Les Orchard: Envisioning a Tiger/Tinderbox mashup

Still Seeking an Exploded Tinderbox for Tiger » Archive » Blog » 0xDECAFBAD

Les has some very cool thoughts about a “Tinderbox for OS X”:

But, what if Tinderbox could surrender all of those functions up to TextEdit and MS Word and other desktop apps? What if all of the “notes” in a Tinderbox document were just documents and files, and all of the relationships managed by Tinderbox (ie. spatial, links, aliased) were just encoded as extended attributes?

In this scenario, the file system is the Tinderbox document. Don’t want to use your whole hard drive? Make a new disk image and compartmentalize things. Tinderbox could become the world’s most revolutionary Finder rethink ever invented. And the thing is, I can see all of this being enabled by Spotlight and extended attributes.

The possibilities of apps like Tinderbox, Devonthink, and to an extent, even Curio get much more interesting at the idea that they might open up completely to the built-in architecture of OS X. Probably a bit ambitious for any variety of reasons, but the possibilities are tantalizing.

In (almost completely) unrelated news, I’ll be talking at Mark’s Tinderbox Weekend on Saturday here in SF, leading a discussion on Tinderbox as “trusted system.” Looking forward to that.