Phil Whitehouse: Hello. This week marks the three year anniversary of TiddlyWiki being published to the web, and I’m joined here today by the original creator of TiddlyWiki, Jeremy Ruston, and we’re also here with Saq Imtiaz, who is a frequent contributor to the TiddlyWiki project. Hello guys.
Saq Imtiaz and Jeremy Ruston: Hello Phil!
Phil: So in a minute, I’ll hand over to Saq to chat with Jeremy about the history of TiddlyWiki, but while this interview is taking place, I’ll be online taking additional questions from the global TiddlyWiki community in the IRC chat room. I’ll pick the best questions to ask at the end. And with that, it’s over to you, Saq.
Saq: Thank you, Phil. So Jeremy, TiddlyWiki. What is it all about?
Jeremy: That’s the million dollar question, and one that I’ve struggled to answer succinctly in all of these three years, and to be honest, the clearest way I’ve found to define it is for people who already know what a Wiki is. Then it’s straight forward; you can talk about how the user interface lets you see multiple pages at once and how it doesn’t need a server. But to people who don’t know anything about Wiki’s, I describe it as a notebook, as an outboard brain, as a place that you can put the stuff that matters to you and then do things with it.
Saq: Right. So you mention a bit about differences as compared to other Wiki’s. Perhaps you’d like to elaborate a little about that.
Jeremy: Sure. Well, so, one of the motivations for TiddlyWiki was that observing the way that particularly sophisticated users use Wiki’s, is that you’ll see them often opening multiple pages and multiple tabs in their browser so they can flip between pages easily, and particularly so that they can have two pages at once in edit mode. And when you’re doing kind of refractoring of moving stuff from page to page it’s quite powerful to be able to do that compared to jumping around in a single window. And so I was interested in ways of making.. ‘cause I think that’s a productive way to use Wiki’s, so I was interested in how I could create a user interface that would kind of promote or push that way of working. And that drove the idea of a Wiki where the individual entries, instead of being pages, are more akin to paragraphs. And in fact, in the very first instantiation of TiddlyWiki, I was thinking that what we now call a tiddler would be a paragraph, so that we conflate the two things.