Adventuring Into Tinderbox

Jacob Evans -

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.