enjoying new media • software aesthetics

Prototypes

The entries in a journal will all likely share some things in common, whether we’re keeping a record of our blood sugar, tracking the freelance stories we’ve submitted to various editors, our simply recording the events of our schoolday.

Tinderbox lets you save time by associating notes with a prototype. When you assign a prototype to a note, you’re saying, “this note is just like it’s prototype, except for the differences I tell you about.” So, if we make a prototypical JournalEntry, all our journal entries will inherit its properties. For example, we might

• Add some key attributes (like Date) at the top of the text window
• Choose convenient and dsistinctive colors, patterns, and text background colors

We can do lots more with prototypes, but let's keep it simple for now.

It might seem a bother to make a prototype, and to have to set it every time you make a new entry — especially when, thus far, the advantages are just cosmetic. But it’s not a bother, because we can let the journal itself set the prototype:

OnAdd:Prototype="JournalEntry"

Note that this doesn't mean everything in our journal is a JournalEntry — just that things moved into our journal are assumed to be journal entries until we tell Tinderbox they're not.

While we're at it, we can also set the Date of the entry to “today”. That means that anything we drag into our journal from other containers, or that we create inside our journal, gets timestamped and is assigned a prototype. We can thus add a journal to another project: our research notes for our next screenplay, for example, could contain a separate journal for reflections on the creative process.

 

Sponsored by Eastgate

serious hypertext