Tinderbox is a tool for notes, a personal content assistant. The Tinderbox Way takes a close look at Tinderbox and its underlying ideas, exploring not just the program's mechanics but also its design and its spirit.

From the elements of writing more effective notes to the frontiers of information farming, from the classroom and conference hall to the research laboratory, The Tinderbox Way explores a new approach to working with and representing interlinked ideas.

From Chapter One:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasnt written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices.

A client-side framework for
hypertext interactive fiction games.
Undum is a pure client-side game framework for narrative interactive fiction. It is designed for HTML 5 and CSS 3.
If that means nothing to you, then let's go back a few steps. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure, or Fighting Fantasy books? Where you got to choose what your character does next? Well if you think of that in a web-page you have hypertext interactive fiction, or HIF. Instead of turning to a particular page, you click a link, and the next bit of content appears.

The problem is that those kinds of games are pretty limited. Every time the player does something, the story could go in different directions. So the author has to either write masses of branches, or else the decisions you make as a player have to be relatively short lived. If you played CYOA books you'll know that the wrong move either ended the story pretty quickly, or else it didn't really matter what you did because you'd end up at the same place.

To beat this limitation, Undum allows you to make the output dynamic. It allows you to keep track of what has happened to the character (any kinds of data, in fact), and to then change the text that gets output accordingly. Effectively it is like writing a CYOA page that is different each time you read it. This allows for far richer and more rewarding game design.