Tinderbox 7.5.0

What's new in this version:

Force directed layout:
- In map view, View ▸ Arrange ▸ Dance (⇧⌘-D) initiates an automated layout of the view based on a physical simulation
- Each link among notes in the map is treated as a spring that pulls linked notes togethe
- All notes exert a gravitation attraction for other notes
- Notes that overlap repel each other
- At the beginning of the simulation, each note is subject to a random force, much as if it were heated. This force is reduced progressively over time. This process, known as simulated annealing, helps the simulation from getting tangled up in local minima
- Dancing automatically stops when a note is dragged or the selection is change. Dancing also stops when they layout ceases to change significantly
- Not all maps will benefit from automatic layout; the famously tangled map of Mary-Kim Arnold’s “Lust”, for example, does not. Performance may be unsatisfactory in maps with more than a few dozen notes. Nonetheless, this may prove useful in many cases

- Flags:
- One common Tinderbox task is qualitative analysis of existing materials, such as letters, surveys, diaries, and personal papers. An important preliminary step in this work is coding —identifying occurrences of special interest for the study. For example, if we were analyzing a collection of nineteenth-century diaries to study what people recorded about food and drink, we might want to code where the food was consumed. We might mark every passage that discussed eating at home with the code P1, eating at the residence of another family member with the code P2, eating at a pub with P3, and so forth. We might also note places where money is discussed: C1 might indicate that the writer paid for their meal, C2 that someone else explicitly paid for the writer’s meal, and so forth
- Flags offer a convenient and flexible way to foreground selected codes in map view. $Flags is a new set attribute; when not empty, small “flags” are displayed above the note in map view. (Flags do not appear in other views)
- For simple coding tasks, using $Badge may be adequate. Flags provide a wider range of visual cues, and new flags can be improvised quickly when coding needs change
- Note that $Flags is a list attribute
- Flags are described using a concise textual shorthand

Chart view:
- The chart view has been rewritten and greatly improved
- Chart View now has its own options popover, accessible by clicking the Info button ⓘ on the chart view’s tab. The popover allows you to change the chart style and adjust the width and spacing of chart items. Most significantly, you can now choose either a left-to-right or top-to-bottom arrangement of the chart
- Subtitles now appear in chart view

Natural language processing:
The text of notes is now scanned to extract information that might be useful for agents. These results include:
- $NLNames: a set of personal names found in the text
- $NLOrganizations: a set of the names of organizations found in the text
- $NLPlaces: a set of place names found in the text
- These attributes (“NL” is short for “natural language”) are part of the new “AI” attribute category
- Note that these values are extracted automatically and are subject to a variety of errors. Values are extracted asynchronously after a note has been edited; they won’t automatically be extracted from existing notes.

Repetition:
- Get Info: Repetition offers insight into words that are used repeatedly in the selected notes, sections, or in the entire document. Consistent usage may be needful or desirable, of course, but noting repetition can call attention to opportunities to adopt more precise language. The pane lists words that occur between 2-10 times; words that appear more frequently are not listed. Tinderbox also omits all words with fewer than four characters, that appear in the built-in stoplist of 100 common English words, or that appear in the note named stoplist if one exists. The indexing process tries to treat words derived from a common stem as repetitions, so plurals and verb conjugations are often handled intelligently