right, this will allow me to add notes, and, perhaps even publish them to the web, while I'm mobile.
As my adventuring progresses, I intend to post regular updates here.
Previous: