I found your review very helpful.

As a non-software professional, I would nearly some fairly explicit guidance about “regular expressions” before I had a clue what was understood.

And in any case it’s a nice illustration of the advantage of open XML files: you can modify the file using standard tools to accomplish things Tinderbox doesn’t anticipate.

There’s simply no alternative that offers anywhere near the expressive power of regular expressions. And, of course, you can simply type a word or two when that’s what you need — and in my experience, two-term Boolean phrase matching will in fact cover 80-90% of most users’ needs.

Washington|Adams
A+* (notes starting with A with at least one other letter)
A[a-e] Aardvards and Adams but not Affleck or Avogadro
When.*reasons (When..(any text)..reasons)

This need for symbolic language is not evident from the search box. Moreover, although ‘technically’ a regular expression search, the use of symbolic language is a very outdated method, well beyond the comprehension of most modern computer users. A user shouldn’t need to lookup a symbol when they need to do a search.

Mark Stoneman’s advice to use BBEdit for finding and replacing is – sorry to say – rather ridiculous if you consider that you want to replace a word or a character in the whole Tinderbox document. So you export a file with a hundred or more text conteiners to a word processor, then do search and replace and then what… manually copy and paste each piece of text back to its container in Tinderbox ?

Also, your agent example is more complicated than necessary; you could just make an agent and search for “Jay-Z” and that’d do the trick. The extra clause, “Prototype=album”, is handy because it restricts the search to albums, but it’s certainly not necessary. (Conversely, there are times when I wish it were easier to tell the iTunes store that I’m looking for Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic compositions, not his performances or his songs or his lectures or albums paying tribute to his legacy or podcasts or….)

It’s not written in Java, but I do agree that Tinderbox has its own aesthetic that doesn’t quite look like a standard Mac OS X program. But it has been getting more visual polish over the last several releases and that’s a good thing.

I think you may have overlooked some useful filtering tools — especially sorting containers and regular expression searches.

For finding albums by Jay-Z in Tinderbox, I’d do one of two things:

a) Use the Find window to search for notes with Performer containing Jay-Z, OR

b) Sort my container of albums by Performer, and find Jay-Z.

iTunes has a nicer interface for routine searches, but Tinderbox can handle a wider range of queries: it’s easy to look, for example, for all memos, depositions, and filings after last December that mentioned Forsyth or Bustard. That’s advantage of agents; once you’ve formulated that question, you’ve go the answer *now* and the agent remains to give you an updated answer *later* should you need it.

With regard to small developers, it might give you some confidence that Eastgate’s been writing hypertext tools like Tinderbox since 1982. Tinderbox files are standard XML: your data are yours, and you should have little difficulty moving data elsewhere if you wish. Moreover, Tinderbox’s export tools are extremely flexible: if you want to export from Tinderbox to nearly any modern format, you should find the task straightforward.