One of the more amazing tools in the visual mapping arena has been Tinderbox, a combination mind mapping/outliner/personal content management application from Eastgate Development. The developer recently released Tinderbox v4 for Mac OS X, with a wealth of new and improved features. What’s new in this release?

• Notes can now be more expressive, and can incorporate different shapes, icons (called badges), progress bars and other attributes to add meaning and context
• Many of these same attributes are also visible in Tinderbox outlines
• Tinderbox 4 expands and improves the range of things you can do with the program’s agents and rules.
• Tinderbox now supports and interacts with Web 2.0 tools like Twitter

According to the Tinderbox website, a Windows version is supposedly also under development – but Eastgate has been saying that for years, and I have yet to see evidence that it is moving closer to reality. I sent an e-mail to head developer/founder Mark Bernstein last week asking for a status update on the Windows version, but I haven’t heard back from him. That’s not surprising, because he’s in the middle of a major product launch. Still, I remain very skeptical that it will ever see the light of day.

On the other hand, if you’re a Mac user, it looks like Tinderbox 4 is well worth downloading the trial version to see what’s new!

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