Starting to learn Tinderbox

Hello everybody,

this is my first posting in this list, and I do not write it to spare
the time reading the manual. I mention this just in case my questions
might leave a "totally-newbie-impression", e.g. I really hope I did
not overlook something in the manual (or in the dozens of websites and
newsleter posts I surveyed) that would have helped me. In fact, I have
been playing with the Tb demo for more than a week, am aware of the
learning curve, got the impression that it is probably what I am
looking for, but can't see through a lot of stuff that I simply do not
understand.

I am a german journalist who also works on bigger writing projects.
For actual writing I use Ulysses, I probably will buy DevonThink for
Data management and Tb could be the third (or maybe the only?) program
of my choice.

I understand the concept of agents and prototypes and I got a glance
on what they might do for me. But there are some things so simple that
I cannot believe I did not manage to figure them out. So I would like
to ask about it, because I do not want to realize that those things
can't be done just after buying the software.

For example prototypes. Do I have to link by hand from the prototype
to any note that should act like the prototype? Is there no faster way
to tell a newly generated note that it belongs to a certain prototype?
For example from within the dialog box that appears when creating the
note?

For example RSS and Web Sites autofetch. I understand that Web Sites
are imported with all the HTML-tags in it and that it may be wiser to
view them in a browser. Ok. But with RSS, threre should be a way to
have the note with the RSS channel look like in an ordinary
RSS-reader. When I import RSS now, I have all the code in it, which
makes it not very readable, and I cannot click on the links to open
them in a browser, too. I am sure there must be a better way, but I
can't find it described anywhere. I downloaded some stuff from the
file exchange and - voila - those files had blue links. I just cannot
do it by myself.

Links, anyway: I have to press cmd+opt to see the frame around links I
created in a note. I can then click them. But how do I know there is a
link in a note in the first place? By pressing cmd-opt just in case?
Why are the links not highlighted in a different color? In
preferences-text, you can choose text link color, which I did (blue
for links, purple for visited, red for active as is the default, which
I did not change) , but the links remain just black like all the other
text.

I admit this is very simple stuff - a fact that made me suspicous of
the software. I can live with the fact that I'll have to invest a lot
of time to learn what agents and the like can do for me, because this
is complicated stuff and has to be, but if it takes me hours to make a
link colored my willingness decreases a bit. Again, maybe I overlooked
something simple.

Greetings and sorry for the long post,
Thorsten
Received on Sun Jan 29 07:43:59 2006