Donut Age: America's Donut Magazine

Tinderbox 3.6 !

Mark Bernstein just announced Tinderbox 3.6, which has a slew of interesting new features. Mark mentioned some of the salient ones:

  • Set attributes (tags, and more)
  • Spreadhseet import
  • Yojimbo is included free with new orders and upgrades
  • Richer agent queries and actions
  • Exciting new ways to interact with outside programs and Web services
  • Richer stamps for qualitative analysis

The Yojimbo bundling is interesting. The documentation suggests you use Yojimbo as Tinderbox's inbox (i.e., as a temporary holding pen for information you are going to organize more elaborately in Tinderbox). Besides shoring up a weak point in Tinderbox (there's never been a really seamless way to dump things into Tinderbox without breaking stride from whatever you are doing), the bundle represents a marriage of two of my favorite Mac software companies (Eastgate Systems and Bare Bones Software).

There are many interesting enhancements to the software itself, but the one I'm using right off the bat is the HTML export code ^inboundTextLinks^. I'd complained this summer about there being no way to automatically build links to posts that refer to a given note. This new code does exactly that and it took only one new line on my single post template to include that information for every post in this blog. Mark has observed that many blog archives are simply black holes into which older writing disappears. I've been using several strategies to try to fight that effect: my comprehensive Archive page, category pages, frequent self-referencing, and the ^similarTo^ code to create avenues for exploring my back-catalog, but I've been missing this ability to follow the evolution of a thought forward.

I'll need to dig into the other things this version can do, but I'm already quite excited by these additions.