[Tb] Tantalizing

Garth Corral writes
> ...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.

I think they regard the Wiki as the public forum :-)

> 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 brillian...also find
something so
> annoying or sometimes even aggravating that I just want to delete it
> and continue my search elsewhere.

I know how you feel.

There good news is that I think the underlying engine is sufficiently
strong to make most things a matter of fixing the UI. Adopting XML as
the file format was a very smart move.

The bad news is I'm not sure how high a priority UI reworking is with
Eastgate. I'd like to see them publish some user scenarios that
Tinderbox doesn't handle well and then say how they are going to work to
fix them - this is something the community could do on the TinderWiki.

I would love to contribute more detailed scenarios for Tinderbox
improvements but a compbination of a major work overload and family
issues has deprived me of time for exercise and sleep, let alone that
much feedback.

I did put some ideas together earlier on
http://www.oofile.com.au/adsother/tinderbox.html

> Eastgate marches to the beat of it's own drummer and that paying
customers are told what
> they want rather than asked.

I suspect the range of paying customers for this kind of product varies
widely. I sympathise with you AND Eastgate.

> I've just decided that wikis really suck for discussion.
I've had a lot of positive experiences but that comes from using a Wiki
engine which includes versioning (twiki). Editing is then a matter of
keeping a discussion focussed, NOT obliterating comment.

The CSIRO division where I work a lot of the time has won awards for
their information management using the Twiki engine.

Regards

Andy Dent
Received on Tue Dec 23 19:10:47 2003