The Advantages

In many ways Tinderbox does not behave as a modern OS X program. Its roots in the classic Mac OS days are all too evident. If Tinderbox were a Cocoa application, or even a Carbon application, like the Finder, written with OS X in mind, it would be better integrated into the system: we would be able to use Services and Inputmanagers, for example. There are offerings that try to do some of what Tinderbox does and that take thorough advantage of the integrative powers of OS X, such as those from Devon Technologies, but none of these have the hypertextual power and flexible export mechanism of Tinderbox.

It looks as if we are going to see a Windows Tinderbox long before a modernized Macintosh version, but in the mean time it is possible to work around some of Tinderbox's limitations in the text entry area.

I had begun using Tinderbox, when writing papers and articles (like this one), to relate was I was writing to other information, to organize my writing with an outline, and to be able to repurpose my writing in different contexts. If you are reading this than you probably know how Tinderbox's various views and other mechanisms can be such powerful means to these ends.

However, actually writing more than a short paragraph of text within Tinderbox was simply not an option for me. When Tinderbox files get large (over a thousand notes or so) they take a long time to save. The program must construct the xml from its internal representation and write the entire verbose file to disk; this can take on the order of a minute for moderately large documents. This makes my habit of hitting Apple-S after every sentence impractical.

I was also not willing to give up all the advantages of Cocoa text entry: when you use a Cocoa editor you can take advantage of an array of interlocking technologies offered by OS X that are closed off to you if you do your writing within Tinderbox. Also, you can use different editors for different types of document: I prefer writing HTML or TeX in an editor that does syntax coloring, for example.

There are also advantages to having your text stored in the filesystem rather than within a monolithic program. These mostly have to due with the ability to leverage the vast and venerable array of unix utilities and tools.