Easy up front (was Re: [Tb] A couple community issues (epic))

Carl wrote

>If Tinderbox were just a bit easier to dabble with up front it would make
>learning to build such systems much easier... the effort to learn &
>use >Tinderbox keeps exceeding the effort of using other tools

I'm still using BrainForest for my plain outlining most of the time because
1) it has a vastly simpler export to HTML creating simple nested HTML
files with a couple of clicks, that are clean enough to read into
Word as outlines.

2) it has a Palm version

3) I can run the Desktop version on Mac or PC so use it wherever I'm working.

I use Tinderbox occasionally for the other views and am trying to get
out of the habit of sketching diagrams on paper that would work in a
TB view but there's something that keeps getting in the way.

For some reason, using Tinderbox doesn't "flow" for me and I'm not
quite sure what aspects of the UI are to blame. I'm not inclined to
spend much of my very scarce time working it out because simpler and
more important UI changes I suggested for quick aliasing haven't made
it in there yet. (Finder-like command-option-drag to alias one or
more items into a Map view).

I suspect for a lot of people that a combination of a GUI for common
export template setup and more canned templates built-in would help.

I keep wanting to like Tinderbox more. (Unlike Frontier which I kept
wanting to feel like using because of some obvious power but really
hated the user experience.)

-- 
Andy Dent BSc  MACS  AACM   http://www.oofile.com.au/
OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on Mac, Unix & Windows
PP2MFC - PowerPlant->MFC portability