On the prerelease Jeremy writes that he was working on a book about TiddlyWiki [1]
As I have written about elsewhere I was privileged to know Joe Armstrong, the co-inventor of Erlang, in the last few years of his life – we were working together on a book about TiddlyWiki when he passed away in 2019.
I think the book form is a good idea. Over the past few years I have been discovering the joys associated with pens and paper. Some of these joys are about not using a phone, laptop, iPad, desktop computer. All these things were very exciting at when they came out and it took a long time before I realised that thinking, drawing, doodling and diagraming suit my way of thinking. I like the physical nature of doing things my hand.
Some time back, while my daughter was still in a pushchair, I thought I might be able to use an iPad in a cafe while she was with me. The plan was that she would draw with felt tips while I did a few things online with an iPad.
In hindsight the flaw in this method is easy to see. As soon as she saw the iPad and me giving attention to it she wanted to use it. There was no way I was going to get half an hour or so to record thoughts with an iPad. I ended up buying a large format sketch book and using that instead. We left the iPad at home and ended up drawing together in various cafes in and around Manchester in the UK.
The other day I found the stash of sketch books during an autumn tidy. My daughter is 16 now. I kept them in a cupboard in a pile. Elsewhere are a collection of external hard drives and two laptops, one running Windows from 2004, and a Mac from 2006. These will be home to the many TiddlyWiki files I created over the years. In a way they are like a childs drawings, a snapshot of life and in themselves of very little consequence. It turned out that despite creating new TiddlyWikis to help organise my life and ideas I never really got organised in the way I thought.
Anyway… books are good! They make good gifts! And nowadays you can draw in them, take photos of them on your phone and then add them to a TiddlyWiki project! Wow!
Before TiddlyWiki came along my brother an I published a magazine on the joys of nightlife in Stoke-on-Trent. I still have copies. Other people have saved copies. Last year I found the edition from March 1994 and took in round with me in my bag. I was able to have a coffee in a room above a bookshop in Hanley (the main town of Stoke-on-Trent) with people and hold a discussion about the magazine and publishing while it was on the table.
Books are not going to go away!
Alex
[1] https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#Filter%20Syntax%20History