[Tb] Tantalizing

Please see my inline comments below.
 
On Tuesday, December 23, 2003, at 03:25PM, Garth Corral <gcorral__AT__abode.com> wrote:
<snip>
>I was more than a bit disappointed at the lack of an official forum for
>Tinderbox and so, was glad to find this list. Unfortunately, it seems
>from the archives that the traffic is light and the membership small,
>due in no small part to the fact that Eastgate does not seem to endorse
>the notion of a public forum for it's product. This is the basis of my
>remaining concern about paying to register Tinderbox.
>
I also find it to be a concern. It was disappointing to me when Eastgate
went from forums to the wiki. Wikis are not my favorite things, and I find
them hard to navigate, not to mention track updates in.

<snip>
>If ever there was a piece of software that deserved to be called
>tantalizing, this is it. Every time I fire up Tinderbox to try it, I
>find something so compelling, so absolutely brilliant in it's design
>that I want to pay my registration fee right then. The thing that has
>prevented that so far is that each time, I also find something so
>annoying or sometimes even aggravating that I just want to delete it
>and continue my search elsewhere.
>
This seems a fair assessment to me. I like many things about the UI,
but others just tick me off. One was the anti-aliasing bug (which I've
decided to fix with Unsanity's Silk, rather than pay the $70 upgrade
price), another is the inability to customize more of the display, such
as link line thickness. The most irritating thing for me is Tinderbox's
lack of support for OS X Services though.

>In fairness, I must say that many of these things are just annoyances,
>and some of them are quickly forgotten against the backdrop of the
>brilliant things about Tinderbox. I also know that rough edges in
>software tend to smooth over time and refinement comes in small
>increments. It was with this in mind that I set out to scour the web
>for more information from users and Eastgate itself, about the roadmap
>for Tinderbox. This is where my problem lies. I can't shake the
>feeling, based on what I have seen and read, that Eastgate marches to
>the beat of it's own drummer and that paying customers are told what
>they want rather than asked. It seems that many other users also begin
>to overlook these annoyances or worse yet, accept them as quirks of the
>program.
>
This also seems fair. Based on my interactions with him, and having met
him recently, I find Mark Bernstein (primary author of Tinderbox, and
Eastgate founder) to be a hell of a nice (and smart) guy. On the other
hand, I find that he will often try to re-state a problem or issue in
terms that are more favorable to the product. This is not unreasonable
once or twice, but after a while it becomes rather irritating, if not
downright disingenuous. It's particularly irritating when you finally
pin him down on something and there is then little or no response.

>I would like to hear from some of the users on this list that I am way
>off base here and that my concerns are unfounded. At the very least,
>it would be nice to know whether these concerns are outweighed by the
>positive aspects of Easgate customer support, of which responsiveness
>to bug reports appears to be the most often cited. Lack of an official
>forum, accusations of censorship on the forums that did/do exist
>(wiki), and last but certainly not least, public postings by company
>employees of the you-don't-want-that variety have done nothing to ease
>my mind.
>
My interaction with official Eastgate support has been minimal. When I
originally purchase the app, the license key I was sent was no good,
but they remedied that within the day. My interaction with Mark, the
primary face of Eastgate on the 'net, are largely described above.

I think the wiki is... "edited." This can be good, this can be bad. There
does at times seem to be a bit more editing than I think is fair to paying
users of a product, but it's certainly no worse than what you'll get from
any corporation. As to usage concerns either with Tinderbox or the wiki,
for better or for worse, I think that you have to accept that both are
based on Mark's vision and how he thinks. He holds very strong opinions
on these things, and it's unlikely that you'll change his mind. If you
can't live with that, it may be better to look elsewhere.

>Well, I was going to draw this to a close with a request for opinions
>about whether people feel their money was well spent. After composing
>the last paragraph and before closing, I checked back at the Tinderbox
>wiki to see if there was any updated responses to my post and found
>that my posting had been edited by none other than Mark Bernstein. The
>edit was very minor but it removed an argument in favor of a forum in
>addition to a wiki. I'm not really sure what to think now but I've
>just decided that wikis really suck for discussion. Comments anyone?
>
Overall, I think my money has been well-spent on the tool. Tinderbox is
highly useful for me for school and personal use, most particularly
because my data is stored as XML. For the money would I like to see a
more standard support forum and formal bug-tracking system? Absolutely.
Do I appreciate the informal and highly-responsive feedback from Mark
Bernstein? Absolutely.

Some final thoughts on features:
- For pure outlining, OmniOutliner is better
- For automatically generating an index of keywords, (not a table of contents, Mark) NoteTaker is better
- NoteTaker is also better for holding different types on content (e.g. movies)
- NoteTaker, OO, and Circus Ponies NoteBook are all prettier than TB, in terms of GUI polish
- Tinderbox has all of the above beat in terms of export ability and different ways of visualizing data
- Tinderbox's live search, agents, and attributes kick serious tail
- DevonAgent has some nifty search features and data-archiving things that Tinderbox can't quite match so far

Tinderbox struck the right balance for me, nits aside.

If you have any specific questions I can answer for you, do let me know.

-gabe
Received on Tue Dec 23 20:29:35 2003