[Tb] Tantalizing

On Tuesday, December 23, 2003, at 07:29 PM, Gabriel Coelho-Kostolny
wrote:

> Please see my inline comments below.
>
<Lots of great comments snipped>

> 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.
>
Thanks Gabriel, I appreciate you taking the time to comment. Seems
that you share some of my concerns but have been able to weigh the
product against the personality and make a choice. I'm leaning in the
same direction. All tolled, it is a good product. I'll just have to
hope that in the end it heads in a direction that is to my liking.
Either that or just shut up and write my own.

Just coincidentally, I was reading cogent life yesterday in my search
for Tinderbox information. I didn't realize that was you. At least I
think it is. Seems we also share a city (S.J.) and I also skipped out
on something during the boom.

> 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.
>
Agreed. I've also tried all of these except the Devon* stuff, which
looks very interesting, BTW. Ultimately Tinderbox has the right
balance for me too. I'll likely just bite the bullet and make the
purchase. Thanks again.

> If you have any specific questions I can answer for you, do let me
> know.
>
I do have some questions but I'll wait until I organize them in
Tinderbox ;-). Actually, part of what I have done with Tinderbox was
to outline my evaluation in Tinderbox itself, including a bunch of
things that seem like bugs to me. It wasn't easy with the limit on
creating notes in the eval version. I managed to work around it by
opening the release notes document and reusing those notes for my own
outline. It was the only way to perform a serious evaluation. That
limitation is ridiculous; twelve notes, I think.

Before I do anything with the bug list, I want to verify that they are
in fact bugs and not caused by my lack of understanding. This is the
kind of strangeness that I was talking about. In any other program,
finding this many bugs during an evaluation would make me drop it like
a hot potato, but It's just so damn compelling. Argh!

> -gabe
>
Garth
Received on Wed Dec 24 10:50:56 2003