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1.2.0 is out…and how to get feedback from your users – quickly!

November 6, 2009 by Andrea D'Intino · 1 Comment 

Ladies and gentlemen, the 1.2.0 is out…

the change-log itself looks scary :-D But of course we’re not sleeping: the 1.2.1 beta1 is already available in the forum, featuring the long awaited Auto-categorization rules.
Something useful now: how to get feedback from a trial
We’re fans of the excellent a smart bear blog, and we got inspiration from this article about getting feedback from the users.
How did we implement it? How long did it take?
What we needed was a way to have a user communicating with us what was wrong with Tabbles, this should have included a list of options with check-boxes as well as a few empty fields to write something into. Coding this into our desktop app would have been a nightmare (open a socket, and write into a remote db making sure that the user’s firewall wouldn’t get too angry about it… ) and it would have been even worst having the thing to run when the user was uninstalling… :-|
Well, our website is based on Joomla, so we thought: why not using joomla to do this? Joomla has a built-in poll, but it’s pretty limited: only radio buttons, no free-writing field and max 12 questions (!).
After a 5 minutes tour in the joomla extensions directory I found the excellent PollXT which does exactly what I needed and within 10 mins our poll was online. This looks like the best component I’ve seen in a while… it does everything it’s supposed to (and as you need more, it’s there already), it’s stable and very intuitive: A+ to the author! Uh, did I mention that it’s donationware? :-D
All we did is calling a custom action on uninstalling, so the uninstaller calls a web page (which opens without ringing any alarm bell) and PollXT does all the rest.
P.S.: there is in an interview of me here :-D
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Tabbles 1.1.6 with auto-align available

September 25, 2009 by Andrea D'Intino · Leave a Comment 

A new version of Tabbles (1.1.6) is available. You can download it at our web site.

Here are the changes:

  • Due to popular request, a tabble alignment feature was added. You can choose two alignment modes: auto-alignment, where tabbles are aligned automatically after each drag; and manual alignment, where tabbles are aligned when you press ALT+q.

    Auto-alignment is enabled by default. You can find the new alignment functions in the “misc” menu.

  • You can now delete tabble colors even if they are being used by some tabbles. This way it is much easier to reduce the number of colors. (And, due to the recent changes, you are likely to have many more colors than you want.)
  • The “quick-open tabble” dialog was slightly modified. Now, in the left panel, tabbles are sorted alphabetically and grouped by first letter. (Previously they were grouped by color.)

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We have also planned the next major feature: we are going to make it possible to auto-arrange tabbles in many ways:

  • spatial (the current arrangement – tabbles stay where you put them);

  • alphabetical (tabbles are sorted alphabetically);
  • recently opened tabbles first,
  • recently linked tabbles first,
  • frequently opened tabbles first,
  • tabbles with more files first;
  • group by color,
  • group by color name (similar to category view).

The last arrangement will layout tabbles as they used to be in the old “category view” (present in previous versions of Tabbles), but in a less invasive way. So, if you used to like category mode and dislike the current spatial arrangement, stay tuned!

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