enjoying new media • software aesthetics

Timestamps

Time stamps are a great example of metadata: information that helps describe or situate your notes.

It’s nice to collect metadata automatically, because:

most metadata is obvious now — and you may not foresee that it won‘t be obvious later
most metadata is never useful

These days, digital cameras automatically capture lots of information about each picture: the date, the exposure time, the aperture, maybe the latitude and longitude. Using a film camera, you could write all this down (8x10 color glossies with a paragraph on the back of each one). But you probably didn’t. And so, maybe sixty years later, we’re looking at some pictures of our grandparents and “who are those other people?” and we really have no idea what we’re seeing. Where, if we had the idiotic camera taking notes, we’d at least know that this was photographed on March 27, 1964 in Riverside, Illinois, and so this must be Passover and that must be Aunt Jodi and Uncle Li and the little girl has to be Molly because Susan would already have been six or seven.

Tinderbox automatically records the time when you made a note, and the time when you last modified the note.

You can add the date to the text of the note (Edit:Insert Date or cmd-/), or the date and time (cmd-opt-/). If your computer is currently using (say) Norwegian, the date and time are formatted in Norwegian.