It's been quiet over in Jack Baty land. It turns out that I didn't have the frequency for Jack Baty/Scribbles dialed into NetNewsWire. Corrected. (That is a lovely UI, BTW.)

Anyway, thought of Jack this morning when I read this over at Bicycle For Your Mind. I feel the same way about Tinderbox, although reading that piece now makes me want to play with TaskPaper, which I also own and probably have since its release or nearabouts (which is apparently not really a word).

I like reading about people using applications that they love. It inspires me, or "gives me ideas," to be less precious, about what I can do in Tinderbox, and Chris Guidotti gave me a bunch of those this morning. Like Mike Hall did in Interstitial Logging, which has a place in "Don't Forget" in Captain's Log.

I need to log those ideas and figure out a path to implementing them.

I wonder if how I might have used Tinderbox as a younger man, if it were available. I used ThinkTank, probably the first outliner available on any personal computer. It appealed to me as the best way to write the kinds of things I wanted to write on a computer. I had a word processor (Only one!), which was pretty highly regarded for its day, PIE:Writer, but I mostly used it to transcribe the oral proceedings of administrative discharge boards, which was work I could have had a legal yeoman do, but I wanted to "play with my computer." It was really work and I didn't do it for long.

But for organizing plans, ThinkTank was brilliant and that did feel like play. I'd bring an outline into a meeting, pass it around, mark it up as the meeting went on. Then I'd go back to my little Apple //c, type in the annotations and changes, print it out and hand that in to the word processing center and they'd turn it into a document, a notice. We didn't have computers on our desks back then, but I bought a //c just to have a computer on my desk.

Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this and I've got to take a walk.

But I enjoy reading posts like Jack's and Chris's and Mike's. Now I need to make some notes.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:26 Thursday, 4 April 2024