HELLO WORLD.
Update2: we released one more little patch to 1.3.8… at night we can sleep a bit better now!
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Yes, one update more.
But not just a simple update this time: this one will go to several magazines and Maurizio was up 36hours in a row coding this…
More details on our forum
Thanks
the changelog is coming soon… the biggest feature is the auto-tagging rules.
The download is at the usual place. More to come later on….
HELLO WORLD
Many little things going on. I’ll keep it short this time!
Development
Tweaking | bug-fixing | tweaking | bug-fixing | tweaking | tweaking | bug-fixing. Getting close to a release which was supposed to be a small one, but it’s turning out to be pretty massive
But most important: fighting with Windows installer, Installshiled, Installaware, NSIS installer. Even for us it’s hard for us to believe that nonwithstandig the complexity of our app, the crazy GUI, the framework, the file system watcher (soon to move from Win32 to WDMI), the thing we’re having the hardest time with, is still the installation. This does probably deserve a blog post itself… Anyway, we’re considering doing an RC2 just to test the installer.
One last thing: Tabbles looks too much mac-ish right… will this be misleading?
Marketing: how to tune-up a marketing strategy
For the second time, I posted on the joelsonsoftware forum, for the second time the result is amazing. The first post was here.
The second one is here and I also posted on onstartups.com. The result is summed up in this table:
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Suggestion
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How many ppl
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notes
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Creative marketing
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1 (several ideas)
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Involve people, register domains (like launching a movie or a parfum)
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Key features
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2
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A key feature is that you allow people to organise documents without changing their current filesystem layout. (“People ask how I can find documents so quickly when I’m searching the same complicated network drive hierarchy they are, Tabbles is my secret”)
—–
“Have you ever wanted to put a document in more than one folder? Now you can”
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Target specific verticals
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3
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“this product solves (put user problem here) problem”. And you can create different products for different niches.
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Force it into a niche
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2
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Create a javascript trial
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1
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We are in the desktop search niche
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1
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Well, thanks (really!) to everyone who wrote something

.
While nothing is really surprising us, it was good to know what people understand and what they don’t from our site. This led us to rethink a bit the homepage, here is a first
draft.
See ya,
A.
Here I am again!
It was a calm week – read: everything went as planned.
Development
With quite a fat change-log. The most interesting thing is the detachable file panel and the drag’n'drop: now you can drag’n'drop files from the file panel to a tabble on the tabble floor, or to another app. The cool thing about this is that for example you can get your mp3 sorted according to the party you played them or the place your heard them, and throw them into a playing cool…. cool, isn’t it
There is probably gonna be a RC before we roll out the 1.2 stable… which is giving us some more time to update the manual and rework a bit our site.
What made it and what not
We temporarily put aside the idea of making a full ZUI-ish desktop replacement. The idea is definitely cool, but we soon realized that there is a looooot of work behind such a thing, and that it has to be bulletproof, both technically and the on the UI side… you can’t just throw a desktop replacement that does 1/2 of the stuff of your current desktop and pretend that people use it… not?
The new skin for the app is there! Yeah! It looks pretty neat and gives such a different feeling. It still needs some tune-up as there are a couple of bugs here and there, of course…. it’s
here.
Also, the GUI went forward in different places: a couple of new effects, some fixes here and there and a redesigned “quick” window which becomes crucial as it’s the one coming out when you right click on a file in Explorer.
Explorer integration works also for the 64bits machine, thanks a lot to the guys at
ezshellextension for their help! ->
Techie stuff: developing functionalities to let 2 applications (Tabbles and Explorer in this case) talk to each other can be pretty painful, specially as you have to write them in C and go to a pretty low level…we couldn’t bother coding anything in C and with
ezshellextension the integration was working in less than 2 days. Cool!
Well, what else? I’ll spare you the 1000 more bug fixes..
Sales, Marketing and everything else
We installed phplist and we’re on the way to create our Newsletter.
Well, this Newletter idea has been in our head for a while, and this week I finally got it kickstarted. I did some research first on the
Joomla extension directory and after a couple of hours I realized that 1) I didn’t need any integration with Joomla and 2) that the phpbb of the mailinglist software is phplist.
The installation took like 5 mins, I had to fight a bit with the mysql db as the installed wouldn’t write one table, but the built-in db check function in phplist did tell me where the problem was and within 2 mins I googled the workaround on the phplist forum.
So basically, I had the first test newsletter sent some 3 hours after I started searching
I found this interesting
article on how to set it up and what work and what doesn’t, maybe it’s a bit outdated but it helped a lot. Then I started googling phplist free templates, and could only find
this (ok, I googled 3,5 mins). But soon after I realised that since phplist uses the excellent
FCKeditor to edit the templates, all I needed to do was some copy&paste from one of hour web page, in order to have the styles in the email templates…the rest can easily be done in the editor.
Some more messing around with phpbb…it’s nearly fun now
I must say I’m beginning to enjoy it: I began to do some work on our phpbb based
forum as a complete neophite and at the time my mindframe was like “the less I have to fight with it, the happier I’ll be”. A few months have gone from those days, and in the meanwhile I’ve been installing a template, modifying it, installing mods, modifying them some more and eventually I started modifying the HTML files in order to have this or that button displayed or hidden…I found out what the bbcode is, and even try to do some little hacks/modifications myself (with mixed results…hehe).
The coolest thing we’d like to have on our forum is still a post voting system: people need to be able to give posts a vote so that those who come after them will know what is important and what isn’t..
Uh, we did setup Mantis so that user don’t need to register an account to report a bug, also pretty needed.
I guess that’s it for tonight