[Tb] learning curve to[o] steep

I can chime in here a little bit. I've been using Tbox for about a
year and I don't come anywhere near using it for what it's good for.
Now that I'm using Movable Type I do my blog authoring on it, and it's
still very useful for outline brainstorming and some todo list
management. But I'm not scratching the surface at all.

Agents for instance. I know they're there because people keep talking
about them. But there's no basic ground-up tutorial on what they are,
how they work and how to get started writing them that I've seen. (The
"action" field in the new-agent dialog is pretty opaque.) Same thing
with templates. I've noodled around with some of the templates I've
downloaded, so I use them for exporting from tinderbox to my emacs wiki
(and a couple other things.) But I'm not sure what they're really
capable of.

I have to confess some embarrassment when I ask... what manual? Surely
you don't mean the tutorial in the help menu. Is there a dead-tree
manual that people who just order online don't have? Is there a
definitive language reference to the agent system someplace that I'm
just not seeing?

Please point me to TFM that I may R it and become enlightened. ;-)

- M

-
"When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is
practicing, and when you meet him he will win." - Ed Macauley

http://www.mpwilson.com/uccu/

On Feb 24, 2004, at 11:17 AM, Lee Phillips wrote:

> This seems to be a recurring theme, here, on the Wiki, and previously
> on the (defunct) official forum.
>
> I confess I have trouble understanding the kind of roadblock described
> here, as my personal experience was that I was doing real work with
> Tinderbox, using most of it features, within a couple days of
> downloading it. I did have to endure some frustrating moments
> rewriting someof my templates because html export did not work the way
> I assumed it should in some details, and, as the documention was (and
> is) sorely lacking in technical detail, the only way to find out what
> the program actually did was through a process of trial and error.
>
> But I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for the folks at
> Eastgate to be confronted with a constant trickle of would-be users
> who think that Tinderbox might be what they're looking for but is too
> hard to figure out.
>
> I think it would be excellent if those of us who use Tinderbox could
> help the would-be users, but the hard work is up to them: the hard
> work of explaining what they had hoped to do with Tinderbox and why
> they couldn't figure out how to do it. And before that, the apparently
> arduous work of actually reading the manual.
>
> Because, from these messages, I can't figure out where to start in
> trying to help them.
>
> To pick on the current correspondent: would someone who had spent
> significant time with the documentation be likely to refer to a note
> as a "card"? I was a big Hypercard user in the old days, but I never
> had the urge to use this terminology. (No offense intended here; I
> understand that English is not your native language and that that may
> be the reason for this and for your trouble with the manual.)
>
> So, perhaps you can start. What are you trying to accomplish with
> Tinderbox? When you say "but everything above this level [creating a
> note] is a mystery", what are you trying to do? I would say that the
> next level is drawing a line between two notes to indicate a
> relationship. Are you saying that you couldn't figure out, even with
> the manual, how to do this? Why is the manual a pain?
>
> A final note to several people who have complained that they couldn't
> figure out how to use the program effectively without, well, using it
> for a while: isn't this the case for any non-trivial piece of
> software? Do you expect every program to be MacPaint? I've been using
> Photoshop for a couple of years now, and there is still, I would
> estimate, a third of the program's features that I don't really know
> how to use.
>
> Let us help you. Actually tell us what the problem is.
>
>
>
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Received on Tue Feb 24 12:31:16 2004