Fünf Tonnen Flex

(Translated article.
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Tinderbox is a software for the Mac (a windows version is in the works, albeit suspiciously long) for creating and visually managing notes.
Actually, notes can be managed in a lot of ways, and that’s where the problems begin. Mainly the problem how to describe what makes Tinderbox what it is.

I’ll spare myself the attempt to crack this nut and instead cut to the chase and show one of the countless possibilities that the program offers.

The problem:
You’re writing a novel, which contains several important characters. Each of these characters possesses several important traits, but not everybody knows everything about everyone — let’s be honest, most people don’t even know everything about themselves.
But as an author, you have to keep track about who knows what about whom, so you need a way to visualize the points of view of the characters.

The solution, as is often the case with this type of problem: Tinderbox.

First we create a map, where the relevant characters get their own „Adornments“, i.e. workspaces.

There we have our protagonist Frank, his girlfriend Orange and her father Maurice.
Frank is a young, dynamic man who is as successful privately as he is professionally because he possesses genuine creativity and doesn’t mind getting a brown nose in order to further his career.
His girlfriend Orange generally is very sweet-natured, but underneath the surface there’s a lot of pent-up anger, most of all towards her father, who named her after a fruit.
The father, Maurice, is a more or less former hippie who’s glad that his daughter is happy in her relationship. He rather tolerates Frank than actually liking him, since other than Orange he sees the opportunist in Frank.

So, we enter the character traits as single notes.

To display the points of view, we need only one additional note per character, which we can simply put next to that character’s adornment.

Now we just draw connections from the POV note to all the character traits, which that person sees, i.e. acknowledges.
Frank for example sees himself as creative, but closes his eyes to the fact that he’s opportunistic. So far he has only seen Orange’s nice side, while his relationship with Maurice isn’t the friendliest.

Orange’s and Maurice’ points of view get marked the same way. Maurice mostly sees Franks opportunism, while Orange chooses only to see his good side.

It’s easy to see that a map like this gets convoluted very quickly, as the characters become more numerous and more fleshed out.

With older versions of Tinderbox you could overcome this by giving each character its own color and have the connections in that color, which looked something like this:

This is pretty workable. When the characters and their traits become more numerous, you pull the adornments further apart and the relationships become clearer.
But it’s not exactly optimal, in case you want to use the color coding for something else (like grey for character, red for places or whatever).

That’s where a new function comes into play which was introduced in the latest version of Tinderbox: the automated dimming of inactive notes.
This means, if you click on a note which has connections to other notes, all the notes that aren’t affected by those connections, are dimmed.
So if we select Maurice, the map looks like this:

And because the connections aren’t apparent primarily through the connection lines anymore, but the opacity of the notes themselves, it stays clear even without the color coding:

By the way, what can’t be shown in a photo: Those little gaps in the connection lines march from their origin to their destination, which means you also see in which direction the connection goes.
In this particular example that isn’t exactly necessary, but it should be very helpful in some other cases.

The concept can be adapted for any number of purposes, of course.
Maybe medical:
Adornments for ailments, with notes for symptoms.
Add to that adornments for cures (medication, health resorts, etc.) with notes for side effects.
And, because it’s fun: Adornments for HMOs with connections to the cures they pay for.

At first (and second) glance, Tinderbox is very daunting, since beneath the treacherously simple design it hides literally endless possibilities and it really takes time to find your way through it.
What I showed here is merely a scratch on the surface of this thing. But I think the approach to explaining what Tinderbox can do is similar to the approach to actually using it: Take one problem at a time and see how you can solve it using Tinderbox.
So maybe I’ll follow up with other entries like this, as I learn how to get more out of it.

Thanks for reading.