Tinderbox Changelog

What's new in Tinderbox 9.7.0

Dec 29, 2023

TABLE VIEW:
The all-new Table View gives you a simple overview of any note or container. Scan for missing entries and locate bad items instantly. Copy tables as Markdown, HTML, or paste them into spreadsheets.
Tinderbox is ideal for teasing out complex, emergent relationships. Sometimes, though, what you need is a simple list or a quick table. Now, Tinderbox makes it fast and easy.
HYPERBOLIC VIEW:
A completely-revamped hyperbolic view makes this powerful tool ideal for rapid brainstorming as well as for visualizing complicated webs of ideas.
Tinderbox gives you detailed control over just what links are represented, and which links are most significant. Add notes and links by dragging lines out from any note. Tinderbox works constantly behind the scenes to refine the details of the layout.
POSTER NOTES:
Poster notes give you unprecedented new opportunities to extend Tinderbox.
Make a note a poster note by giving it a Poster Template — an export template that describes what to draw on the face of the note. This gives Tinderbox notes access to a universe of superb visualization tools originally designed for the Web. Use Plotly, Mermaid, Google Charts, Cytoscape, aTbRef — whatever you need for your work, right there in the Tinderbox map.
SMARTER ACTIONS:
Along with poster notes, Tinderbox 9.6 brings more power to help actions communicate with outside services. Often, adding support for a popular service will simply be a matter of dropping an installer note into your document.
We’ve already seen some impressive examples, ranging from using Readwise to import your reading highlights to using ChatGPT to summarize notes.

New in Tinderbox 9.6.0 (Aug 2, 2023)

New in Tinderbox 9.5.0 (Dec 9, 2022)

Command Bar:
The command bar (Help ▸ Commands & Info…) provides an abundance of information about your Tinderbox document. Some possibilities:
Quickly open any Tinderbox document you've used before. Just type “Open ” followed by part of the document name.
Select any note by typing "Select" and its name or path.
View Tinderbox tutorials (e.g. “View video…”)
Open any inspector pane (e.g. “Open Border Inspector”)
Get help from aTbRef (e.g. “Explain Export”)
Explain Tinderbox actions and their usage (e.g. ".collect_if")
Define Tinderbox attributes (e.g. $Width)
Check whether you need an upgrade ("Can I update")
Smarter AI:
Tinderbox automatically scans your notes to locate names, places, and organizations. New Taggers let your documents define terms and synonyms to help your agents do more with less work.
Sentiment analysis helps assess the tone of comments and reviews.
Highlighters let your Tinderbox document automatically highlight selected words and phrases. Built-in highlighters are provided for editing actions and for Tinderbox taggers, but it is easy to add your own highlighters. Notes opt-in to highlighters, either individually or by inheriting a highlighter from their prototype.
Gallery:
You can now save Tinderbox view tabs in the gallery, and can retrieve them whenever you like. This makes it easy to keep overviews and special reports handy without keeping them on your tab bar.
View ▸ Tab ▸ Gallery displays a list of current tabs and a list of saved tabs for the current document. A tab can be added to the gallery list, making it available later — even if the original tab has been closed. Any saved tab may be added anew to the tab bar.
Actions:
Tinderbox actions let your notes examine and organize themselves. Tinderbox actions receive a massive boost in Tinderbox 9.
Inspector panels are now resizable, giving you plenty of writing space for your actions. Tinderbox color-codes actions as you type, making it easy to spot typos.
New actions make it easy to extract information from forms and emails. Other actions like .trim help you clean messy information, while AI-powered tools like .paragraphList help you focus on precisely the information you need.
Markdown support:
Tinderbox now provides built-in support for writing and previewing Markdown for writers who prefer Markdown to styled text.
The preview pane now doubles as a full-featured Markdown preview, and Tinderbox automatically streams to Marked2.
Smarter agents:
Tinderbox provides better control of agent priority.
Highest priority agents run every few seconds.
Normal priority agents are updated at approximately ten second intervals.
Low priority agents are updated every minute.
Lowest priority agents are updated every five minutes.
Occasional agents are updated every hour.
Extensive infrastructure improvements make agents more responsive while keeping them out of your way when you’re busy.
New Themes and Fonts:
Tinderbox is meant for serious work, but that’s no reason to avoid elegant modern typography. We include some terrific new fonts to keep your workspaces fresh and legible. In Tinderbox 9, Hoefler & Co.’s Decimal and Archer join an all-star cast that include Ideal Sans, Ringside, and Mercury.
Tinderbox lets you customize nearly every aspect of its powerful views — and, even more importantly — you can teach your documents to adapt their appearance, drawing your attention to interesting and important developments.
Color schemes let you share visual schemes, and two new schemes — Sunny and Sunny Dark — open bright new perspectives.
Improved Link Tools:
Tinderbox’s hyperbolic view examines the link network. What notes link here? What notes are reachable from here? The revamped view has improved layout and superior control, helping to visualize big documents and complex link networks.
Tinderbox agents and actions gain new power as well, with easy-to-use commands for examining link neighborhoods and finding paths among notes.

New in Tinderbox 9.2.1 (Apr 17, 2022)

New in Tinderbox 9.2.0 (Mar 3, 2022)

New in Tinderbox 9.1.0 (Dec 12, 2021)

New in Tinderbox 9.0.0 (Jun 22, 2021)

Command Bar:
The command bar (Help ▸ Commands & Info…) provides an abundance of information about your Tinderbox document. Some possibilities:
Quickly open any Tinderbox document you've used before. Just type “Open ” followed by part of the document name.
Select any note by typing "Select" and its name or path.
View Tinderbox tutorials (e.g. “View video…”)
Open any inspector pane (e.g. “Open Border Inspector”)
Get help from aTbRef (e.g. “Explain Export”)
Explain Tinderbox actions and their usage (e.g. ".collect_if")
Define Tinderbox attributes (e.g. $Width)
Check whether you need an upgrade ("Can I update")
Smarter AI:
Tinderbox automatically scans your notes to locate names, places, and organizations. New Taggers let your documents define terms and synonyms to help your agents do more with less work.
Sentiment analysis helps assess the tone of comments and reviews.
Highlighters let your Tinderbox document automatically highlight selected words and phrases. Built-in highlighters are provided for editing actions and for Tinderbox taggers, but it is easy to add your own highlighters. Notes opt-in to highlighters, either individually or by inheriting a highlighter from their prototype.
Gallery:
You can now save Tinderbox view tabs in the gallery, and can retrieve them whenever you like. This makes it easy to keep overviews and special reports handy without keeping them on your tab bar.
View ▸ Tab ▸ Gallery displays a list of current tabs and a list of saved tabs for the current document. A tab can be added to the gallery list, making it available later — even if the original tab has been closed. Any saved tab may be added anew to the tab bar.
Actions:
Tinderbox actions let your notes examine and organize themselves. Tinderbox actions receive a massive boost in Tinderbox 9.
Inspector panels are now resizable, giving you plenty of writing space for your actions. Tinderbox color-codes actions as you type, making it easy to spot typos.
New actions make it easy to extract information from forms and emails. Other actions like .trim help you clean messy information, while AI-powered tools like .paragraphList help you focus on precisely the information you need.
Markdown support:
Tinderbox now provides built-in support for writing and previewing Markdown for writers who prefer Markdown to styled text.
The preview pane now doubles as a full-featured Markdown preview, and Tinderbox automatically streams to Marked2.
Smarter agents:
Tinderbox provides better control of agent priority.
Highest priority agents run every few seconds.
Normal priority agents are updated at approximately ten second intervals.
Low priority agents are updated every minute.
Lowest priority agents are updated every five minutes.
Occasional agents are updated every hour.
Extensive infrastructure improvements make agents more responsive while keeping them out of your way when you’re busy.
New Themes and Fonts:
Tinderbox is meant for serious work, but that’s no reason to avoid elegant modern typography. We include some terrific new fonts to keep your workspaces fresh and legible. In Tinderbox 9, Hoefler & Co.’s Decimal and Archer join an all-star cast that include Ideal Sans, Ringside, and Mercury.
Tinderbox lets you customize nearly every aspect of its powerful views — and, even more importantly — you can teach your documents to adapt their appearance, drawing your attention to interesting and important developments.
Color schemes let you share visual schemes, and two new schemes — Sunny and Sunny Dark — open bright new perspectives.
Improved Link Tools:
Tinderbox’s hyperbolic view examines the link network. What notes link here? What notes are reachable from here? The revamped view has improved layout and superior control, helping to visualize big documents and complex link networks.
Tinderbox agents and actions gain new power as well, with easy-to-use commands for examining link neighborhoods and finding paths among notes.
And lots more…:
Tinderbox runs superbly on Apple Silicon and Big Sur, as well as macOS 10.13 and later. Some natural language features may not be available on older systems or in all languages.

New in Tinderbox 8.9.0 (Dec 2, 2020)

New in Tinderbox 8.8.0 (Oct 7, 2020)

Find:
Tinderbox’s flexible search tools will find what you need, fast. Now, Tinderbox neural nets suggest related search terms as you type. When you find interesting results, you can drag them into your map or outline view to make an alias for later reference.
Search and replace, too, right from Find results.
New Actions:
.replace() lets agents update the text or attributes of notes. Use simple search or regular expressions.
A new operator, .strike(), lets your stamps and agents strike-through selected text in your notes.
A new function, wordsRelatedTo("term"), returns a list of search terms related to any word. Available in English, Simplified Chinese, and many other languages!
Smarter Explode:
Explode takes a long text and splits it into several smaller notes according to your instructions. Often, people want to set the name of the new notes to be their first sentence. Now, Tinderbox AI understands more about sentences, and is less likely to be fooled by honorific (Dr. Perkins), currency ($5.95), and such.
Nicer Ziplinks:
[[Ziplinks]] are now recognized in watched folder and by the import manager. [[]] now have the same powerful preview support that regular ziplinks offer.
Scripting:
Lots of new AppleScript support for making links and link types, creating agents and adornments, and more.
Crosstabs:
A new way to dive into your notes! The crosstabs view lets you explore your notes based on two different attributes. Look at your students’ performance on midterms and final exams. Examine the relationship of your writing progress to your workout schedule. Crosstabs gives you new ways to discover unexpected relationships in your ideas.
The Crosstabs view isn't just a dull report: it invites you to get your hands on the actual notes. Hover over any cell to see the notes listed there. Select any notes with a click. Tons of interesting options. You can export instantly to spreadsheets, statistical packages, or word processors. You can even make agents from interesting crosstabs cells for further research.
Geographic Adornments:
Add maps to your Tinderbox maps! Just assign an address to any large adornments and it becomes a map! Notes placed on the map that have addresses will move automatically to the appropriate place.
Shared Prototypes:
Share prototype notes across documents and make your own built-in prototypes.
Drag Notes Everywhere:
You can now drag notes out of Tinderbox views and drop them in other Tinderbox windows, in other applications, or on the Desktop.

New in Tinderbox 8.5.0 (Feb 25, 2020)

New in Tinderbox 7.5.5 (Sep 11, 2018)

ACTIONS:
$CleanupAction moves from the General to the Agent category.
The collect() family of operators has modified its behavior. If the collected attribute is a set or a list, collect() adds its elements to the result. If the collected attribute is not a set or a list, but contains a semicolon, quotation mark, or parentheses, the value will be added to the result as a quoted string. This should correct a variety of confusing cases.
ATTRIBUTE BROWSER:
Attribute Browser categories are now sorted by locale; diacritical marks no longer create unexpected sort orders. When categories are sorted by the summary, ties are sorted by the category name. (2307, 2449)
EXPORT:
In complex documents, HTMLView could fall behind in its update cycle. We now perform the update synchronously from a background thread, avoiding potential resource starvation. (2452)
Addressed a crash when switching away from HTMLView in documents that keep Tinderbox very busy. (2451)
If the preview or HTMLView had the focus and the user switch to the text pane, Tinderbox gave the focus to the Title editor rather than the text pane. (2450)
KEY ATTRIBUTES:
Fix over-ambitious percent encoding when trying to ViewInBrowser.
The key attributes table’s method updatePreservingSelection was not, in fact, preserving the selection. In consequence, after editing a key attribute, the first row was selected instead of the next row.
The View menu now allows you to Edit Key Attributes…
MAPS:
When using a tab to switch from a different view to a map view, the scroll position of the map view was sometimes drawn incorrectly, and some notes might be treated as being offscreen even though they were, in fact, on-screen. This arose because TbxMap’s setFrame:withOffset: method changes constraints on the map view but did not immediately update the layout; in consequence, the system sometimes found itself measuring the layout against the previous boundaries and origin of the map.
In maps, the command Expand Horizontally erred if the first word in the note could not fit in the available width without being broken, yet if the word were broken the entire display name would fit in the available width and height. Notes are now expanded so that, at minimum, the available width is sufficient to display the longest word in their $DisplayName. (2442)
Bold links are bold again.
Lozenge, diamond, and hex shapes choose the placement of their text more intelligently, and are more stable in placing text during resizing. (2441)
Right-clicking the link widget brings up a contextual menu listing inbound and outbound links for the note. (2382)
OUTLINES:
In Outline view, the highlight has been revised to make it easier to identify the highlighted item at a glance.
When using columns, Tinderbox failed to account properly for the margins between columns, and therefore sometimes allocated too little vertical space for the note name.
In outlines, the selection highlight is emphasized by rules at the sides of the selected note.
MISCELLANY:
Fixed a crash when evaluating $DisplayName in an agent query, because TbxDisplayNameQueue returned the wrong queue.
The Inspector may now be opened and closed from text windows.
The DEVONthink importer no longer sets key attributes of the container for the imported notes has an OnAdd action, since that container may well be setting key attributes itself.
Sorting notes is now performed on the agent thread, which should alleviate intermittent crashes in documents that spend a lot of time running rules and agent actions.
Tinderbox resets its date translator apparatus when the time zone changes during a Tinderbox session. The objects were reset on the main thread, which could create trouble if a date calculation was in progress on the date translator’s own work queue. The objects are now also reset on the work queue.
Avoid a potential crash that could occur when selecting an alias inside an agent which the agent is about to delete.
When reopening documents, text windows are opened on the main thread (as they must be) even when reading in the background.
Document Settings failed to recognize its tab bar after it had been closed and then reopened.(2426)
After a link type is edited in the Links pane of the document inspector, map views will update themselves even if no note is selected.

New in Tinderbox 7.5.3 (Jun 29, 2018)

ACTIONS:
If collect() collects items that contain an ampersand &, quotation marks " or an open parenthesis, the item is now enclosed in quotation marks to prevent parsing problem with the resulting list. (2410)
Styled Text:
Several string operations can now be applied to styled text from $Text, or destined to $Text, in order to modify the text style. Note that while any string may have its style set, this only has an effect on $Text.
When an action assigns the $Text of one note to another, Tinderbox preserves styling.
$Text = $Text(/configuration/example)
When the text of two notes are appended, Tinderbox preserves styling.
$Text = $Text(/a)+$Text(/b)
A string may be emboldened or italicized:
$Text=$DisplayName.bold
$Text=$MyString.italic
The font size of a string may be changed:
$Text=$MyString.fontSize(36)
The following operators now respect style information:
.replace , .substr , .paragraphs()
EXPORT:
HTML Export is much faster, especially for documents that contain images or lengthy texts.
Avoided a deadlock in HTMLView that could stall the agent queue and cause memory congestion, and that could also result in Tinderbox displaying stale HTML and Preview data.
Reduced the memory footprint required when exporting by reducing the number of attributed strings we create, and releasing them more promptly when they are no longer needed.
FORCE-DIRECTED LAYOUT:
View ▸ Arrange ▸ Dance is now undoable.
IMPORT:
Fixed a crash when autofetching some DEVONthink items.
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Fixed a deadlock, most likely to be encountered at startup, when several parts of Tinderbox contend to access attributes for indexing, for rule and agent initialization, and for display.
Addressed a crash when deleting a text link in map view and then copying and pasting the previously-linked text to a new note.
Agent expressions that manipulate DisplayName could deadlock and lock the agent queue. Moved DisplayName evaluation to its own serial queue.
Refactored TbxAttributeBrowserModel to move TbxAttributePicker handling from the model back to the controller.
Fixed a potential crash when trying to compute $DisplayName while Tinderbox is closing a document.
Fixed a startup crash in macOS 10.11, occurring when TbxTextViewActivationAnimation attempted to store a weak reference to a TbxTextView.
INSPECTOR:
Arrow keys did not work as expected in the autocomplete of the search fields of the Action Inspector’s Sort pane; the search fields failed to use TbxAutocompletingSearchField. (2409)
A new Appearance Inspector pane lets you set the outline background color.
MAPS:
New notes created by double-clicking or right-clicking on an adornment were moved next to the adornment; Tinderbox now creates the note where you told it to create it.
The vertical and horizontal centering kibbitzers now have higher priority than the edge-alignment kibbitzers.
Fixed a crash when then first item in a note’s text is a pdf attachment.
OUTLINES:
Outline layout has been revised to use $OutlineBackgroundColor more attractively. Outlines now use $OutlineBackgroundColor to tint the background behind the entire note, not just the note title.
If editing a value in an outline column, clicking inside the edit field no longer reselects the entire text. Instead, the insertion point is places appropriately.
TEXT:
Basic links, like text links, can link to a specific place in the destination text. The Navigate command and double-clicking the link in Browse Links now scroll to the destination and highlight the destination word.
Copied text links pasted into a new note failed to understand that their source note is the new note, not the note from which they were copied.
In the key attribute table, moved the Values popup rightward to allow space for the scroll bar.
Agent updates that refresh the screen no longer switch the focus away from the key attribute table if the key attribute is being edited.
Avoid double-escaping %-encoded URLs when opening.
In the key attributes view, URLs with non-ASCII characters now respond to the View In Browser button.
Note ▸ Explode is now available from the text pane as well as the view pane.
TextView again respects paragraph spacing.
After pasting an image, Tinderbox restores the typing attributes to what they were before the paste. (2412)
VIEWS:
After turning off View ▸ Use Columns in outline view, columns are immediately removed. Previously, they were removed from the tab but not from the view. (2423)
Added a title to the Error button, since many people don’t know what it is.
Fixed an intermittent crash when entering full-screen mode, caused by TbxMap’s attempt to cancel the current editing session when adjusting the split pane.

New in Tinderbox 7.5.0 (May 31, 2018)

FORCE DIRECTED LAYOUT:
In map view, View ▸ Arrange ▸ Dance (⇧⌘-D) initiates an automated layout of the view based on a physical simulation.
Each link among notes in the map is treated as a spring that pulls linked notes together.
All notes exert a gravitation attraction for other notes.
Notes that overlap repel each other.
At the beginning of the simulation, each note is subject to a random force, much as if it were heated. This force is reduced progressively over time. This process, known as simulated annealing, helps the simulation from getting tangled up in local minima.
Dancing automatically stops when a note is dragged or the selection is change. Dancing also stops when they layout ceases to change significantly.
Not all maps will benefit from automatic layout; the famously tangled map of Mary-Kim Arnold’s “Lust”, for example, does not. Performance may be unsatisfactory in maps with more than a few dozen notes. Nonetheless, this may prove useful in many cases.
FLAGS:
One common Tinderbox task is qualitative analysis of existing materials, such as letters, surveys, diaries, and personal papers. An important preliminary step in this work is coding —identifying occurrences of special interest for the study. For example, if we were analyzing a collection of nineteenth-century diaries to study what people recorded about food and drink, we might want to code where the food was consumed. We might mark every passage that discussed eating at home with the code P1, eating at the residence of another family member with the code P2, eating at a pub with P3, and so forth. We might also note places where money is discussed: C1 might indicate that the writer paid for their meal, C2 that someone else explicitly paid for the writer’s meal, and so forth.
Flags offer a convenient and flexible way to foreground selected codes in map view. $Flags is a new set attribute; when not empty, small “flags” are displayed above the note in map view. (Flags do not appear in other views).
For simple coding tasks, using $Badge may be adequate. Flags provide a wider range of visual cues, and new flags can be improvised quickly when coding needs change.
Note that $Flags is a list attribute.
Flags are described using a concise textual shorthand.
CHART VIEW:
The chart view has been rewritten and greatly improved.
Chart View now has its own options popover, accessible by clicking the Info button ⓘ on the chart view’s tab. The popover allows you to change the chart style and adjust the width and spacing of chart items. Most significantly, you can now choose either a left-to-right or top-to-bottom arrangement of the chart.
Subtitles now appear in chart view.
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING:
The text of notes is now scanned to extract information that might be useful for agents. These results include:
$NLNames: a set of personal names found in the text.
$NLOrganizations: a set of the names of organizations found in the text.
$NLPlaces: a set of place names found in the text.
These attributes (“NL” is short for “natural language”) are part of the new “AI” attribute category.
Note that these values are extracted automatically and are subject to a variety of errors. Values are extracted asynchronously after a note has been edited; they won’t automatically be extracted from existing notes.
REPETITION:
Get Info ▸ Repetition offers insight into words that are used repeatedly in the selected notes, sections, or in the entire document. Consistent usage may be needful or desirable, of course, but noting repetition can call attention to opportunities to adopt more precise language. The pane lists words that occur between 2-10 times; words that appear more frequently are not listed. Tinderbox also omits all words with fewer than four characters, that appear in the built-in stoplist of 100 common English words, or that appear in the note named stoplist if one exists. The indexing process tries to treat words derived from a common stem as repetitions, so plurals and verb conjugations are often handled intelligently.

New in Tinderbox 7.0.0 (Feb 22, 2017)

Composites:
Composites let you build structures from multiple notes. If you’re a reviewer, a book might have author, title, details of your assignment, and notes about your reading. Just received a new contract? A new composite is just a mouse-click away.
Making a composite is easy: just move two notes until they snap together. Tinderbox Seven comes with pre-defined composites you can use as a starting point, and it's easy to add your own.
Superb New Fonts:
Lots of people live in Tinderbox, so we want your documents to be legible and lovely. Four new state-of-the-art font families are built into Tinderbox, each carefully optimized for reading on modern screens.
Ideal Sans is a superb sans-serif font that’s ideal for your maps and outlines. (You’re reading it now.)
Mercury is a serif font that’s designed to be modern and legible, yet nearly as effective in challenging contexts as old standbys like Times Roman.
Ringside Condensed is hot off the drawing boards, a compact font that’s perfect for adornments.
Tungsten is ideal for Tinderbox dashboards where you need big impact in a small note.
Faster, Smarter Maps:
Today, lots of people use Tinderbox map views whose size and complexity were unthought of when Tinderbox was first designed. We’ve refined map views for speed and flexibility.
Even better, Tinderbox 7 introduces a family of guides or kibbitzers that look at your layout and try to help you do what you want more exactly. If you’re trying to line up some notes, or to place a note midway between some others, the kibbitzers will lend a hand.
Quick Links:
Want to link to a note without interrupting your typing? Just type “[[” and the first letter of the note you have in mind! Tinderbox displays a menu of notes; choose one and you’re done. Wiki linking without the CamelCase complexity!
Import:
It’s easier than ever to move information into Tinderbox. Import from text, Word files, Scrivener, spreadsheets, DEVONthink Pro -- you name it!
Better yet, you can now make note that automatically refresh their contents from the Web, from DEVONthink, or files stored locally or in the cloud!
Actions:
Tinderbox agents and actions help perform tedious tasks for you, keeping your work cleaned up and organized. Tinderbox 7 brings you even more actions. OnVisit actions are performed whenever you read a note. OnRemove actions are performed when you move a note away from an adornment or outside a container. Edicts are like Rules but are performed less frequently, so they use less power and fewer cycles.

New in Tinderbox 6.6.5 (Sep 16, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.3 (Jul 26, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.2 (Jul 22, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.0 (May 25, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.5.0 (Mar 23, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.4.0 (Nov 24, 2015)

ATTRIBUTES:
Attributes now offer Suggested values. Suggested values always appear in the value menu of key attributes, and are always offered for autocompletion, even if no notes currently use them. Suggested values may be added to attributes in the System Attribute and User Attribute inspectors.
A new read-only attribute $NoteURL exposes the tinderbox:// url used to access notes from other programs.
COMMON WORDS:
The Common Words window returns in the form of a Get Info pane. The pane lists the most common words found in the entire document, omitting very common words like “the” and “and.” The size of each word in the image is proportional to its frequency.
EXPORT:
Outline Export has been rewritten. Options are now available to export outlines as styled text (RTF or doc format) as well as plain text.
Text Export now allows subsection heads to be reduced in size for each level of indenting, providing finer control over export styling.
Pasting Tinderbox notes items into DEVONthink Pro Office 2.8.8 or later provides DEVONthink with more information, including any $Tags assigned in Tinderbox as well as a link to the Tinderbox item.
FOOTNOTES:
New Note menu commands allow you to add a Footnote either as a sibling of the current note or as a child of the Notes container for that note. The name of the newly-created note is taken from the selected word or phrase. A text link is created from the selected text to the footnote, and a basic link is created from the footnote to the currently-viewed note. After making a footnote, the selection shifts to the newly-created footnote; after writing the footnote, use the Navigate command to follow the basic link back to the note you were editing.
IMPORT:
Selections copied from Delicious Monster’s library application, Delicious Library, are now pasted as reference item. Pertinent attributes are automatically filled.
Tinderbox accepts drags from the Calendar. If the document has an Event prototype, the newly-created note is assigned that prototype. $StartDate and $EndDate will be populated; the name of the note is the event title and the subtitle of the note is the event location.
LINKS:
Double-click any link in the link browser to select its destination and dismiss the popover. If invoked from a view pane, the view will be scrolled or refocused if necessary to locate the newly-selected note.
New Note menu commands Navigate (⌘-Return) and Go Back (⌘-‘) are available. Navigate will follow the first basic link from the current note, selecting its destination. Go Back will return to the note most recently selected.
MAPS:
A new option the expand proportionately has been added to Note menu, and the Map pane of document settings offers a new option to expand notes proportionately if the note name is long.
OUTLINES:
In outlines, if a “leaf” note –– a note with no children – is selected, collapsing that note (⌘⌥-left-arrow) will collapse its container and select the container. Formerly, “collapse” was disabled if the note had no children.
SHARING:
Tinderbox now has a Share menu in the file menu. If some notes are selected, those notes will be shared with compatible programs. If no notes are selected, the Tinderbox document itself will be shared.
STAMPS:
Stamps may be dragged in the Stamp inspector to reorder stamps in the stamp menu.
TEXT:
Text: in the text pane, the Indent and Unindent commands (⌘-[ and ⌘-]) indent and unindent the selected paragraphs.
NEW ACTIONS:
Actions: new dot-operators .count, .max and .min return the size, maximum and minimum elements in a list or set. For example, $MyList.max returns the largest element in $MyList.
Actions: the new dot-operators .beginsWith and .endsWith return true if a string begins or ends with a specific substring. For example
$MyString.endsWith("cream")
is true if $MyString is “ice cream”. These operators search for literal strings, not regular expressions; if you need to search for a regular expression, use .contains.
Actions: the operators linkToOriginal(), linkFromOriginal(), unlinkToOriginal(), and unlinkFromOriginal() create and delete links. If either the source or destination of the action is an alias, the original note is used as the target rather than the alias.
MISCELLANEOUS:
In Outlines, left-arrow now selects the parent of the selected note. Formerly, is selected the previous note in outline order, which up-arrow also does.
The Tinderbox inspector now reports the number of active agents along with the number of agents; this is useful if you have lots of inactive agents.
The font size of the note title displayed in the text pane is now reduced for long titles, allowing more of the title to be viewed.
AutoFetch was restricted to checking no more than once every five minutes. This makes debugging too hard. Now, the first update after opening a document will always perform an auto fetch.
The URL handler treated top-level items as an error. For example, 'tinderbox://testing/?view=outline+select=1447138898' should anchor the outline to the root, but instead failed to find a note named “” and posted an error.
Copy URL of a top-level note failed to export the / after host component.
tinderbox://testing/?view=outline+select=1447138898;
Prevent a crash when Tinderbox is reawakened after a flight in which the locale or time zone has changed.
Two new elements may be overridden in the optional configuration file, config/config.xml, located in the Support Folder. font name sets the default TextFont for newly-created documents, and 1-9 sets the relative text size from 1 (tiny) to 9 (huge).
Copy Note URL is now available on the Note menu as well as the item contextual menu.
Maps: stub links (links to and from notes in other containers) are longer and more easily visible.
File ▸ Update Agents Now will also perform any edicts.
Attribute inspectors: hide Suggested Values when type isn’t string, set, or list.
The Stamp Inspector disables its stamp name and action text fields when no stamp is selected.
Maps: the text thumbnail wrapped prematurely if the width of the map item was greater than the width of the note’s most recent text pane.
Avoided a startup crash when initializing agents, where changes were being processed on the wrong thread.

New in Tinderbox 6.3.2 (Oct 22, 2015)

HIGHLIGHTS:
ATTRIBUTES:
A new built-in set attribute, $Tags, is available for free-form tagging of notes. The new Tags attribute is categorized under References because “General” is getting too full.
IMPORT:
OPML import is now more tolerant of bad input, and no longer crashes if the file encoding is MacRoman.
Spreadsheet import again handles line breaks in quoted text fields correctly.
Spreadsheet import failed with certain complex, multiline text fields that contained encoded tabs or newlines inside escaped quotes.
INSPECTOR:
Properties Inspector/Prototype pane: the menu failed to list all the prototypes if some prototypes share the same name, leading to erroneous selections when using the menu.
The fix of the Properties Inspector Prototype popup in b163 broke the map view prototype tab and the outline view prototype contextual menu. These work once more.
MAPS:
Image adornments with transparent or translucent regions are no longer rendered opaque then the document is saved.
Arrowheads on linear links are again correctly rendered; their orientation had previously been arbitrary.
In maps, left-arrow and right-arrow now select the next and previous sibling of the selected note.
The plot inspector now allows you to enter a value for the target line.
XY Plots now draw a target line if a target is specified.
Changing some visible attributes of aliases, such as $NameStrike, failed to refresh the display immediately if the original note was absent from the current view.
ROADMAP:
Roadmap is now available from the treemap contextual menu.
Torn-off Roadmap windows now automatically adjust the width of their columns, and also automatically elide titles if they exceed the window width.
TRAVEL:
If Tinderbox remained open while the computer moved to a new locale, it would continue to use the old locale.
If Tinderbox remained open while the computer moved to a new time zone, it would continue to use the old time zone.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Crash on wake, trying to update the layout of a ValueCellView in the key attributes table. Presumably, the selected note was an agent alias which was deleted while Tinderbox is in the background. Deleting changes the selection before the note is deleted, but that updated the text pane only if the text had been edited! Now, we update the text pane as well if the note has been hidden.
Crash when rendering preview containing Prototypes in a document with active rules and agents, because the note was reindexed while rendering was under way. The Markup not makes a copy of the Lynx record.
Help: corrected export problems caused by missing double carets ^ in Additional Export Elements.
Took steps to prevent crashes on quit or when closing a document, if pending changes are enqueued when the document is closed.
In key attribute tables, the pull-down menu of value cells is now sorted case-insensitively.
It was possible to select a MapBackgroundColor document setting of “normal”, which (a) made no sense, since normal means “inherited or default” and we’re setting the default here, and (b) leaves us with the DebugColor, which is unsightly by design.
When edicts were updated while Tinderbox was in the background, the next edict update was scheduled for approximately five hours from the present, rather than one hour.
Fixed the help string for $Edition
Browse Links… is now available in the treemap contextual menu.
Text links created from an alias were not displayed, because the text is associated with the original note, not the alias. Now, creating a text link from an alias implicitly creates a link from the original rather than the alias, as the alias has no text to link to.
In some documents with active agents and rules, Tinderbox sometimes fails to save multiple window layouts whilst saving other information correctly. Modified autosave to ensure that documents are not marked as needing to be autosaved while in the process of being closed.
(For Developers) When one or more notes are copied to the pasteboard, Tinderbox now adds a new flavor com.eastgate.tinderbox.metadata for the convenience of other applications. The new flavor is a list of dictionaries, one for each selected note, which may have the following keys:
Name: the note’s DisplayName (NSString)  - Tags: an array of NSStrings, possibly empty, containing the NSString values of each element of the note’s $Tags attribute - Created: the note’s creation date (NSDate)
Text: the note’s text (NSString) - URL: the tinderbox:// url for the note

New in Tinderbox 6.3.1 (Jul 29, 2015)

HIGHLIGHTS:
Attributes: Intervals
A new attribute type, Interval, represents time intervals and durations. For example, the interval value
01:25:40
represents a duration of one hour, twenty-five minutes, and forty seconds. The duration
01:30
represents one minute and thirty seconds. The duration
1h30
represents one hour and thirty minutes. A duration may be preceded by a number of days:
1 day 01:00:00 (25 hours)
2d2h30 (two days, two hours and 30 minutes)
An interval may have negative duration:
-5:30
Intervals may be added or subtracted from durations, multiplied or divided by constants or numeric attributes, and may be compared for equality using == and != or for magnitude using < and >. Interval may be added to dates. Note that subtracting two dates does not currently return an interval — rather, it returns the number of days between the two dates.
The interval “2d5” is now treated as 2 days, 5 hours. (1544)
The interval “1h30m10s” is now treated as one hour, thirty minutes and 10 seconds; previously the seconds field was ignored in this format. (1544)
The function interval(start,end) returns the interval between two dates. For example,
interval($Created,$Modified)
returns the interval between a note’s initial creation and its most recent modification.
The “unknown attribute” popover used when adding key attributes now lets you define interval attributes. (1542)
DEVONthink Integration - When any item is dragged from DEVONthink into Tinderbox, the newly-created note’s URL points to the DEVONthink database record for the original item. This has always been possible through the DEVONthink “Copy URL” command, but now it works seamlessly whenever you drag from DEVONthink. (Requires DEVONthink 2 or later)
Storyspace Support - Later this year, Eastgate expects to announce Storyspace 3, a new tool for writing hypertext narrative that builds on and extends the Storyspace legacy. Storyspace helped pioneer the craft of hypertext fiction, and Storyspace 3 will bring a wealth of new capabilities to this effort.
Tinderbox and Storyspace will share files, letting writers move seamlessly between them.
This release incorporates many changes in support of Storyspace, none of which should significantly affect Tinderbox. Several new System attributes have been added in the new Storyspace category, but these aren’t likely to provoke collisions.
Using Tinderbox From Other Applications - URLs that begin
tinderbox://
let other tools link to Tinderbox documents and specific tabs, views, and notes. The tinderbox:// protocol has been substantially improved.
The protocol handler for tinderbox:// urls will now automatically open documents in the Recent Files list as well as documents that are already open.
The tinderbox:// protocol now accepts an additional command, select, which takes as an argument a semicolon-delimited list of IDs to be selected.
tinderbox://Notes/Issues?select=1429560859
Alternatively, the argument can be a URL-encoded name
tinderbox://Notes/Issues?select=Find Issues
If a single note is selected, Tinderbox will attempt to scroll it into view.
The contextual item menu for notes now contains an option to Copy Note URL which places the note’s tinderbox:// url on the clipboard. (1546)
Clarified fix 560, in which a contextual menu item places the URL of a document tab on the clipboard.
RevisedApplescriptManager to handle escaping more reliably, and corrected some mistakes in encoding tinderbox:// URLs.
ALSO OF NOTE:
Actions - Using undefined colors — such assigning a note the $Color “Red” or “rde” when you meant “red” — previously had undefined behavior. We now return a specific arbitrary color (currently a brick red) for all undefined colors. (1538)
The dot operators .uppercase, .lowercase, and .captialize had too high an operator precedence, and so expressions like MyList.at(n).substr(0,3).lowercase required extra parenthesis to be parsed correctly. (1495)
Actions restoring the default or inherited value of a visible attribute
$Badge=;
incorrectly marked the attribute as changed even when the note’s value did not, in fact, change, potentially forcing necessary screen updates and interfering with scrolling.
Export - When exporting with $HTMLEntities false, some paragraphs ignored the note’s $HTMLEntities setting and export with entities anyway, causing difficulties when exporting East Asian languages (among others) to HTML. (1061, 1523, 1524)
New HTML markup elements # and 6_0_1.html return the relative URL the the eldest and youngest sibling of this note, respectively.
Export as Text could display the export sheet in the inspector window if the inspector happened to have the keyboard focus. Tinderbox now disables Export As Text if the inspector has the focus. (1547)
Help - Corrected Help ▸ Feathering Your Nest ▸ Color Schemes
Many corrections to Tinderbox Help (thanks, Mark Anderson!)
Key Attributes:
The formatting of dates in the Key Attribute table is now adjustable. By default, the date and time are shown using the system’s short formats for the current locale. Other formats may be chosen by changing the value of $KeyAttributeDateFormat. Suggested values include “L” and “l” to display only the date in long and short format respectively. (1421)
A new popup menu in the Text pane of Document settings lets you conveniently set the default format for dates in the Key Attribute Table. (1421)
In the key attribute table, the drop-down menu for set attributes now displays a checkmark next to items that are currently selected. (1519)
Typing in the key attributes picker prematurely ended an editing session if the text happened to include a text link or a smart link. Changing key attributes forced update rulers which toggled the text field, deselecting the token field and then reselecting it. (1525)
Maps:
Tinderbox tabs should do a better job of keeping track of their scroll positions.
Avoid unsightly scrolling and unwanted boundary animation when dragging notes into a container. (1508)
Fixed several problems with the font button in Document Settings:Maps. (1539)
When right-clicking in the background of map views, Tinderbox displays the map coordinates of the click point as a disabled item in the menu.New Xcode beta.
Changing caption alignment in the caption pane of the Name inspector should now update the map view immediately. (1400)
Outlines:
The “title bar” for agent icons is now heavier in outline view, allowing Tinderbox to better differentiate between agents that are running and those that are “off”. (1513)
Text:
Ctrl-return now inserts a line break without also inserting a paragraph break. We avoid the conventional shift-return for this, on advice of the best authorities, because some typists press the shift key early in anticipation of capitalizing the first letter of a new paragraph. Ctrl-return should please Tinderbox users who work with poetry.
When editing the text pane, ⌘⌥-up-arrow and ⌘⌥-down arrow select the next and previous note, but now return the keyboard focus to the text pane. Previously, the view pane gained the focus. (1352)
Tinderbox no longer enforces $ParagraphSpacing if you override it while editing text. For example, if you are discussing a poem, you might want no additional spacing between lines of the poem, while still using $ParagraphSpacing to separate paragraphs. (1537 in part)
Automatic Link Detection (“Smart Links”), which makes URLs clickable (and blue) when typed in the text pane, is now disabled in template notes. (1489)
Forward-delete/fn-Delete when typed in the text pane was incorrectly intercepted and acted upon by the attribute browser view pane. (1536,1299)
Lengthy and complicated pastes were not inscribed in the document unless they were subsequently edited. If they were not inscribed, the text was also not marked as modified after pasting. (1548)
The text size of columns now adapts correctly to changes in the note’s font size and the view’s magnification. (1540)
Treemaps:
Links may now be dragged from the parking spaces to notes in treemap view. (1514)
Workflow – Menus and Shortcuts
Added shortcut keys to item contextual menu’s entry for Roadmap ⇧⌥⌘-R (1516)
Document windows now remember whether or not the text ruler is visible. (1535)
The item contextual menu now includes Browse Links. (1549)
Browse Links is now disabled if the selected note has no links to browse.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Edicts failed to run at hourly intervals, because the edict queue was suspended and not reactivated.
New (beta) version of development environment, with numerous changes to accommodate new SDKs.
Numerous corrections in Actions and Dashboards, and several fixes to the corresponding Tinderbox document.
Rewrote Network Updates::CheckForLatestVersion to allow a longer timeout and more reliable operations.
Fixed a crash when choosing a scheme from the color scheme picker. (1512)
To prevent accidents, Forward-delete is no longer active in attribute browser. (1522)
Explode now uses the prototype “/Prototypes/exploded notes” to contain exploded notes, creating a prototype if none exists. The default prototype simply adds $ChildCount as a key attribute. (1521)
Fixed an intermittent problem with layout in the Explode popover. (1537)
While closing a document, took steps to ensure that roadmap and get info windows do not attempt to use pointers to the now-deleted hypertext object. (1509)
Changes in network code to support El Capitan.
Addressed a possible crash when closing a window that is in the process of rendering an HTML preview. (1118)
Addressed a crash when creating Agents from the menu bar, arising because Tinderbox was updating the screen before the agent was properly baked
Tinderbox no longer performs Storyspace OnVisit actions when a note is selected. (1533)
Addressed a crash that could occur when the outline view pane was narrow — but not too narrow – because it proved impossible to measure the text rectangles.
Fixed a possible crash when editing Tinderbox Code Fields, when trying to find the names of attributes that begin with a given prefix.

New in Tinderbox 6.3.0 (Jun 3, 2015)

HIGHLIGHTS:
A new walkthrough, Actions and Dashboards, joins Getting Started With Tinderbox on the Help menu. Explore one of the the most exciting and thoroughly-examined expense reports you’ve ever imagined while learning how to use agents, rules, and Tinderbox’s visualization tools more effectively.
A new treemap view reveals complex hierarchical structure while helping you visualize properties of hundreds of notes at a glance.
Better progress bars and pie charts help your dashboards help you keep an eye on your goals.
Large and complex map views are much faster.
This release is recommended for all Tinderbox Six users. See the release notes in Tinderbox Help for all the details; here are some highlights.
Lookup tables:
We sometimes need to some discrete values onto other values. For example, suppose we have some notes that record the state in which each customer resides. We want to know the sales region for the customer; each state is assigned to a region.
Lookup tables can specify several keywords that share a common value by separating the keyword with the pipe character |. For example, “Oliver|Micawber|Pip:Dickens;Palliser|Finn:Trollope”. Lookup tables have been added to Help.
Actions
When expressions are coerced to numbers, the logical value true is now coerced to 1, and false is coerced to zero.
The currency format converters .format(“$”) and .format(“$0”) now use locales set by the locale() operator if it has been called; otherwise, they use the system's default locale.
Explode:
The explode action is now applied after the text of the newly-created note is set, allowing the action to modify or depend on the exploded text.
Explode now remembers the most recently-used delimiter, which can be convenient when using complicated regular expression delimiters.
Export:
Print has been added to the contextual menu for the HTML Preview pane.
Maps:
Responsiveness of large and complex maps has been greatly improved. When dragging notes, Tinderbox is more aggressive in reducing detail in order stay responsive. In particular, links may be suppressed during the drag if link drawing is impairing responsiveness.
Progress Bars now accept an optional fourth argument, a target value.
The target represents a nominal or desired result. For example, we might write from 0 to 4000 words on any given day, but during NaNoWriMo we want to set the target at 1500 words/day.
The target is drawn in a dashed link alternating $PlotColor and either $Color or $Color2.
Fixed a crash when displaying a summary table if $Name contained an encoding error.
Outlines:
Outlines update elements more smoothly while dragging the pane splitter; element resizing was being animated, which is unhelpful. (1451)
Right-clicking the background of an outline view (e.g. below the final item or in the left margin) now allows you to Create Separator in place of the disabled option to Create Adornment.
Tab bar:
The tab bar may now be hidden (View ▸ Tabs ▸ Show Tabs). The hidden tab bar is “spring loaded”: when the mouse moves near the top of the window the tab bar will be revealed and remain until the mouse moves away.
The selected tab of most view types now has a small “info” button that permits you to set options for the tab; this replaces a variety of buttons and contextual menus formerly used to set background colors and other options.
Text:
Format ▸ Style ▸ Reset Margins resets paragraphs in the selected range to use the standard margins and line spacing.
Editing a note with text links could previously have led the text links to shift position in the text.
When the key focus is on the text pane, the menu titles for Show Key Attributes/Hide Key Attributes/No Key Attributes are updated appropriated.
We now have a disclosure button for the key attributes table, as well as the show/hide menu command.
Text no longer scrolls to the top after paste.
In the text pane, Magnify and Shrink now change the size of the selected text, rather than scaling the view pane.
Automatic detection of URLs in note text is now enabled by default. It can be disabled using Edit ▸ Substitutions ▸ Smart Links. The status of automatic URL detection is now saved with the document and will be restored when the document is reopened.
Text: after pasting more than a few thousand words into a note, Tinderbox might fail to save the revised text unless it was subsequently edited because a formatting operation timed out. The formatting operation is faster now and the timeout more forgiving.
$SmartQuotes now controls both automatic quote substitution and automatic dash substitution. Double-hyphens in templates will no longer be converted to m-dashes, a convenience that plagued HTML comments.
To edit the anchor of a text link, option click in the link to set the insertion point without activating the link. Made a note of this in the Help file.

New in Tinderbox 6.2.1 (Apr 25, 2015)

Pie Plots:
Pie charts have been improved in a variety of ways. (1353)
Labels are now drawn atop pie chart segments; previously, some segments could be drawn atop labels from other segments.
The colors for each segment of the pie chart are taken from the attribute $PlotColorList. The first color designates the color of the first segment, and remaining colors in the list are used in rotation until all segments have been drawn. If the list contains fewer than two colors, “black;white” are used inside.
If the container is sufficiently wide, a legend is drawn to the right of the pie chart. Otherwise, pie segments are labeled in the pie chart.
If $Direction is false, the first segment begins at the top of the pie and subsequent segments are added clockwise – as is customary in geography. If $Direction is false, the first segment begins as the right edge of the circle and segments are added counter-clockwise, as customary in mathematics.
Pie segments are now separated by a dark gray line.
If a container or agent has a pie chart, then the alias of that container or agent will also display the same pie chart, if space allows.
Renaming Notes:
In-place editing (outline): clicking in the edit field incorrectly closes the edit session. This was a byproduct of fixing issue 1370; we now address that issue differently. (1414)
Actions:
When formatting numbers format("$") and .format("$") apply conventional formatting for your local currency – for example, “$1,063.52”
When formatting numbers format("$0”) and .format("$0”) apply conventional formatting for your local currency, rounding to the nearest currency unit – for example, “$1064” .
Equality comparison == and != now work with Color attributes. Colors are equal if they designate the same color — for example, the colors “#FF0000” and “bright red” are equal in the default color scheme. (1408)
Equality comparison == and != now work with URL attributes. Note that URL comparisons are currently case-sensitive, even in the host: http://Eastgate.com/ is not equal to http://eastgate.com/ . This may change in the future. (1409)
Miscellaneous:
Fixed an auto layout error in the text pane’s title field, which could grow unreasonably if a note’s title contains many paragraphs.
Moved the “smart quotes” checkbox in Document Settings: Text to the correct location.
The Rule and Edict panes of the inspector now indicate whether the rule or edict is inherited, or immediate. (1358)
When importing large spreadsheet tables, we no longer set the text of the import container to contain the full table, as this can take a long time without much benefit. (1217)
Corrected a crash when switching to a new space (?or perhaps awaking from sleep) while the Get Info popover is displayed, because on returning to view Tinderbox tries to refer to the no-longer-extant model for the Get Info category list.
Added some precautions to guard against Tinderbox agent updates attempting to proceed after the document has been closed.
Shortened the timeout on Simplenote authorization requests from 30 to 15sec.
In outline view, Note ▸ Create Note created new notes at the top level of the view, even if the selected note was more deeply nested. Note ▸ Create Child Note has also been corrected.
Console messages were displayed after undoing note creation in outline view, warning that Tinderbox could not create a LayoutInfo. We no longer ask it to create the LayoutInfo for the now-hidden note. (1411)
$HTMLExportPath had incorrect values for notes not at the top level. (1412)
After dismissing the find bar, Tinderbox returns the focus to the currently selected note. (1404)
Searching in the view pane’s Find bar now temporarily highlights text in the text pane. Highly experimental. (1406 in part)
Fixed a crash when trying to import text files encoded with UTF16 rather than UTF8. (1416)
CeresReader could sometimes leave notes read from a document marked as “newlyCreated”, and this could sometimes lead Tinderbox to unexpected behaviors such as spontaneously opening Get Info when switching tabs, if the selection in the destination tab happened to be an agent.

New in Tinderbox 6.2.0 (Apr 17, 2015)

HIGHLIGHTS:
Import and Export are simpler, yet also provide more flexibility. A variety of new Export tools let you export your work to familiar formats instantly, while the flexible template-based approach remains for demanding export needs.
Map performance has been substantially improved.
A new feature, Edicts, allows you to establish low-priority rules for automatic housekeeping.
Badges can be larger, and can be emoji or other characters.
Text can contain lists and tables.
This release is recommended for all Tinderbox Six users.
Actions:
The designator child[-1] designates a note’s youngest child. child[-2] designates the elder sibling of the youngest child. (1292)
runCommand passed MacRoman to the command line arguments, not utf8 (1301)
In agents, that is now bound to the examined note both when the query is evaluated and also when the action is performed. Previously, that was not bound for the action.
A new attribute $ImageCount in the Textual category reflects the number of images in the note’s text.
Date formats: new format code U formats the data in Unix style (seconds since January 1, 1970) (1319)
Explode: the explode popover adds an Action field which lets you enter an action to be applied to each exploded note.
Added a new attribute group, Sandbox, to hold several attributes useful for testing and experimentation: MyString, MyNumber, MyList, MySet, MyBoolean, MyColor, and MyDate.(1331)
The attribute $Bend replaces the former attribute $LeafBend. The former attribute continues to work as before but the old name is deprecated. (1355)
Convenience:
In outlines and other views, ctrl-Return creates a new note as the elder sibling of the selected note.
Tinderbox now recognizes additional abbreviations of days of the week. For example, in English the four-letter abbreviation “Thur” is now recognized for “Thursday.” (1238)
During long exports, both ⌘-period and Esc cancel the operation. MapItemController has been intercepting the cancellation. (1326,1327)
The tooltip for the text pane note title field is the full path to the note. If the note is an alias, the tool tip shows both the path to the alias and the path to the original note. (1350)
Better behavior for page-up/down (fn-up-arrow and fn-down-arrow) in outlines. (1306)
Support for home/end keys ( ⇧-fn-up-arrow and ⇧-fn-down-arrow) in outlines.
Edicts:
A new action attribute, Edict, lets you specify housekeeping actions that do not need to be updated frequently. Edicts are performed soon after a document is opened, and then are updated at intervals of approximately one hour. Edicts are especially useful for chores like archiving obsolete notes which only need to be performed occasionally. (1214)
A new intrinsic Boolean attribute, EdictDisabled, allows you to disable Edicts associated with a note. Often, EdictDisabled will be used when a prototype has an edict to be inherited by its instances, but you don’t want the edict to apply to the prototype itself.
A new pane in the Action Inspector permits you to view, edit, and enable edicts.
The Agents and Rules pane of the Tinderbox Inspector now reports the edict count and the interval since the most recent edict update. (1393)
Export:
Export has been extensively revised to provide simpler access to common export formats.
Export Templates: a folder “templates” is now created in the Application Support folder to hold export templates that are to be shared among files. Shared templates are stored as text files in this folder, and may be added to any document by selecting the file from File ▸ Built-In Templates. If a template with that name already exists, the template’s text is replaced with the text of the template file. (1300)
Extensive changes to export, which may now be a bit faster. Export is now performed in the background; in principle, you can continue working during export.
Backed out changes to make export more massively parallel, because the export context (including binding of this) is shared by the hypertext and so isn’’t thread safe. Added an issue to explore this.
Export now uses a progress indicator built into the main window. Enjoy this; it was a bear.
Export commands moved to a submenu of the file menu.
Export ▸ As OPML exports the entire document as an OPML file, adding the built-in OPML templates if necessary.
Export ▸ As Outline exports the entire document to a text file, presenting the display name of each note in a tab-indented outline.
Export ▸ As Rich Text exports the entire document as an rtf file, including titles (treated as headings) and the text of each exported note (exported as styled text).
Export ▸ As Rich Text (no titles) omits note titles.
Export ▸ As .doc File exports the entire document in Microsoft Word format, including (treated as headings) and the text of each exported note (exported as styled text).
HTML Export can be cancelled (at last!) by pressing ⌘-period or Esc while the keyboard focus is in the map pane.
Export Selected Note has been rewritten to use the standard save dialog.
A new export method Export ▸ Attribute Browser exports each attribute browser category and the notes it contains.
$HTMLFileNameLowerCase now defaults to false; in previous Tinderbox Six releases it defaulted to true.
Export commands for .doc export are now enabled from the text pane as well as the view pane. (1318)
RTF/Word Export: changed titles from 24pt to 18pt.
Added an option sheet for export, permitting us to consolidate RTF, doc, and text export into a single menu choice.
The new option sheet for Export now allows you to choose to export the entire document or only the selected notes. (1317)
Export: OPML export is now an option in the Text export sheet, rather than its own menu choice.
Export: added an option to export plain text.
Export: added an option to export to Scrivener.
Export: title size is adjustable.
The standard Save panel displayed by the HTML Inspector’s Export To button can now create folders.
The label of the Export To button is now correctly placed.
Fixed links in Tinderbox Help:Export
HTML Export: conditional evaluation of the existence of notes ( …. ) always returned true; it now returns false if the designated note doesn’t exist.
HTML Export: conditional evaluation of the existence of notes will now work with designators. will be true if this note has a nextSibling, false otherwise.
Single note export now sets the initial export location to the note’s expected export folder. Formerly, the export location was set only of the file already existed.(1325)
Smart Dashes and Smart Quotes are both implicitly disabled (again) in templates.
Import:
Tinderbox now imports .webarchive files. On import, the $URL of the imported note is set to the URL of the archive’s main resource, and Tinderbox takes a rough stab at extracting the styled text to the imported note. (1307)
XML-parseable text files, such as many html page templates, failed to import because they are mistaken for malformed OPML. Now, files with text or txt extensions will never be checked for parseability. (1303)
AutoFetch now imports styled text extracted from the target URL, rather than importing raw HTML.
If Tinderbox is asked to parse an invalid OPML file, it leaves an error notice in the text of the imported note. (1302)
.md, .mmd, and .markdown files are now imported as text.
Tinderbox now accepts file drops of .tsv files (tab-separated values) (1332)
When Tinderbox supports tab-separated tables (including drags from spreadsheets), cell values that are surrounded by straight quotes have the quotes trimmed. (1332)
Inspectors:
Quickstamp: the search field now offers autocompletion (1377) and updates the current value on selection when a completion is chosen (1243).
Applying a Quickstamp immediately updates the key attributes table, allowing faster feedback. (1254)
In the User Attributes pane of the Document Inspector, if you try to name or rename an attribute with a name beginning with ‘$’, the ‘$’ is ignored. Previously, this was treated as an error. (1298)
The Tinderbox Inspector’s Agents and Rules pane now indicates that automatic agent updates have been disabled.(1321)
The System Attribute pane of the Document Inspector now indicates when the selected attribute is intrinsic. (1357)
Name and Caption inspector: alignment terms are no longer capitalized. (1373)
The missing “font” type now appears in its place in the User attribute type list. It is disabled, as only system attributes can usefully hold fonts. (1369)
Closing a document no longer closes the Inspector if some other document remains open. (1367)
The Text Inspector’s Text panel now correctly reflects the note’s paragraph spacing; formerly, it was off by one. (1371)
Maps:
Substantial improvements in scrolling speed, both for mouseWheel scrolling and grabby hand scrolling. Links in complex maps are automatically hidden during scrolling to improve performance.
The tendency of the map view to “jump” after creating new notes in sparsely-populated views has been reduced.
Breadcrumb bar appearance and removal is animated, breadcrumb titles are positioned more neatly.
Link labels were truncated at scales after increasing the magnification of the map, because the cached link widths were note cleared.
Labels for curved links were placed as if the links were linear; the new label placements should be somewhat better.
Agents now have a summary table widget at all times, even if they have no children. Formerly, agents with no children did not display the table widget. (1256)
Emoji and other unicode characters may now be used as badges. In place of the badge name, set $Badge to the unicode character to be displayed in the badge area. Best results will generally be obtained with $BadgeSize of 32 or greater.
Shrink To Fit was far too conservative in using the available width and height of the note. (1330)
If a smart adornment has a subtitle, the layout algorithm now allows space so the subtitle will not be completely obscured.
Better selection of link pads when note edges nearly overlaps, especially when large notes are closely spaced.
Somewhat better map printing.
Smart adornments allow a little extra space beneath the title so that notes do not crowd title descenders.
Maps: when clicking in the interior of containers, Tinderbox failed to make proper allowance for the Title bar, which displaced the click target for the note from the note’s image. (927)
Outlines:
In outlines, ⇧-PageUp (⇧-fn-upArrow) moves to the first item and ⇧-PageDown (⇧-fn-downArrow) moves to the last item.
Double-clicking in the background beneath an outline adds a new note as the youngest child of the parent, not the eldest.
Improved drawing of agent icon in outlines. (1375)
Text Pane:
Added Table… and List… commands to the Format ▸ Text menu, providing panels to insert tables and lists in the text pane.(1379)
Using Check Spelling While Typing in the text pane should now update both $NoSpelling and the current text behavior immediately. (1281)
Tinderbox text panes now save and respect line spacing, paragraph spacing, list styles and tabs set in the ruler. (1245, 1271)
When $ParagraphSpacing is used, half of the spacing is now applied before the paragraph and half is applied after the paragraph. Previously, the entire spacing was applied after the paragraph. (1251)
Text: Tinderbox 5 documents opened with a fixed right margin, which is unhelpful in Tinderbox 6.
The text pane’s contextual menu displayed inappropriate link-editing options when right-clicking on a text link. These options no longer appear, and are replaced by Browse Links. (1362)
Text again observes $LineSpacing and $ParagraphSpacing throughout the text, overriding local changes from the ruler.
Scrolling the text pane and then activating it with a click no longer scrolls the text pane to the start. (This was a side-effect of the ruler update workaround.)
Miscellaneous:
(Internal) DirectoryList, which is used by the badge picker, built-in templates and built-in prototypes, now automatically skips all files with the .xml extension. The special file manifest.xml is read, parsed, and may be used to provide configuration information about the directory.
(Internal) The optional manifest.xml file may be added to user badge directories as well as built-in badge directories. It has the form:
1 0
If monochromatic is not zero, choosing a badge from this family will set $BadgeMonochrome to true and the badge will be drawn differently against a dark background color. If oversize is not zero, $BadgeSize will be set to its value.
HTML Pane: If a note has no template, and the HTML pane is visible but the divider is dragged to hide it, the divider width formerly popped back to reveal the pulldown menu that allows the user to select a template. The layout had been coaxed to permit the pane to remain completely hidden. (1257)
In some cases, deleting all the text of a note, deselecting, and then reselecting the note left the text pane typing attributes set for Helvetica 12. The typing attributes in this case are now restored to the note’s default text font. (1304)
A specific note – originally imported from email – crashed when attempting to render it into HTML. (1308)
Console messages “CoreAnimation: warning, deleted thread with uncommitted CATransaction…” were traced to attempting to mark the document as edited from a secondary threat. TbxDocument’s setModified now uses the main thread.
TbxDocument’s setModified: no longer launches an asynchronous task if the task won’t change the then-current value of isDocumentEdited.
When importing an OPML file that isn’t valid OPML, Tinderbox now identifies the line where the parser failed in the text of the imported note.
Avoid crashing when a selecting a malformed color scheme in Document Settings:Colors.
Rewrote tbxMapValet’s restoreItemOrder for more efficiency, allowing us to maintain the z-ordering of items even during scrolling.
When stamps are applied to a large number of notes, a progress indicator appears.
Views: when editing a view title, pressing ESC cancels the editing session. If the note was previously untitled, it is deleted; otherwise, the note’s title returns to its previous title.
Get Info should again be available in Mavericks when an item is selected and the item has the focus. (1329)
Corrected right margin handling when saving.
Browse Links: when examining links from an alias, Browse Links now list text links from the original note, since aliases share that original’s text and text links. (1328)
In Document Settings ▸ Maps, the Interior Scale slider displays its current value, and updates that value as it is moved. (738)
The subtle gradients of the bezel border are suppressed when printing and copying images, since Quartz renders translucent gradients incorrectly when drawing offscreen.
Format ▸ Style ▸ Black (^⌘-5) now restores the color to the note’s text color if the text color is not black.
Outline text heights were measured incorrectly for notes where $OutlineTextSize was not 100% (1294)
Clarified what “Link to Selected Text” does by setting its title to reflect the selected text. If the text selection is “Arkansas” and the note Arkansas exists, the menu title becomes Link to “Arkansas”.
Legacy documents with a border bevel of “normal” are now treated as having a border bevel of “automatic” in the Appearance inspector.
Links are refreshed after drag-scrolling a map view, since they may have been suppressed during drag-scrolling for better performance.
Fixed a distracting animation artifact in maps when snapping a note to a guide changed both the mapView bounds and the position of the dragged note.
New compiler and SDK release, requiring various updates to remove deprecated idioms.
Corrected layout of Get Info URL pane. (1374)
If, after editing the name of a note in outline, you click into the text pane to close the edit session and begin revising the text, the text pane’s title field was not updated to reflect the changed name. (1370)
Roadmap: shortcut changed to ⌘⌥⇧-R
Adjusted background color appearance in roadmap tables.
Corrected a problem when creating macros, in which the newly-named macro would not be selected for editing (1372)
Menu item: Window ▸ Toggle Full Screen (1364)
Agent with a cleanup action of “none” or “” retain their map layout. Previously, the layout lost when the file was reloaded. (1378)
Revise mouseUp in expand widget to ensure that the scrollable viewport grows after the expand. We failed to cancel the potential drag before updating the view frame, causing scrolling to sometimes appear “sticky”. (1381)
Browse links: links to aliases are now italicized. (1382)
Badge picker: Extra “blank” items arising from system files hidden from the finder are no longer displayed. (1383)
Edit ▸ Make Alias creates an alias as the sibling of the selected note. Previously, the alias was created as a child of the parent note of the view. (1389)
The HintView’s illustrative tab arrow has been moved leftward to avoid hitting the splitter bar. (1392)
Explode has been revised to reliably delete delimiters. (1394)
Browse Links handles multiline text link anchors more gracefully. (1397)

New in Tinderbox 6.1.2 (Jan 21, 2015)

New:
A new item in the TinderboxSix menu displays highlights of this version.
The What’s New window will also be displayed at startup for registered users the first time they install a new version.
Getting Started With Tinderbox:
A tutorial walkthrough for beginning users, found in the Help menu.
Badges:
The badge picker has been completely rewritten to support larger badge families.
New attribute $BadgeMonochrome. In maps, if $BadgeMonochrome is true and if $Color is dark, the badge will be drawn in sourceOut mode instead of sourceOver. This is useful when using black badges on a dark map background. (1226)
$BadgeSize is a numeric attribute which sets the size of the badge in map view. If zero (the default), the default badge size is used. The Badge Picker automatically sets $BadgeSize to 32 when selecting badges from the Avatar family; an even-larger badge may sometimes be desirable.
The Badge Picker’s pane selector adapts somewhat more reasonably if there are numerous user families of badges (1268)
Text:
Highlighting selected text always used yellow, even if the red or blue highlighter was selected. (1216)
Dog ears sometimes appeared in notes and containers which had formerly held text, but from which all the text had been deleted.
Changing dates in the key attribute table would often set the selection to the first row, not the next row, because the need to update the value cell forced the table to be rebuilt, losing the selection. (1218)
Paste styled text into an empty note, then delete the text. The typing style correctly adopts the style of the pasted text. However, in past versions, Format ▸ Style ▸ Standard Font did not correctly reset the typing style to the standard font if the note was empty. It does, now. (1205)
Documents can be Saved and Closed from the File menu when the current window is a text window. (1232)
Timeline:
Timeline links are drawn once again. (1173,1206)
The minimum width of timeline items has been reduced, improving the appearance of short-duration events with short display names.
Miscellaneous:
Text windows are now saved with the document and reopened when the document is reopened. (1212)
A new designator construction, child[n], allows you to designate the nth child of a note. Adornments are ignored in choosing the available children. The eldest child is designated as child[0] or, as before, simply child. If a note has no children or if the nth child does not exist, the result is noSuchNote and the value returned will be the default value or be undefined. (1227)
The label for case-sensitivity in the agent inspector now reflects the actual functionality. (1207)
Thanks to a glitch in the constructor for HTMLExportTemplate, Tinderbox might think that a link context (set up by link-listing constructs such as ) existed when none does, resulting in a crash. (1223)
Addressed a crash when scrolling the results table in a torn-off Find window.
Fixed a crash in Attribute Browser, which could in some circumstances be forced to sort simultaneously in two different threads.(1222)
Smart adornments always issues multiple change messages, even if they did not, in fact, make changes.
Stamp inspector: "+" should save pending changes (1221)
When adding a built-in template to a document which has no default template, the newly-added page template becomes the document’s default template. (1213)
Fixed a crash when closing text windows. (1230)
Automatically draw icons from the Icons and Symbols family in light gray against a dark map color, and dark gray against a light map element.
Rewrote the Badge Picker because (a) the old picker used the newly-deprecated NSMatrix, and (b) the old picker couldn’t accommodate the large repertoire of the new Symbols family. The change also permits us to update the badge immediately, rather than when the popover is dismissed, and permits arrow key navigation in the Badge Picker. (6, 991)
Document Settings: the Simplenote account and password fields could appear not to be saved if new information was typed and then the window was closed without selecting a different text field or pressing return. (1235)
Typically, HTMLExportExtension is either empty or begins with a period (for example, “.html”). If the period is omitted, Tinderbox will now supply it.(1231)
Sequential attributes now auto-increment correctly. (1219)
Attribute Browser: if multiple tabs held an attribute browser, changing the attribute category in one tab also changed the category in other tabs. Attribute browser tabs are now fully independent. (1200)
Link Types Inspector: corrected handling of the color well.
Renamed tab contextual menu item New Window to reflect what it actually does. (1098,1186)
In the action inspector’s query pane, we now provide prompt feedback for the number of notes the agent has retrieved. (1167)
Fixed a crash when pressing when the cursor focus is on a string or set-valued key attribute, but the attribute’s text field is not active. (The pulldown menu was returning an unexpected null value because no choice was made). (1237)
If HTPath was called for a synthetic note or one that doesn’t exist, it could crash because it used an obsolete test (node==nil) and was not prepared for a null object (NotANode*). (1264)
Updated the OPML and Scrivener templates to normalize handling of $HTMLExportExtension.
Help for Get Info and Inspector.
In a specific document, creating a new agent by right-clicking the background and selecting Create Agent… intermittently did nothing or created an agent in the wrong container. The problem arose because the parent note was taken from the current selection; if that selection was an agent alias, then no agent could be created. The parent note is not chosen appropriately. (1269)
Similarly, creating notes by pasting text into map view could create in an unexpected place if the selected note was not in the map view.
Removed a half-dozen additional Law of Demeter violations that involve node->GetHypertext()->; these can run into trouble if called on a NotANode.
Corrected the (Node*) constructors of some classes like AttributeInfo which inherit both from HypertextFacade and NodeFacade. (1270)
Additional help, especially for export.

New in Tinderbox 6.1.1 (Nov 14, 2014)

Actions and Rules:
Action values have not been thread safe; if one thread changes an action while another thread is using the same action, Tinderbox might crash. To avoid this, we add a recycling pool for actions and only delete actions in the agent thread. This should now avoid risk of the agent thread using invalidated, deleted actions. (1114)
A document with many inherited rules could crash on update, because the new, thread-safe approach to attribute fetching failed to handle cached actions correctly. To avoid this, we no longer cache compiled rules; this wastes some work, but the since rules are no longer evaluated on the main thread the performance hit may be tolerable. (1141)
Fixed a crash in a rule when applying nsort to a list of items that are not, in fact, numeric.(1180)
nsort() sorted incorrectly if the list contained floating point numbers. (1188)
Modified format() and .format() so the localized formats “l” and “L” respect local handling for separators. For example, in the US the result of 10500.format(“l”) will be “10,500”
Agents:
Turning an agent on or off in the Action Inspector now updates the agent’s outline icon immediately to reflect whether it is running or not. Previously, the icon might not be redrawn until the selection changed. (1127)
Attribute Browser:
Attribute Browser: category labels are formatted more legibly. For example: “801-890” rather than “8.1e+2-8.9e+2” (1168)
Fixed a crash when switching to attribute browser from other views, if the browser attempted to set up categories before the browser attribute control had been initialized. (1172)
Removed animation when switching between attribute browser and another view, as the crossfade was unsightly with outlines and had terrible performance. (1199)
Dates:
Days of week: the date parser now recognizes the day of the week in the current locale, not only in English. Recognized forms include the full day (Sunday), the short day (Sun), and the very short day (S). Note that the very short day is ambiguous in many languages, including English.
Month names: the date parser’s super-lenient formulation, which recognizes partial dates like “Jan 15, ”now deals with month names and month abbreviations in the current locale.
The super-lenient date parser now recognizes dates like “Jun 2014” as well as “Jun 5”
Unparseable dates are now treated as “never”. (1137)
Export:
File>Export Note asks for export folder, defaulting to the current export folder. (1110)
Export Selected Note is now enabled when the text pane has the focus; it was previously available only when the view pane had the focus. (1175)
Links:
Attempting to make a link from the text link parking space by clicking and typing the name of the destination crashed .(1143)
Revised link parking space help messages, and hide link parking space help controls when they are inapplicable. (1144)
Maps:
When pasting notes in maps, if the map background has been clicked, the pasted note is placed at the location of the most recent click.
When pasting a group of notes into a map, the relative geometry of the pasted notes is preserved. (983,1076)
Added “Paste” to map background contextual menu. (796,1077)
Menu command for Paste is no longer enabled when nothing can be pasted.
Images on the clipboard may now be pasted into maps as image adornments. Image files may also be dragged. Images on the clipboard may also be pasted into outlines or charts; in this case, a new note named “pasted image” is created and the image is placed in its text.
Double-click on the note name no longer hoists the view in maps, outlines, or charts. Instead, the title is opened for editing. Triple-click opens the title for editing and selects the entire title. Double-clicking the interior continues to hoist the view in maps, and double-clicking the icon hoists the view in outlines. (1148)
Summary tables no longer coerce integers to show two decimal points. This old behavior might be desirable for currency, but decimal points can still be forced using .format(2).
Adornments inside agents could not be pasted or duplicated. (1197)
Text excerpts in maps now respect $MapBodyTextSize. (1190)
Summary tables incorrectly handled tables in which an interior cell is empty or contains only white space. For example, if a line was
Lincoln | | 1865
then “1865” would be drawn in the second column, not the third. (1198)
Menus:
The item contextual menu now provides an opportunity to open a Text Window. (1132)
The Find results table now has a contextual menu, and offers an opportunity to open a Text Window (1132) in both popover and freestanding window implementations. This is particularly tricky because the menu is owned by the table, not the cell view, and so must be prepared through the NSMenuDelegate protocol.
Outlines:
Outlines: link widgets are larger (1140).
Selected notes are no longer expanded when switching tabs.(1162)
Roadmap:
Roadmap: Improved layout of torn-off roadmap, so title remains centered and lists expand to fill the available space. (1158)
Roadmap no longer lists links to notes deleted in this session. These links are retained internally while the deletion might be undone, but should not be displayed. (1170)
After scrolling a long list of link sources or link destinations in roadmap, some notes which have no badge were listed with another note’s badge. (1195)
Simplenote:
Simplenote syncing had been inadvertently disabled. It’s back now. (1171)
Text and Key Attributes:
Key attribute tables and Get Info>Attributes now accept Format>Text>InsertDate and Format>Text>Insert Date and Time with equivalent effects. (1142)
File attributes in key attribute table: if no value is specified, clicking on the folder icon lets you choose a file. Previously, the folder icon was disabled. (1129)
Format>Style>Standard Font now adjusts the typing attributes. This accommodates the scenario where the user pastes unwanted text in a new style, deletes the text, and then applies the standard font: because there is now selection, previously this failed to reset the typing style which the unwanted paste had altered. (1125)
If you try to add a key attribute that is not defined as an attribute, a popover allows you to create a new attribute on the fly.
Key Attributes: the popover for unknown key attributes now deletes attributes that don’t exist if those attributes are not created (1151).
Key attributes: the unknown attribute popover now includes "file" and "boolean" types (1152).
Key attributes: autocomplete interference with names that such as DestState, which have prefixes that are shared by only one existing attribute, should no longer prose difficulties (1154)
Text windows: when a text window is activated, its cursor position remains where it was when the window was deactivated. If the text has been shortened in another view, so that the cursor position no longer exists, the cursor is placed at the start of the text. Formerly, the cursor was always placed at the start of the text. (1133)
Read-only attributes no longer enable “Use Inherited Value” in the key attribute table. (1177)
Selecting a new note and clicking in the text pane could sometimes cause the text to scroll to an arbitrary position. (1201)
The “unknown attributes” popover now supports creating URL attributes. (1202)
Miscellaneous:
The positioning of the “+” control in the tab bar has been corrected.
The Color Palettes picker now includes a palette that reflects the current Tinderbox palette.
The Registration Window provides a link from the reminder text to the order page (1155)
The initial position of the inspector has been moved, allowing more space in the upper right-hand corner for notifications. (1165)
When a new document is opened, its first window becomes the key window. (1161)
$ID was not correctly populated for newly-created notes. (1174)
Yosemite triggers layout debugging pane in its standard file windows; disable the debugging pane in release builds. (1173)
Popovers again detach correctly under Yosemite. (1178)
Crashes when closing popovers that ought to be capable of being torn off under Yosemite should no longer occur. (1178)
The Stamp Inspector failed to reset its text fields after switching documents if the nth stamp was previously selected and the new document had at least n stamps. (1182)
Switching tabs to a tab using the Preview pane, and then switching back to any map pane, resulted in a host of update problems. If the preview completion block failed to run, then change updates would be permanently locked. Even if the preview completion block did run successfully, the update was not thread safe.
Fixed a typo in Help:Anatomy of a Note

New in Tinderbox 6.1.0 (Oct 3, 2014)

SUMMARY:
This release includes fixes intended to make Tinderbox more reliable, correcting a number of recently-reported issues. Most significantly, Tinderbox now saves the state of all windows that were open when the document was closed.
In addition, this release prepares for the OS X 10.9.5 update and for the forthcoming OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
Tinderbox Help has been expanded substantially.
This release is recommended for all Tinderbox Six users.
Aliases:
Traditionally, Tinderbox draws alias titles with an italic font. This is problematic for note titles written in languages that do not typically use italics. A new document setting (Outline pane) allows you to underline alias titles in order to more clearly identify them. (1062)
Editing an alias now marks the original as modified. (1056)
Attribute Browser:
Attribute Browser: crash when switching to User attribute family when there are no user attributes. (1071)
Attribute Browser: addressed an intermittent crash when sorting the attribute browser in the background.
Attribute Browser: the disclosure triangle animation no longer stalls. (1044)
The attribute browser now reflects $NameStrike and the title’s strike-through style.(1104)
Badges:
The Badge Picker now sets the badge of all selected notes, not only the note whose badge was clicked. (1047)
Built-in Templates and Prototypes:
When creating built-in templates, the Templates container’s OnAdd action now sets $IsTemplate=true. (1064)
Built-in Prototypes: added an OnAdd action to the prototype for HTML Template. (1068)
Built-In Prototypes were not created if the document had another note with the intended name, even in a different container. We now create a new prototype as expected in the Prototypes container.
Charts:
Expand All is enabled in Chart View. (1055)
Export:
Renamed File>Export to HTML… to File>Export Document (1101).
Added a new menu item File>Export Selected Note(s) that exports only the selected notes. (1101)
If a note is marked as a template, automatic substitution of dashes and automatic text replacement are disabled. (1031)
Get Info:
Get Info>Agents: editing a query or action without pressing return, and then changing the priority, discarded changes to the action or query. (1046)
Get Info: changing colors is now undoable (1086)
Corrected scrolling of long values in value cells of Get Info’s Attribute pane. (1091)
Get Info adjusts the popover width to suit the selected pane, but failed to adapt the width of the initially-selected pane because the pane was selected before the popover had been created. (1096)
The Get Info popover is not transient rather than semi-transient, and is more readily dismissed. (1120)
Inspector:
In the Text Inspector, fields for Display Expression and Hover Expression now offer auto-completion.
Maps:
Potentially improve performance when dragging in a map view if an attribute browser is open in another window. (1032)
Maps: the link widget is larger, and its click target is larger yet, to make it more easily discoverable and less finicky to use. (1082)
Maps: after pasting in a map, scroll to the pasted note.(1075)
Maps: shift-option-drag in the background should marquee extend the current selection rather than replacing it. (1079)
Shift-click and cmd-click on the map background no longer deselect the selected notes. Simply clicking the map background clears the selection; the modifier keys suggest that the user wants to do something else — and perhaps simply clicked the background by accident. (1078)
In map view, ⇧-click now extends the selection, exactly like ⌘-click. In outline and chart views, ⇧-click continues to range-select from the current selection to the clicked note. (1080)
When a map or outline has the focus, it displays a subtle shadow along its left edge. Some people dislike the shadow; it is now controlled by the boolean attribute $MapBackgroundShadow. (1081,1084)
Restored the crosshair cursor when pressing the option key for marquee selection. (1083)
Outlines:
In outlines, clicking on the collapse/expand widget of a note no longer selects that note. This makes it easier to manipulate an outline while editing a note’s text. (956)
Expand widget: ⌘-click expands the clicked note and its younger siblings. Formerly, only younger siblings were expanded. (1069)
Expand widget: option-click expands the clicked note and its descendants. (1069)
Revised Create Separator. When no note is selected, the separator is created as the parent’s youngest child. (1085)
Preferences:
Tinderbox Preferences is now available even when no document is open. It is also no longer possible to open two instances of the Tinderbox Preferences window. (1073)
Registration and Updates:
The Registration pane now shows both the version you’re using and the latest version, and provides a link for downloading the latest version. (1063)
Text:
Format>Style>Standard Size no longer removes bold and italic styles. (946)
Format>Style>Standard Font now sets the font of the current selection to $TextFont and the size throughout the current selection to the default size. Other styles will remain unchanged, provided that they can be rendered in $TextFont. (29, 39, 837)
Text windows now display Key Attributes. (1072)
Key attributes: after editing a value and pressing , the focus moves to the next row. (1074)
From the text pane, ⌘⌥-up-arrow and ⌘⌥-down-arrow move the selection in the view pane up or down, equivalent to up-arrow and down-arrow in the view pane. (1000)
View>Magnify, View>Shrink, and View>Standard Scale are now enabled when the text pane has the focus (1093)
The Text Window command will now open a text window for all selected notes, unless more than nine notes are selected. (1094)
Text acquired a fixed trailing margin, which was frequently undesirable. (1121)
Timeline:
Added “Change Settings…” to the timeline background’s contextual menu. (1053)
Windows:
Tinderbox now saves the tab state of each window separately, and restores the tab state when loading the window.
Miscellaneous:
Tinderbox no longer asks whether you want to save empty documents.
Abbreviated dates of the form 06/2014 are recognized and interpreted as the first of the month. Note that 6/14 is interpreted as June 14 of the current year, not as June 2014. (1099)
In Get Info attribute browser and in key attribute tables, autocomplete is no longer limited to choosing among the first 99 values. (1102)
Fixed a possible crash when setting a badge.
The bottom of the label “Description” in the Document inspector User Attributes pane was truncated. Correcting this led to a cascade of layout issues in the document inspector.
Revised the XML format to prepare for saving and restoring the state of multiple windows.
Fixed an intermittent crash when opening a text window, especially when the text window was empty, arising from activating a window without properly setting up the saved insertion point. Added insertion-point caching for text windows, so the selection is preserved when the text window is reactivated. (1065)
Fixed a potential crash when restoring the selection of a text window if the text were edited in another window while the text window was deactivated.
The RuleManager now checks $RuleDisabled before running a note’s rule. (1059)
Revised handling of setViewController patching of the responder chain to accommodate both traditional and Yosemite behaviors.
Simplified drawing of tabs.(1024)
Disable assertions in release builds.
Break potential dependency cycles in many popover classes where the class was the popover’s owner and its delegate.
Document inspector: the height of the text field for default values was insufficient.
Fixed a potential crash in the parking space help dialog if you try to make a link when the parking space is empty.
Explode omitted the final character(s) of the final exploded note, if delete delimiter was checked and if the final note did not end with a delimiter. (1087)
Stamps were sometimes disabled when more than one note was selected because the text pane inappropriately disabled the stamp. (1092)
Many menu items were incorrectly disabled in attribute browser.(1095)
Many additions and improvements in Tinderbox Help.
Built with Xcode 6.

New in Tinderbox 6.0.3 (Aug 28, 2014)

Attribute Browser:
Add controls for sorting to attribute browser. (1042)
Previous Tab and Next Tab are recognized in Attribute Browser. (1016)
Refactored Attribute Browser and Quickstamp to extract a TinderboxAttributePicker to coordinate category and attribute name popups. Repaired broken test if the picker is not initialized because the inspector controller doesn’t call awakeFromNib.
Map View:
Identical note titles did not always appear identically in maps on non-retina displays, perhaps because MapItemView frames were not required to fall on integer boundaries. SRect::AsCGRect and SRect::AsNSRect now return integral rects, which should improve matters. (1013)
bar() and vbar() patterns are now drawn for containers and agents. (972)
One can no longer paste notes inside agents. (987)
In map view, link stubs, which indicate links to or from notes not present in this level of the map, were sometimes omitted. (1006)
We now permit maps to zoom in (Focus View) on notes without children; this can be useful if you want to begin adding children to a newly-made container. Confusion that formerly arose should be lessened by the prominent breadcrumb bar. (1003)
In maps, up-arrow/move up now selects the former parent after moving up a level in the map hierarchy.
Smart adornments could crash on open with recursive calls to MoveOff because they used integral rectangles to compute overlap (see b87).
Adornment actions are now longer applied if the note was already on the adornment before the drag was started. (964)
Clicking on a locked adornment now selected the adornment. No adornment handles appear, as a locked adornment cannot be resized, but the lock icon is now shown in order to permit the user to unlock the adornment. (1043)
Outline View:
The parent of a hoisted outline is not available as a link target; previously, attempts to link to the parent node were rejected. (975)
In outlines, items with large font sizes received far too much leading. (1014)
Extra vertical spacing frequently was applied in outlines with columns, because the effective text rectangle was 32px narrower than the actual text rectangle. (1018)
Text Editing:
Changing text color or highlighting failed to take effect if no text was selected, because Tinderbox failed to update NSTextView’s typingAttributes. (1010)
Strike through is now enabled when the selection is empty.
Activating a text window moved the scroll position to the top while leaving the insertion point unchanged. Instead, the insertion point is now moved into view. (1039)
HTML Export:
Increased the limit for repeated ^ includes from 10 to 90.
HTML export: /help/release_notes/6_0_3.html crashed. (960)
Menus and Shortcuts:
File>New Window doesn't need ellipsis. (967)
In the tab contextual menu Rename "New Window" as “Move Tab To New Window” (984)
Get Info… is available in the attribute browser. (1011)
Edit Background… is now enabled in Chart as well as Map and Outline view. (1004)
The shortcut keys for Expand and Collapse are now ⌘⌥-left-arrow and ⌘⌥-right-arrow. The option key is added to avoid a conflict with conventional start-of-line and end-of-line key bindings. (999)
View menu acquires a Tab submenu with New Tab, Next, and Previous. Next and Previous Tab commands have shortcut keys ⌘⌥-[ and ⌘⌥-]. (994)
Other changes:
Date strings prior to November 1883 were sometimes converted to a day one day later than intended. This may continue, depending on your local time of day, pending discovery of the proper way to handle time zones before the introduction of time zones (of which, it seems, time zone objects are aware).
Fixed a potential crash when Tinderbox switches to the foreground or background whilst updating the document inspector.
In the Agent pane of Get Info, the right-most part of the priority pulldown control could not be clicked, because is was covered by the transparent portion of the adjacent text field. Adjusted constraints to avoid this. (963)
In Document Settings, the Simplenote password is now a secure text field. (980)
The default value for the Creator preference in newly-created documents is now the current OS X account name. (981)
$ReferenceURL is now a URL attribute, not a string. (990)
Certain malformed regular expressions could cause a crash when used in agent queries, actions, or attribute browser queries (1015)
Built-in Prototypes: changed the hover expression to use $Date.format() in place of format($Date,…)
Build and sign on Mavericks in preparation for OSX 10.9.5.
Double-clicking a note in the Similar Notes list of Get Info will select that note. (1044)
Explode: using $$$$ or **** for a delimiter yields regex matches of length zero, which hangs the chunkier. (1049)
Explode: title is first sentence doesn't stop at first sentence but continues through the whole note, except that the first note is titled correctly. (1050)
Timeline adornments no longer enforce a minimum width. (1035)

New in Tinderbox 6.0.0 (May 30, 2014)

New in Tinderbox 5.11.1 (Jun 13, 2012)

New in Tinderbox 5.10.2 (Mar 15, 2012)

New in Tinderbox 5.10.1 (Feb 7, 2012)

New in Tinderbox 5.10.0 (Dec 21, 2011)

New in Tinderbox 5.9.2 (Jul 20, 2011)

NOW WITH MORE ZOOM... Tinderbox 5.9 opens and saves huge bundles of notes more quickly, letting you switch projects in moments. Agent updates are faster, too. Use all the agents you want; they’ll do their work and won’t get in your way.
MORE INFORMATION... Tinderbox maps are packed with information, but sometimes you’d like a little more detail. The new HoverExpression lets you reveal extra detail about the note you’re pointing to, without clutter and complexity.
MORE SMARTS... Key attributes now offer autocompletion, helping you add information quickly and accurately.
Tinderbox now automatically looks up addresses to find the corresponding latitude and longitude. Mapping your prospects or planning your book tour has never been easier.
MORE CONNECTIONS.... Simplenote syncing has been completely rewritten to use the Simplenote’s latest API. Tags are now fully supported, and you can limit your Tinderbox document to syncing notes with specific tags.
In fact, all Tinderbox’s network support has been rewritten from the ground up, providing faster and more reliable connections that won’t get in your way if your network is slow.
MORE PERSISTENCE.... Do you live in Tinderbox? Tinderbox can now reopen your work at startup, helping you resume where you left off while saving you valuable seconds.
MORE GRAPHS... Tinderbox dashboards can now use XY Plots, which join bar plots, plots, and histograms to help you discover patterns and stay abreast of developments.
MORE ART... Embedded images return from their vacation, both in text windows and image adornments. Image adornments now work beautifully with shapes, too. Whether you need a photo references for the characters of your novel or simply want to include some diagrams on a Web page, Tinderbox is ready.
and more!
Map backgrounds can be gradients. Help for actions has been rewritten and simplified. Checkboxes appear in outline columns, and integrate more nicely with imported files. Better support for IAWriter and QuickCursor.

New in Tinderbox 5.8.1 (Apr 2, 2011)

New Actions:
Tinderbox agents, containers, and adornments can be set up to act on your behalf, automating routine chores and helping to keep your document clean and organized. Rules and actions make Tinderbox a spreadsheet for ideas.
Tinderbox’s action language has been rewritten to make it easy and intuitive while bringing you unprecedented power to make your document work exactly the way you want. Many quirks and sources of confusion have been banished, making actions easier to understand and to improve.
Some highlights:
New facet syntax lets you write $StartDate.month or $Color.brightness. The older function syntax month($StartDate) is still supported, too.
Lots of powerful new list actions work with tags and topics. Lots of new tools for building, sorting, reversing, and testing sets and lists.
Clean conversions let you convert strings to numbers and dates, and format dates, numbers, and lists exactly as you prefer.
$Text.contains("pattern") makes agent queries simple.
Automatic Backups:
Tinderbox now automatically saves a backup copy of your documents when you open them. By keeping up to four generations of backup, Tinderbox ensures that you can easily correct mistakes.
There’s a new preference setting to turn off automatic backups for sensitive documents.
New System Attributes
The attribute $IsAdornment lets rules and actions behave differently for adornments and other kinds of notes. This can make Smart Adornments much easier to write!
Sometimes, you want a bunch of notes to inherit a Rule or Display Expression, but don’t want the rule to apply to the prototype. New intrinsic attributes $RuleDisabled and $DisplayExpressionDisabled let you turn off rules or display expressions for individual notes.
And there’s more:
A new Preference setting lets you choose whether making a link selects the start or the end of the link.
Adornments can now have their own badges.
Badges appear in Chart views.
Pasted notes retain their prototype.
Updated and extended Tinderbox Help.
Improved internationalization support.
Want to share part of your outline? Select it in Tinderbox, and paste it into your favorite word processor.

New in Tinderbox 5.8.0 (Mar 4, 2011)

Brings new power to Tinderbox agents and actions, making it easier to let your Tinderbox documents organize themselves. It’s easier than ever to get started with Tinderbox – just open a Map or Outline and start making notes. As your projects grow, you can add agents and actions that automate routine chores, add missing metadata, and highlight your most interesting and important notes.
New Actions:
Tinderbox agents, containers, and adornments can be set up to act on your behalf, automating routine chores and helping to keep your document clean and organized. Rules and actions make Tinderbox a spreadsheet for ideas.
Tinderbox’s action language has been rewritten to make it easy and intuitive while bringing you unprecedented power to make your document work exactly the way you want. Many quirks and sources of confusion have been banished, making actions easier to understand and to improve. Some highlights:
New facet syntax lets you write $StartDate.month or $Color.brightness. The older function syntax month($StartDate) is still supported, too.
Lots of powerful new list actions work with tags and topics. Lots of new tools for building, sorting, reversing, and testing sets and lists.
Clean conversions let you convert strings to numbers and dates, and format dates, numbers, and lists exactly as you prefer.
$Text.contains("pattern") makes agent queries simple.
Automatic Backups:
Tinderbox now automatically saves a backup copy of your documents when you open them. By keeping up to four generations of backup, Tinderbox ensures that you can easily correct mistakes.
There’s a new preference setting to turn off automatic backups for sensitive documents.
New System Attributes:
The attribute $IsAdornment lets rules and actions behave differently for adornments and other kinds of notes. This can make Smart Adornments much easier to write!
Sometimes, you want a bunch of notes to inherit a Rule or Display Expression, but don’t want the rule to apply to the prototype. New intrinsic attributes $RuleDisabled and $DisplayExpressionDisabled let you turn off rules or display expressions for individual notes.
A new Preference setting lets you choose whether making a link selects the start or the end of the link.
Adornments can now have their own badges.
Badges appear in Chart views.
Pasted notes retain their prototype.
Updated and extended Tinderbox Help.
Improved internationalization support.
Want to share part of your outline? Select it in Tinderbox, and paste it into your favorite word processor.

New in Tinderbox 5.7.0 (Oct 27, 2010)

New in Tinderbox 5.6.0 (Sep 16, 2010)

New in Tinderbox 5.5.0 (May 21, 2010)

New in Tinderbox 4.7 (Jun 29, 2009)

You’ll have new flexibility for making notes, fresh power for building documents and dashboards that help organize themselves, and even more speed for getting things done.
Fill Materials - Tinderbox notes have a new Fill attribute. Built-in fill materials include wood, steel, water, sandstone, and linen — and you can add your own fills.
Fills aren’t just chart junk or management eye candy. The note Color and Pattern continue to work together with the fill, gently tinting the note to suggest connection and communicate linkage. Fills can be inherited from prototypes, and can be set by agents, actions, and rules.
Also: new color variants let you construct richer color families.
Smart Adornments - Smart adornments help your Tinderbox maps organize themselves, scanning constantly for notes that meet their criteria. Automatically gather, sort, and arrange urgent notes, or notes that mention key tags and topics. Smart adornment actions can then modify the note — extracting information, setting or removing tags, or even twittering!
Just as agents are smart containers, smart adornment are lightweight agents. They search only within the confines of their map, leaving you free to experiment with new structures and to try fresh ideas while exploring your data.
Also: sharp new Chart view, better handling of link labels…
Dashboard Support - Map layout refinements provide better support for dashboards, timelines, and other informative displays built right into your Tinderbox documents.
Notes can display text or important attributes in their title, or beneath the note title. Badges flag crucial notes, while plots and bargraphs provide convenient sparkline summaries while giving you ready access to your data.
Terrific Performance - Agents and actions get a speed bump in Tinderbox 4.7 — a terrific boost for large and complex documents. Mark Bernstein’s weblog used to take 45sec to update; now the agent update time is just 17sec.
Plus: new Cleanup options, conditional DisplayExpressions, and dozens of small improvements.

Tinderbox Changelog

What's new in Tinderbox 9.7.0

New in Tinderbox 9.6.0 (Aug 2, 2023)

New in Tinderbox 9.5.0 (Dec 9, 2022)

New in Tinderbox 9.2.1 (Apr 17, 2022)

New in Tinderbox 9.2.0 (Mar 3, 2022)

New in Tinderbox 9.1.0 (Dec 12, 2021)

New in Tinderbox 9.0.0 (Jun 22, 2021)

New in Tinderbox 8.9.0 (Dec 2, 2020)

New in Tinderbox 8.8.0 (Oct 7, 2020)

New in Tinderbox 8.5.0 (Feb 25, 2020)

New in Tinderbox 7.5.5 (Sep 11, 2018)

New in Tinderbox 7.5.3 (Jun 29, 2018)

New in Tinderbox 7.5.0 (May 31, 2018)

New in Tinderbox 7.0.0 (Feb 22, 2017)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.5 (Sep 16, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.3 (Jul 26, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.2 (Jul 22, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.6.0 (May 25, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.5.0 (Mar 23, 2016)

New in Tinderbox 6.4.0 (Nov 24, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.3.2 (Oct 22, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.3.1 (Jul 29, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.3.0 (Jun 3, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.2.1 (Apr 25, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.2.0 (Apr 17, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.1.2 (Jan 21, 2015)

New in Tinderbox 6.1.1 (Nov 14, 2014)

New in Tinderbox 6.1.0 (Oct 3, 2014)

New in Tinderbox 6.0.3 (Aug 28, 2014)

New in Tinderbox 6.0.0 (May 30, 2014)

New in Tinderbox 5.11.1 (Jun 13, 2012)

New in Tinderbox 5.10.2 (Mar 15, 2012)

New in Tinderbox 5.10.1 (Feb 7, 2012)

New in Tinderbox 5.10.0 (Dec 21, 2011)

New in Tinderbox 5.9.2 (Jul 20, 2011)

New in Tinderbox 5.8.1 (Apr 2, 2011)

New in Tinderbox 5.8.0 (Mar 4, 2011)

New in Tinderbox 5.7.0 (Oct 27, 2010)

New in Tinderbox 5.6.0 (Sep 16, 2010)

New in Tinderbox 5.5.0 (May 21, 2010)

New in Tinderbox 4.7 (Jun 29, 2009)

New in Tinderbox 4.6.0 (Mar 4, 2009)

New in Tinderbox 4.5.2 (Sep 25, 2008)

New in Tinderbox 4.5.0 (Aug 26, 2008)

New in Tinderbox 4.2 (Feb 29, 2008)

New in Tinderbox 4.0.2 (Oct 16, 2007)