On returning from Hamburg, I started a big new project.

The Tinderbox code base is ten years from release 1.0.2. It’s in remarkably good shape, but it’s time for a thorough shakeout. We’ve got technical debt to pay up, and we’ve got new things to do and we’ve got a bunch of new ideas to build out, and everything will work better if the foundation is more solid.

I think this will lead to several new tools, and several new platforms. Exciting times.

Tinderbox 5.11.1 overview in Tinderbox

The first step — I did most of this on the plane from Hamburg — was literally to take stock. What, exactly, is Tinderbox? Each note in this Tinderbox map is a Tinderbox class file, generated by importing a directory listing into Tinderbox and using Explode. Most represent a single class, though a few (like CeresMapDrawingPolicy) represent a half dozen cooperating objects and a handful, like ExportElements or AgentActionExtras, represent 25 or 50 small classes. Adornments represent functional clusters like “XML handling,” “Agents” or “Graphic primitives.”

After sorting out lots of baggage we plan to leave behind, we’ve got about 350 of these objects and object clusters. We’re jettisoning hundreds of framework classes in this leap, too, though these aren’t shown on the map. And as we leave them behind, I think that the world pretty much leaves behind PowerPlant, the MacOS framework that became a classic in many senses. A tip of the hat, then, to Greg Dow and John Daub and MWRon and a bunch of other people I’m forgetting now for the foundation of the software on which we all depended for so much, for so long.

It wasn’t paradise, but it was home.

We draw a lot of boxes and arrows in computer science and information architecture. European computer science is especially fond of them. And of course they're central to the Tinderbox map view.

But should we rely on boxes? How about some curves?

I tried to get some interest in foliated, art nouveau maps at IVICA a few years ago. I’ve not seen much uptake, but perhaps that was too much to expect; making this happen will take a lot of work and would probably be a risky platform for a doctoral dissertation. (It sure could put someone one the map, though!)

I’m not entirely happy with this sketch. In fact, I’m not happy at all. The curves aren’t right, and we need other ways to represent anti-links and contingent links. How do we represent typed links without too much clutter? And this does nothing to help matters when you have lots of tangled links, which I think is something we ought to encourage.

But there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked around here.

I have a bunch of research topics gathering dust. Most would be suitable for a dissertation or thesis. All should be publishable.

When I was a graduate student, I used to spend hours looking for ideas that might generate a publishable scientific discovery. Everywhere one turned, either someone had been there before or you needed a ton of new equipment.

Now, I’ve got ideas lying all over the office. That was chemistry and this is the margins of computer science and the humanities. Perhaps I was completely clueless back then, perhaps everyone else has always seen these topics lying around.

Anyone interested? What’s the best things to do with them?

We draw a lot of boxes and arrows in computer science and information architecture. European computer science is especially fond of them. And of course they're central to the Tinderbox map view.

But should we rely on boxes? How about some curves?

I tried to get some interest in foliated, art nouveau maps at IVICA a few years ago. I’ve not seen much uptake, but perhaps that was too much to expect; making this happen will take a lot of work and would probably be a risky platform for a doctoral dissertation. (It sure could put someone one the map, though!)

I’m not entirely happy with this sketch. In fact, I’m not happy at all. The curves aren’t right, and we need other ways to represent anti-links and contingent links. How do we represent typed links without too much clutter? And this does nothing to help matters when you have lots of tangled links, which I think is something we ought to encourage.

But there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked around here.

I have a bunch of research topics gathering dust. Most would be suitable for a dissertation or thesis. All should be publishable.

When I was a graduate student, I used to spend hours looking for ideas that might generate a publishable scientific discovery. Everywhere one turned, either someone had been there before or you needed a ton of new equipment.

Now, I’ve got ideas lying all over the office. That was chemistry and this is the margins of computer science and the humanities. Perhaps I was completely clueless back then, perhaps everyone else has always seen these topics lying around.

Anyone interested? What’s the best things to do with them?

I’ve got an elementary headache with XCode 4.

Suppose I sit down and say, “Get me the files for CeresMapDrawingPolicy!” Back in the old days of XCode 3, this was easy enough:

1. Select the project at the top of the group tree
2. Type a few letters (case-insensitive!) in the search area
3. You’re done

Since Tinderbox involves about 1900 files, it’s important to make this fast and easy,

Currently, I’m doing this with blind typing in the Project Navigator. This is bad because

• You have to keep all groups open all the time, which defeats the utility of groups
• Blind typing is case-sensitive
• Mistakes fail silently
• You need to do a lot of typing because CeresMapDrawingPolicy and CeresMapOutlinePolicy are different files in different places

There’s got to be a much better way to do this. Suggestions? Email me.

Update: That was fast. Matt Hanlon recommends Open Files Quickly (⌘-shift-O ). Helge Gudmundsen recommends Code Pilot.

I’ve got an elementary headache with XCode 4.

Suppose I sit down and say, “Get me the files for CeresMapDrawingPolicy!” Back in the old days of XCode 3, this was easy enough:

1. Select the project at the top of the group tree
2. Type a few letters (case-insensitive!) in the search area
3. You’re done

Since Tinderbox involves about 1900 files, it’s important to make this fast and easy,

Currently, I’m doing this with blind typing in the Project Navigator. This is bad because

• You have to keep all groups open all the time, which defeats the utility of groups
• Blind typing is case-sensitive
• Mistakes fail silently
• You need to do a lot of typing because CeresMapDrawingPolicy and CeresMapOutlinePolicy are different files in different places

There’s got to be a much better way to do this. Suggestions? Email me.

Update: That was fast. Matt Hanlon recommends Open Files Quickly (⌘-shift-O ). Helge Gudmundsen recommends Code Pilot.

A grueling day of sprint-coding, starting from the rarely-seen XCode stationery. The blank canvas is always formidable, and it’s worse here because intensive Tinderbox work for the 5.10 updates has played havoc with my Objective-C reflexes.

Ten hours later and we’re just about reading legacy Storyspace files.

Much of the code is quite ugly, thanks to tons of arcane bit-twiddling. Remember, this file format was originally designed to lift things efficiently off floppy disks, because a big hypertext like Victory Garden could take five minutes to load on those old machines. To minimize processing, large parts of the file format exactly matched the data structures, so you could slam the bits right into memory. Unfortunately, this means that details of the 68000 compiler’s memory layout persist even in this new code, three processors on.

It’s not all awful. Test-driven design will help a lot. It hadn’t been invented the last time I went through this. It’s already helping, although I did lose 20 minutes trying to track down the lost 141-st link in Mary-Kim Arnold’s “Lust”, when it turned out the lost link was never lost at all.

Status: 5 classes, 4 tests.

Curator’s Code proposes that we popularize two new link glyphs: ᔥ to denote “via” and ↬ to denote “hat tip” or acknowledgment

Marco Arment replies in "I am not a curator," arguing that the distinction is not clear and that aggregators do not really want to clarify the distinction anyway — and don’t really want you to follow these links in any case.

This is an old, old question in hypertext research. In fact, the controversy conflates a bunch of old questions that might better be addressed separately:

• Should links be typed?
• Should link types represent intention or citation?
• What should be the link anchor: a text span, or a glyph embedded in the text, or a glyph in the margins or the footer?

I don’t share Arment’s confusion over the two glyphs. Use ᔥ when you’re just repeating a link you saw elsewhere, and use ↬ when you’re commenting on, extending, or disagreeing with a link.

In practice, Arment is probably right: two obscure new glyphs are probably too many for people to learn. At the same time, we need more glyphs because simply “reblogging” in tumblr fashion is soon going to seem old-fashioned and terribly 2012.

It's nice that Tinderbox macros can make it easy to embed these oddball characters in your text without an excursion to Character Viewer. Or, use TextExpander with Tinderbox to give easy mnemonics to each character.

I've got an idea for a hypertext fiction thriller that would be exciting, sexy, and a hell of a good time.

But where on earth am I to find the time to write it? And does the world need another thriller more urgently than better Tinderbox and Twig and a new Storyspace and the two print books I'm supposed to be finishing?

Time’s winged chariot indeed.

Update: Mary-Kim Arnold suggests the employment of minions. Alan Jacobs complains that minions are not what they were.

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.