This makes sense to me. Still figuring out my own uses, which will surely evolve, but what you’ve said is definitely something to consider. I can see how Curio has it’s own usefulness, not as a replacement for TBX. I think what I actually want is for Tinderbox to have it’s full functionality but also have the user interface of Curio. That might actually be what a lot of people want… Can someone make that happen please!? 
hey there, I am super attracted to the Zettelkasten method because it makes intuitive sense to me, but I am turned off by the time stamping part, and the way the method feels a bit too rigid. (I feel the same way about GTD: doesn’t work for me.) But I am basically adopting a modified version of the Zettelkasten idea. One idea per note, most of the time. (E.g. I’m currently drafting a 4,000 wd article in TBX, and managing that many single paragraphs-as-notes seems a bit unruly, so I’m using TBX just to develop ideas, and drafting only in the key “node” notes within the system.) it’s slightly awkward, and I feel like I’m using a Swiss army knife just to open the skin of an orange – the complex tool doesn’t match the simple job – but still I find this extremely useful. (looking forward to, probably, going deeper down the TBX rabbit hole.) thanks.
Hi @beck, thank you for your (thoughtful and eloquent) response! I really like what you’ve said here. Rereading it again now, and in relation to the other posts here, I can totally see how Curio and Tinderbox are, as you say, “distinct tools.” I mentioned below in another post, that I wish for a “super-software” where the depth of Tinderbox is contained in the (friendlier) interface of Curio…
The other thing that stuck out to me here, is what you said about not anticipating getting so far with the software after a year. I find that super encouraging. For some people (perhaps including you and I) getting into Tinderbox might provide the necessary motivation to gain that programming knowledge, which probably can come in handy in other contexts, outside of TBX. Insofar as that fluency is translatable, there is perhaps no loss in figuring that stuff out.
I do have one question, if I may, which is that you seem to suggest that Tinderbox is not necessarily the best place to “create a gestalt and make sense of the concepts.” That is a large part of what I want to use it for, and what I am currently using it for (but the visual media piece is definitely feeling awkward) – based on your sense at this point, to what extent do you experience the same sort of gestalt thinking in Tinderbox? (in addition to its capacity as a workshop)
Suddenly I am imagining putting Curio on top of Tinderbox on top of DEVONthink…! (Not sure @ChemBob meant that he uses them together? I was imagining parallel uses of DT3+Curio and DT3+TBX.) It looks like this conversation continued over on the Curio forum: https://forums.zengobi.com/t/tinderbox-dtp-and-curio-usage/3188/10
Based on that thread, it looks like Curio has more complexity than I had perceived when I did the trial.
Also found this thread on the Curio forum: https://forums.zengobi.com/t/curio-devonthink-tinderbox/1059/15
But a key difference between now and 2016 is that the Tinderbox interface may have become friendlier in more recent versions, making it (perhaps) more attractive to do Gestalt things in Tinderbox.
Anyways, thanks Beck! By the way, I saw on your website that you are in a PhD program at an Information School. I just want to +1 the suggestion for you to publish a book at some point, whether based on the dissertation or not. I really value your perspective and I feel that it would fit in a valuable and unique way into the non-academic conversations around knowledge management and “productivity”. +1!
Kai
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hi @kseggleton, thank your for responding to this thread. I can see the appeal of skipping Tinderbox and “using Curio as the visual frontend of DEVONthink.” Definitely.
A niggling question about that is, do you have, then, a great deal of material that is not searchable in Curio – and how easy is it to link/search across Projects in Curio? If I understood correctly, your description of wiki links proposes a way of using more complex linking in Curio via DT3. My concern is that each project space would be “sandboxed” in Curio, whereas in TBX you seemingly can strain and sift the same pool of information from within the app itself. Do you do most of your “searches”/sorting, etc. in DT3? I suppose I mean, to what depth is your Curio library a representation of what is in your DT3 library? If not the full extent, does it ever feel frustrating to not be able to engage your full DT3 library within Curio? And, on a related topic, does it cause problems for you to have Curio’s searches limited to the current “project”? I think that’s more of a problem if you’re working on projects that engage with the same or overlapping materials/topics/etc, whereas it sounds as though each of your chapters was fairly distinct…? If that’s the case, then I can see how having a separate Project for each chapter could be super nice. But I have the feeling that Curio’s system would get sort of unwieldy if everything were to (or had to) be kept in a single Curio project.
Sorry for the bombardment of questions. Hope you have a chance to get at this, in whole or in part,
Kai
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I’m not quite sure from your description what you are trying to do, but it seems like one aspect is linking disparate kinds of document together. If that is so, then you might like to consider looking at Hook https://hookproductivity.com (at the risk of more new app fatigue). And it is possible that iThoughts https://www.toketaware.com might provide an easier option for visual representations, though it is not as rich as Tinderbox.
I think of Curio as a large sheet of paper and a set of colored pencils. I think of Tinderbox as an infinite set of Scrabble tiles. Both of these can be used to solve problems. Whichever one feels right for the problem at hand is the one to use.
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Would Filemaker achieve this goal of a more GUI intensive and customizable way to present data?
I had a productive adventure in Curio yesterday. I needed to create a timeline from about 50 notes. I fired up Aeon Timeline and got busy.
Flipping between the two applications, of course, introduced predictable errors.
Then, I noticed you can export Curio search results as a CSV file. That file can be imported without modification into Aeon. Kudos to both developers for openness.
I set the start and due dates in the metadata of the objects I wanted to export, added a timeline tag to each of the objects, searched the timeline tag, and an Aeon timeline line emerged with minimal work and no errors.
Next, I used the Notes inspector in Curio to add some ad hoc metadata and wrote a quick Python script to interpret the metadata from Curio notes.
Bottom line, I can export from Curio to Aeon, including relationships for Aeon’s grid view, with zero effort and no work.
I was proud of myself, then realized a missing feature in Aeon has been there all along.
I’ve often wished for a spreadsheet-style input mode foe Aeon, and that’s easy, too. Just enter the data in Numbers with appropriate column names, export to CSV, and Aeon will happily read the data.
Anyway, for my uses Curio seems to be a very useful tool. It won’t do what DT will, but it’s handy.
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Related to this, it looks like OPML exports in DT do not include all metadata, in particular custom metadata.
Is there a way to export everything in a nice format like OPML?
Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering how you got the wiki links from Devonthink to show up in Curio? I am using Curio 13 (because I am still running High Sierra) but I see that you had originally mentioned this before the release of Curio 14.
Sorry! I missed the bit about copying and pasting from the rendered preview of md note. I see that it works. Thank you. Very useful.