A prototype is a fairly basic concept within Tinderbox, once you get past simply writing notes. You can get away with simply typing notes as your zettels and doing nothing more. That’s already your Zettelkasten. A prototype is a way of creating a new note that has the properties of another note. So, for example, every Zettel I create is made from a prototype that has certain user attributes that I want it to have. You can think of attributes as custom tags on drugs. I mean a standard tag might be: WORK. But in Tinderbox, that tag, which is called an attribute, doesn’t just have a title. It can also have a value. So it could be WORK: Mondays. Tinderbox will display the field where you can type in the value of your attribute right at the top of your note. That way, you can have attributes for things like AUTHOR and DATE. (Those examples aren’t even custom attributes as Tinderbox has many build in ones, including those, that you can choose from a list.) So if I want every Zettel to have those attributes ready for me to fill in, the fastest way would be to create an empty note with those attributes selected, and then in the inspector tell Tinderbox to treat that note as a Prototype.
Ok, with that said, I’ve created some custom attributes that serve the purpose of inserting a title for me into new zettels. The title is basically a timestamp. The prototype note runs a little script that finds the attribute for the creation date and then inserts that text as the title of my zettel. You don’t have to do all that. It’s just that a zettelkasten is meant to have a numbering system, and I figure the best numbering system is a timestamp. Then, even if my notes get messy in Tinderbox (since it’s a graphical ‘desktop’ with your notes kind of like ‘icons,’ it’s easy to get messy. But Tinderbox has a powerful Attribute Browser. You can have it display every note (zettel), organized by title. Like magic, you have an outline view in order (true zettelkasten style) of all your notes.
I’m happy to walk you through setting all that up. But you may be happier, for now, just making notes and not worrying about all that. Even if you don’t add any numbering system, you can still use the Attribute Browser to view all your notes sorted by creation date, for example.
As you can see, Tinderbox is as simple or complex as you want it to be. The price tag for it is because you can do all that cool stuff if you want to, which you can’t do in any other program. I wish they had a competitor so that the price would go down. It’s grossly over priced in my opinion.
So anyhow, ask me for help if you like. I do suggest going through their tutorial and going through the help menu when you need help. It’s much better to understand what a prototype is, for example, if you make one yourself.