Guides and The Shape Of Space
Tinderbox maps have always used a fairly coarse grid. This makes it easy to align notes and to express how they relate to their neighbors, and helps keep things neat. Of course, sometimes the grid can be too strict, and over the years we’ve gradually moved to a finer grid.
Tinderbox Six doesn’t use a grid. Instead, when you move or resize a note, guidelines appear to indicate alignment with nearby notes — and the note snaps into perfect alignment if it’s sufficiently close.
What’s interesting here is that, in practice, these guides create a flexible implicit grid. Where the old approach now feels like automatically setting tabs at half-inch intervals, this implicit grid only sets tabs stops where you want them — and automatically adds new tabs stops when you need them.