I have also been following ‘Scrivener’ myself, bought the license the minute 1.0 was available… and it is definitely going to make it to my upcoming ‘favorite writing environments’ page.

I’d say that Tinderbox gives you a lot of power to play, structure, discover, tie… your thoughts/notes, etc. I mainly use it as a repository of scattered tidbits/ideas for what someday I would expect to be some sort of writing work/s…

In that way for me Tinderbox is a playground to experiment with those notes. They way I use it (as you know it can be used in many, many different ways…), it allows me to peek into what I was thinking or writing about at some given moment… and discover as well as rediscover connections between thoughts, develop new ones, etc.

Because of its geeky nature… and because I love to play around with things… it is also a unlimited source of distraction as you play with commands, try to make use of features, etc.

[BTW, it is true that nowadays OSX and some new cocoa apps seem to be in a way catching up with what at the time were some innovative ideas that weren't easily available for the average user/writer... i.e. tinderbox agents v. spotlight searches...

At the same time today's spotlight searches seem still far too limited when compared with tinderbox agent queries. Apple says spotlight searches are going to be improved in Leopard with boolean capabilities, etc.]

But to try to answer your question and not write a whole different post through the comments form… I would say that once I get the complete picture of something I want to write about… I switch to some other app. for that. Not that I couldn’t do that within Tinderbox… but me being me… that is what I do.

In many cases, that app. is Ulysses. As I briefly mentioned above, for some reason within the environment the blue-tec guys provide you with… I just naturally focus and get the thing done. For better or for worse…

Best, TFS