Tinderbox Keeps Getting Smarter -- Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox has been upgraded to version 2.4. Tinderbox (see my review in TidBITS-651) is a superb way to create heavily hyperlinked text; text snippets are stored in a hierarchical structure and can be exported as Web pages. I used Tinderbox to create the online help for the Perl editor Affrus, which blogger John Gruber has called "the finest software documentation," in part because it is "cross-linked out the ying-yang." Tinderbox 2.4 makes outlines smarter by permitting any entry to have a rule for updating itself periodically; for example, if you're using Tinderbox to maintain a to-do list, a parent item (representing a category or group of tasks) might have a rule that its "completed" attribute should be true if and only if the "completed" attribute of all its children (the actual tasks) is true. There are also many small bug fixes and aesthetic tweaks, and Tinderbox's Web-page export continues to evolve strongly. Tinderbox runs in both the classic Mac OS (Mac OS 9.2 recommended) and Mac OS X 10.0 and later. Tinderbox costs $165, plus $70 annually for free updates. A demo version is available for download. [MAN]

<http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/06959>
<http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/03/ 30/online_help.html>
<http://latenightsw.com/affrus/>
<http://daringfireball.net/2005/02/apps_of_the_ year_2004#affrus>
<http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/download.html>