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My Tinderbox wishlist

Here is a list of things I'd love to see in future Tinderbox releases.

Interface enhancements

  • Show different hand cursors on text links and web links (similar to Adobe Acrobat). Show a third style (maybe a "+" inside the hand cursor) that add a new note via the internal Wiki-like feature
  • Add a field in the "Browse links"-window to manipulate the link text itself
  • Allow a certain number window arrangements to be stored as sets within a Tinderbox file (e.g. I want to switch easily between different construction sites of my Tinderbox file) and add definition of quick-access keys for often needed notes/views
  • Add "spring folder"-like behavior to outline view for moving notes and adding links with the graphical link tool
  • Entering line breaks in text (that will render to BR) not only paragraphs.
  • Custom attributes based on lists (pulldown and pulldown+check marks)
  • Multiline textarea in the custom attribute list
  • Editing template files in Tinderbox directly (or at least open them with one click in the associated editor).
  • Better way of selecting which attributes should be displayed in a note window (pulldown as switch list is too clumsy)
  • Selecting a line by clicking left of a paragraph
  • Support for syntax coloring
  • Make any note representation a drop target for link-creation (such as the notes in the History window)

Keyboard Interaction enhancements

  • Dialogs could be more key-accessible (for example: it should be possible to use the keyboard to define the prototype when adding a new note). This would also help to work around with iKey and GUI scripting much better.
  • Shift+Command+Option-Click on a web/text link to directly open the "Browse links" window with the clicked link selected for editing
  • Shift+Command+Option+O to open the outline view below the current note (also with the map view). Currently Cmd+Option+O opens the container/parent of the selected note
  • Command+Option-Dragging notes to create aliases at drop location (like currently Option-dragging already creates a copy)
  • Command-Clicking on a title bar could open a pulldown menu to access the hierarchy (similar to the Finder feature)
  • Hitting Enter and Command+Return on a selected note in the find window.
  • Cursor movement in the find window, in the history window, the roadmap window and the path window.
  • Adding Images from URL in clipboard (e.g. with Command+Option+C)
  • Shortcut keys for: font styles, applying prototypes, quick stamps and adding web links from URLs in the clipboard
  • Single keystroke to open HTML template folder of the assigned template and the last active "Exported files" folder

Application enhancements

  • a shared editing in a network (like SubEthaEdit)
  • allow definition of a frequency per agent (how often that agent is updated) to reduce the load for agents that may not change much
  • allow users to see a list of agents and enable/disable them one by one, set update intervals, see & edit their actions in a list, see the number of notes affected by each turn, the amount of CPU cycles needed for a complete run
  • ^randomLine() should expand text links like ^include() does
  • Control Tinderbox via Applescript (like setting attributes in particular notes at particular places, customize layout in a map view, adding notes to particular containers, etc)
  • List type attributes with a way to access list elements by index or named index
  • Ability to point to a note with a URL from the browser (e.g. tbox://document/noteid would open the corresponding tinderbox document). This would allow easier switching to a given note from a site. The possible values for "document" would have to be defined by Tinderbox preferences (name to path+filename association).
  • An agent that can create agents. For instance: I add categories to notes as strings. If there is a new category an agent should be created automatically that from that time on will generate a collection of notes with that category
  • An ExportRoot parameter could specify which root folder a note is exported to. This would allow to publish to several places (private, group, public site) in one go.
  • More control about how to display the ^text value (not just "plain" or not). In particular using only ^text^ is not suitable for XML data, because HTML has to be neutralized
  • Custom styles and a user defined style-to-HTML mapping
  • Integrated editor for tabular data
  • Conditions for ^siblings(), ^ancestors(), ^basicLinks(), ^childLinks(), ^ancestors(), ^justChildren(), etc. Elements will only be included if condition for each one is true.
  • It should be possible to constrain ^basicLinks()^ to one or more link types
  • a built-in way to export RTF and Word-compliant HTML and/or XML (without using extra templates)
  • A "parse HTML" command that tries to back-convert some HTML to Tinderbox representation (e.g. bold, italic, links, H1, H2, H3, ...) -- this could maybe be done via AppleScript?
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