Just Released: Tinderbox 5
Eastgate Systems has just announced Tinderbox 5, a major update to its venerable note-taking application.
“Note-taking” hardly covers it, though. Tinderbox is uniquely flexible and adaptable, in a league of its own when compared with all the other OS X notebooks.
This flexibility comes at a price, however: there’s a steep learning curve to overcome if you want to get the most from it. But every long-term Tinderbox user I’ve ever encountered has said the steep curve is worth overcoming, and that they’ve never looked back. It definitely has its fans.
What’s new in version 5? “It’s fast,” say Eastgate, thanks to a pile of under-the-hood improvements and an even bigger pile of brand new code. What else?
Better text rendering, better Unicode support, and new shapes and options for shapes in the map view, are just some of the features included in this update.
You can download a trial version (which is limited to 30 notes) to play around with. Give it some time; Tinderbox is not something that will appeal to everyone straight away. The learning curve starts off very shallow, because creating text notes and nesting them inside one another is very intuitive. It’s the deeper, far more powerful features that take some time to understand.
If any existing Tinderbox users have some views on this update, we’d be delighted to hear from you in the comments.
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for 
