The Tinderbox Way 2nd edition Mark Bernstein © Copyright 2006-2012 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ISBN: 1-8845-1148-1 Tinderbox™ and Storyspace™ are trademarks of Eastgate Systems, Inc., and CIVILIZED SOFTWARE is a service mark of Eastgate Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners, and are used for identification or illustration purposes only. Eastgate Systems, Inc. 134 Main Street, Watertown MA 02472 USA [email protected] http://www.eastgate.com The Tinderbox Way THE TINDERBOX WAY ................................................................................................................1 BUILDING TINDERBOX .............................................................................................................13 NOTES ...................................................................................................................................23 LISTS AND CONTAINERS ..........................................................................................................37 ATTRIBUTES AND VALUES ........................................................................................................55 PROTOTYPES ...........................................................................................................................71 TINDERBOX MAPS ..................................................................................................................89 STRUCTURE ............................................................................................................................111 AGENTS ................................................................................................................................129 ACTIONS ..............................................................................................................................153 DASHBOARDS .......................................................................................................................183 TIME ....................................................................................................................................195 PLANNING WITH TINDERBOX .................................................................................................209 LINKS ....................................................................................................................................215 MEETING NOTES ..................................................................................................................241 MAKING TINDERBOX YOUR OWN .........................................................................................259 SHARING LISTS AND OUTLINES ..............................................................................................267 SHARING NOTES: EXPORT TEMPLATES ..................................................................................285 COMPOSING PRINT DOCUMENTS ..........................................................................................301 INTERLUDE: LIVING WITH NOTES ...........................................................................................309 WHY IS TINDERBOX COMPLICATED? .....................................................................................347 THE INFORMATION FARMER’S ALMANAC ...............................................................................357 BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................................375 The Tinderbox Way 1 1.The Tinderbox Way Tinderbox is a software tool for making, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing notes. It’s an unusual piece of software. At a time when most new programs are updates and revisions within a familiar genre, Tinderbox attempts something new. This book explores ways you might use Tinderbox and explains why Tinderbox works as it does. Tinderbox is a personal content assistant. Notes are intensely personal, but their impact on your effectiveness and accomplishment, public and private, can be tremendous. Writing things down in a place where we can find them again helps us make sure that we can consider every aspect of our decisions. The importance of making, analyzing, and sharing notes applies not merely to weighty decisions, like choosing what kind of car to buy or in which mutual fund to invest, but also to the hundreds of tiny decisions we make every day, selecting what we’ll do next and what we’ll postpone. I often hear people talk about a book, a film, a party that changed their lives. But how many people have heard about a book that might have been, for them, that crucial book, only to forget all about it? How often do we fail to find the time to see a film or a play we ought to have seen? How many times have we been too busy or preoccupied to remember to drop by a party where we just might have met someone who would have changed… everything? 2 The Tinderbox Way Our choices are important, and intensely personal. If we make them thoughtlessly, if we leave them to chance and memory, how can we be confident that we are doing all we can do? And doing what we ought? We learn by remembering and by reviewing experiences. By preserving our notes, we can create new opportunities for learning. What were you reading, this time last year? What do you think about it today? What do you think, now, about that movie that seemed so original, or so controversial, just a few months ago? Will you even remember it, a few months from now? Who will remind you? An Energetic Assistant Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. It’s meant to help, to facilitate. It’s not a methodology or a code. It’s a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. It’s a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence. Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person—not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasn’t written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. The Tinderbox Way 3 Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions— engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices. I didn’t need to persuade the Development team to code Tinderbox the way I wanted: I was the development team. I didn’t have to fight Management and Marketing for features. They work for me. But Tinderbox has always been short of resources. There is never enough time, never enough hands to do all the work. I have made plenty of mistakes, and when those mistakes became visible, I had to decide whether to live with them or to start over. According to current wisdom, this is the wrong way to build software. We’re told that software specifications should be based on meticulous studies of user needs and corporate goals, that specialized interaction designers should plan the interactions and specialized graphic designers should plan the graphics, that the code needs to be planned and specified by product specialists and then written and tested in software factories located in distant, low-wage countries. Documentation, packaging, and marketing specialists add their special skills. Good software sometimes comes from organizations that operate like this, but it’s a process of consensus, of design by negotiation. At its worst extreme—an extreme we see more and more often in software today—it generates the blandness of design by committee [15]. When Apple announced the original iMac, Eastgate’s designer asked, “Why would anyone want a VT100 made out of colored plastic on their desk?” At Eastgate we’d anticipated a very different product, and we expected the new machine would prove a debacle. We were wrong. A few weeks later, I spent a day visiting art galleries on Santa Fe’s Canyon Road, and the most prosperous galleries all 4 The Tinderbox Way had colorful new iMacs atop their stylish desks. Some of those desks were 17th-century hand-carved Spanish heirlooms, some were steel- and-wood fantasies of contemporary crafts, but on all of them stood Bondi Blue iMacs shaped just like that long-obsolete dumb terminal. The galleries weren’t responding to the retro tech allusion: they responded to the iMac because it was different. It was designed. Someone had thought about it—it wasn’t just another beige box. It didn’t matter that the old beige box might have been better in some ways; the iMac was trying to do what the old package didn’t, and you could sense a personality and a vision behind that effort. A Personal Content Assistant Tinderbox is personal. It’s designed to help you do your work better and to enjoy it more. It does this by helping to manage notes, by which I mean all sorts of specific, meaningful information. It helps you to make notes, to analyze them, and to share them with colleagues, customers, and friends. We call this overall process of making, analyzing, and sharing information content management. Finally, and crucially, Tinderbox is an assistant. It does not impose a way of working; it’s neither a workflow or a methodology. Tinderbox doesn’t tell you how to take notes, but instead provides you with a number of different ways of making them. Tinderbox doesn’t suggest an optimal way to share information, but instead offers a variety of ways in which you might share information, in forms that your collaborators will find convenient and useful. The Productivity Puzzle If Tinderbox is an assistant, it ought to help you. Do our computers actually help? Or do they merely replace some old- fashioned clerical drudgery—ledger books and file cabinets—with