Why I find Tinderbox irreplaceable

I’ve got a long Tinderbox review soon to be published at Mac Appstorm. I’ll put up a notice when it is posted over there. Meanwhile, I’ve been using Tinderbox to manage another writing project — not my own. I’ve had to once again make sense of comments from other reviewers of the manuscript. The following screenshot shows how I’ve done this:

Tinderbox helps me organize comments from reviewers of a manuscript. Click for larger view.

I’ve got three reference notes (the full review commentary from each of the two reviewers, and a link to the draft) arranged in the upper right area. I then parsed the commentary into individual comments which I then manually arranged into three categories:

1. Points of fact
2. Style & Structure
3. Content

The colored boxes “containing” the comments are known in Tinderbox parlance as “adornments.” They just help define the geography of the screen. I created an agent that will turn the color of the individual comments to gray when I check it off as being acted upon. No rocket science needed here, nor an advanced degree in Tinderboxology. And yes, this could be done in any number of other applications, but I couldn’t have done it as effectively. With Tinderbox I can automate those steps that are tedious and unnecessary for me to do, while having the ability to manually manipulate my information as is required for me to make sense of it. That works for me.