I downloaded the 14 day trial of Tinderbox, Eastgate’s fascinating new hypertext organiser. It’s a sort of outliner-cum-mindmapper-cum-hypertext-cum-blogging app. On first glance, I really liked it. I especially liked the fact that the file format is in a clear and simple XML. I have an outliner on my Palm – Progect – which has a huge chunk of my life in it. It’s GPLed, and there’s a great Perl library that can parse its database contents. So I installed the Perl program, and converted my outlines to Tinderbox’s XML format to play around with. Six months worth of notes seems a good thing to test out their organiser, and if it makes sense to commit to using Tinderbox, I can probably write a decent Palm->Tinderbox syncing app. That’d be great!
The trial version of Tinderbox isn’t having any of it. It tells me that I can only create a few notes in this limited version, and politely declines to do much more.
Fair enough, I guess.
Sigh.
So far, since borrowing this iBook, I have, or have seriously consider spending the following wodges of cash:
- $ 80 – bust iBook power supply
- $129 – Jaguar
- $100 per annum – .Mac subscription
- $ 95 – Tinderbox
- $ 80 – QuicKeys
- $ 20 – Keyboard Maestro
- $700 – Apple Developer Connection subscription
Some of these don’t really count – I didn’t ponder the ADC membership for very long, and QuicKeys is just a more expensive version of Keyboard Maestro. I really didn’t consider any of them for very long, to be honest, because I can’t afford any additional expenses right now.
But all of this is mounting up – to a lot of virtual money, and a very unsettling sensation.
Every time I get to something interesting in the Mac world, I bump into a barrier of dollar signs, where upon I have to spend more money to access the secret levels. It feels strange to have the possibilities of what I can do on my own PC suddenly limited by how much I can afford.
No, that’s not right: it feels odd to be unable even to ascertain the limits of what I can do, by dint of what I can afford.
Of course I understand that this is the way the world is. I’m not complaining about people asking for money. I’m guessing that Tinderbox is worth $95 – perhaps not to me, not right now, but certainly to many others, and definitely to the people who wrote it.
But you know what? I feel poor. And I never felt poor with Linux.
On the contrary, I felt drowned in riches.