Gordon Meyer updated his Tinderbox-based weblog, Usable Help, to use internal templates. Here’s how.

Since day one, I've written, built, and managed the site using Tinderbox. It's rather remarkable that I'm still using the same tool a decade later, and almost astonishing that I'm using the same Tinderbox file (document), considering that I started with Tinderbox 1.0 on Mac OS 9. Tinderbox has continued to grow and evolve, and Mac OS has been radically transformed, but here I am with the same file I created so long ago.

It’s been a year since my ELO postmortem. Tinderbox reminds me about major posts on their anniversary. This one might be worth another visit.

The most recent addition to the crowd-sourced directory upon which such hopes rested, and in whose defense so much vitriol was spilled, appears to have been a single stub added four months back. The “Featured article” hasn’t changed since December 2009. Here’s the page about “Our Process”, references in the main navigation list:

Our process 

Information about the process goes here.

Judith Lipton talks about Tinderbox for planning her next book, The Pura Vida Paradox, at Psychology Today.

Right now there’s a big Tinderbox sale for students, educators, and non-profits. 

And there’s another Tinderbox sale for Scrivener fans. 

And Tinderbox users can save 30% when they buy Scrivener, too.

Happy New Year.

I dropped Netflix CDs this summer,. Someone broke into my house and is now watching my TV, and the new pricing made electronic-only Netflix look awfully attractive.

What I really miss is my old Netflix queue — the list of 100-odd movies I wanted to watch. I really should have captured it; I never realized it would vanish.

Another thing I miss is a way to bookmark movies that aren’t currently available for instant viewing. For instance, I’d like to see Moneyball eventually. And the new Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: I might not get to a theater, but I’d like to see it.

There’s got to be a way to remember these things. Tinderbox?

In most of my presentations for Tinderbox Weekend, I nested “slides” inside a container in the previous slide. Here, you’ll notice that the “title” block is actually a container, so I can simply select it and zoom into its interior map.

In this slide, I’m making lots of use of a feature from the upcoming Tinderbox release 5.X – subtitles. Notes can now display a title, a subtitle, and text as well, giving you a lot of new flexibility for presentations and dashboards.

The point here applies to (and implicitly criticizes) this presentation: your notes ought to be rich in dense information. Here, I’m suppressing lots of information we might have – examples, implementation details, insights into what’s coming next – in the interest of visual simplicity.

It’s not the way I usually want to work, but it’s a common technique. In the high-stakes world of volunteer Web conferences, it seems, getting this wrong can result in turmoil and tears.

For the recent Tinderbox Weekend, I did all my talks in Tinderbox. This was a bit of a stunt, because most of the time I rely heavily on visuals and tend to give Keynote a workout.

It went surprisingly well. Here, for example, is the “slide” for the agenda. It’s a Tinderbox map view – and it’s actually the map view I used earlier in the week to make sure all the segments fit into the program.

We’re having another Tinderbox Weekend in Boston, February 4-5. I think we’re already close to sold out. Please register soon.

We'd like to plan a Tinderbox Weekend in Western Europe, perhaps Paris or Amsterdam, next Spring. Other cities are possible, too. We’ve been talking about getting a Tinderbox event set up in Australia or New Zealand for ages: high time. Have a suggestion for a venue? Want to help? Email me.

Update: link fixed. My Hypertext 2011 paper asks, “Can We Talk About Spatial Hypertext?” (pdf).

It picks up the argument of Patterns Of Hypertext, applying the same sort of thinking to the way people use maps in tool like Tinderbox. I expected it would cause a stir.

Might be an interesting sidebar at Dangerous Readings this weekend. It’s in Boston; if you're interested in new narrative, you should come.

Tinderbox Map views let you call attention to exceptional notes (overdue tasks, outlier data points, questions for investigation) by giving them distinctive visual appearance. You can make overdue tasks red, or add a distinctive border to tasks you’ve delegated, or add a badge to tasks you need to do during your monthly trip to corporate HQ.

Sometimes, you may find yourself with too much visual noise as every note seems to compete for attention. Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized color scheme helps here. It offers four primary tones and four background colors, plus eight accent colors, all chosen to work together and all carefully muted in tone and hue.

Example dashboard by Stacey Mason

You can download Solarized as a Tinderbox color scheme file; just drop it in your map to add the solarized colors to your document.

Imagine a professional product that a number of specialists use to do their work. It can be a niche product – let’s say it has just 1000 users, and that they typically open it twice a day. It takes 30 seconds to load all their data, they do some work, and then they’re done. (In other words, it’s much smaller and simpler than Tinderbox or Photoshop or Firefox – it’s a small niche tool.)

Now, suppose you’re the product manager. You suspect that you can improve the load time a bit if you have someone spend a day polishing it. Is it worth the money to save, say, 10 seconds of load time?

Let’s do the math: 1000 users, 10 seconds, twice a day. That’s 20,000 seconds/day. Over a year of 261 weekdays, I believe that’s 1450 hours. At just $25/hr, we’re saving the users about $36,000. At $100/hr – with salary, taxes, benefits, office space and furnishings not as impressive as it sounds – we’re saving $144K. A nice return for a day’s work.

If the product manager and the developer went off to Vegas instead and came home with $35K each, they’d be pretty happy and might take the rest of the department out for a steak and a beer. So they’d be happy. The customers still have half the savings in their pocket – and they can use the extra 1450 hours/year to make more stuff and earn even more money.

But the marketplace doesn’t care. New customers don’t even see the load time, because new users don’t have much data. So this kind of improvement doesn’t help you sell the program at all. (It might help if you were in a feature war, I suppose.) The technical press veers between incompetence and corruption, and certainly has not time for details like these. Given the choice between saving the users $36,000 or having someone spend the day polishing the layout of the website, the rational product manager probably says, “let’s go with the web site.”

The result seems to be a slew of inexpensive products with polish and limited capability, products that demo well and don’t attempt a lot. We have products like the impressive new Garage Band for the iPad that exist to demo other products. We have buzzword-compliant B2B products that promise vague and indirect benefits. And we have a rush to completely unproductive forms of software investment, like the billions of dollars being poured into buying invalid patents that are intended only to deter litigation from the owners of other invalid patents.

The disconnect between the real technical press – Gruber, TidBits, A List Apart, Tim Bray, Martin Fowler, Rands, Shawn Blanc – and today’s magazines and newspapers is nearly complete. As Gruber has long been showing us, there’s no penalty for being wildly wrong in Newsweek or the WSJ; you’ll be invited back to get another big payday to be wrong some more. And there seems to be no penalty for being a jackass – not merely being wrong, but being wrong in a way that confirms your prejudices or enhances your stock portfolio. There’s no penalty at all for being wildly wrong in writing reviews in the App Store. Meanwhile, the bargain basements of the Kindle store are overflowing the scanned “classics” so badly OCR'd that you can’t even be sure they’re in English.

We need to find a way to pay that fellow who is going to save us $144,000 this afternoon. We can use that money. To begin, let’s start penalizing the liars.

A new version of Tinderbox is available.

Tinderbox 5.9.2 is a fit and finish release, but it offers a slew of important improvements. Upgrade, and lots of things will simply work better. See the release notes in the Help menu for all the details.

As usual, this release is free if you purchased or upgraded your copy of Tinderbox in the page year.

Phil Houtz lept into Tinderbox for his novel and found that "if you don’t have a clear idea about what you’re defining you can easily wind up with a jumbled mess." In a new and detailed blog post, he steps back and reorganizes his nascent novel notes. Especially useful for a good look at the different between containers and links.

James Fallows writes that Steve Zeoli’s recent Tinderbox piece is "Software Reviewing as it Should Be Done."

One of my current favorites is (Mac-only) Tinderbox, whose creator, Mark Bernstein, was a guest blogger in this space recently.

Steve Zeoli, of Vermont, has an extensive posting about Tinderbox at Mac Appstorm that is a model of how to both assess and explain a complicated piece of software. Even if you're not interested in Tinderbox, the review suggests some of the broader ways to think about what programs can and cannot do for you.

An oddity of the Tinderbox 5.9 release has been the lack of much discussion of speed.

The new release is substantially faster to load and save files with lots of notes. In the big picture, even the largest Tinderbox files have always loaded quickly enough, meaning that the delay is an inconsequential part of your working day. But startup delay is uniquely visible and annoying: you want to do something, you’ve told your computer you want to do it, and now you have to wait while it shuffles bits. (Loading a Tinderbox file does require a prodigious amount of computation, so the delay is understandable, but of course that’s little compensation while it’s making you wait.)

Like lots of software tools today, Tinderbox finds itself in an economically interesting performance gap. Making loading-time faster generates substantial value for the community; it might only be a minute or two a day, but the value of a minute a day for a lot of users over the course of a year or two adds up to real money. But, while making Tinderbox faster generates collective wealth, there’s not a very good way for Eastgate to receive a return from its investment in the speed bump.

In this case, faster saving was made desirable because automatic backup and autosave are much easier to implement if saving is likely to be unobtrusive. Fast loading is, pretty much, a gift. We could have thrown a big party at someplace like SxSW and bought you all some beer, but instead we spent the money on performance.

Anyway, we hope you like it.

Another interesting Tinderbox comment from Appstorm on using Tinderbox to plan novels and a trilogy.

I have been using TB for just over a year and it has become my second top application after Scrivener. (I also use DEVONThink Pro)

I have planned a trilogy of novels on it, and a detailed timeline for the first novel.
I’m currently editing the first novel, which is to come out in February 2112, and I have set up my Scrivener screen so that the timeline occupies the lower third of my screen (though the Apps can be viewed together in other ways). I write using a 27″ cinema display running off a MacBook Pro, so this is a stunt that I can pull.

As for the trilogy, the plan is a work in progress using map view. But the power to manipulate the characters, events and relationships, and run what-ifs, has far exceeded my expectations.

As for the learning curve, my practice is to learn a new TB trick every week. Otherwise I’d go nuts.

Learning TB is like learning a musical instrument. At a certain point the frustration dissolves and it feels just plain good. Then you take it up notch, etc.

Here’s my prediction: for the rest of my life I will be using Scrivener and TB in tandem for all my novels.

Over at AppStorm, James Kett averred that Tinderbox was “for very left-brained, obsessive-compulsive, micromanaging people who cannot see the big picture.” This provoked a detailed response from “Tyrion”:

For many years, I have walked into large, complex businesses and attempted to identify what was going on and how it could be done better. My job was part Qualitative Research, part Quantitative Research, and part Political Analysis. Qualitative Research has a number of tools for analyzing interviews and playing with the data, teasing meaning out of diverse viewpoints. I used these tools effectively, but I wish I’d had Tinderbox earlier in my career because it would have made this job easier. Tinderbox is a far more useful tool for ‘right-brained’ qualitative analysis than most of the other tools I’ve worked with, but even that sells it short.

You’re right that Tinderbox is a tool to help you see the big picture, but you’re wrong in thinking that analysis of this sort can’t help you. My own experience over many years of consulting with large companies was that the people who thought they had the ‘big picture’ were most often mistaken. The big picture often turns out to be more complex than many people think they see and more fluid than they realize. This is also the problem with many of the reviews I’ve read about Tinderbox.

Tinderbox is often characterized by one or another of its capabilities, classified as a tool to do one thing or another. Very few people I’ve seen truly understand its character as a tool box for manipulating and exploring information. It’s as if someone handed them a toolbox loaded with tools, and they pulled out a hammer and described it as characteristic of the whole toolbox.

I’m sorry to say that you have far more experience than I with Tinderbox. I only found it recently, but it’s displaced other research tools that only did part of what it does and I expect to find more things that I can do with it as time goes on. It’s a hard tool to master, that’s easy enough to see. It’s also a hard tool to characterize. If after several years you don’t find it useful, you probably never will, but don’t think it’s only for left-brained geeks, it’s useful for right-brained creative types as well who can see the ‘big picture’.