Tabbles forum

[Andrea]

Update!

it has been a while since we wrote something in here! I'm writing following the 1.4.10b3 update.



Anyway, coming soon (within the next release... 1.4.10 or more probably 1.5.0) we'll have:

1) Tabbles portable: the possibility to run Tabbles from a USB stick and therefore to keep all your data into a USB drive and move it around from one pc to another...

2) More powerful command line: something that will allow people to write apps to categorize files/urls from outside Tabbles.

3) (tentative) support for Chinese/Japanese languages: Maurizio is trying to figure-out what didn't work last time we tried...


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Ok, a little request from us now: is there anyone willing to put together one or more training-videos , in whatever language you like and covering whatever aspect of Tabbles? If you do we'll be happy to include it into our youtube channel - grab your chance to become a star!


Love and peace,

Andrea

[Jfw]

Hello all

I am just wondering, is the USB portability already implemented ?
This is a major feature need for me

BR,
Jf

[Andrea]

Hello jfw!!!

it's half-way done... we're kinda sitting on it... we're planning to release it next week - stay tuned!

[Andrea]

One more update... after a loooong while

Yes, we're still working - and even on something very interesting.

Maurizio has been working for 4 weeks now on the "shared tabbles" feature. Tabbles has been cut in pieces for a long while, and a lot of deep-under-the-hood changes have been made.
We don't know the results yet: today Tabbles compiled for the first time but it's crashing every 10 seconds. Apparently this is not a surprise as the changes were many, and often complex.
Anyway, after discussing and discussing many possibilities on the technology to be used, we approached WCF - Let me try and explain a bit more.


Tabbles is becoming a client-server application based on the WCF technology

Basically a number of functions in Tabbles will be "exposed", meaning that they can be accessed from the Tabbles "clients" via TCP/IP (or using another technology that allows for 2 apps in the same machine to communicate). So There will be a server holding the db, and the clients communicating with the server each time you combine 2 tabbles or you tag some stuff...once again, this is still WIP and we're not even sure it will work yet - fingers crossed


Side effects: external apps will be able to access the Tabbles' database, a-là-twitter

This stuff Maurizio is working on should be able to allow other people to code apps that can (for instance) tag files or retrieve data from the db. This could well be the first layer of an API that will allow to code plugins


This sounds to us 2 very exciting - hope it is the same for you there!

P.S.: if this silly volcano starts behaving decently again, within 2 days I should leave for 2 weeks of holidays (the first one in 3 years! ) so I guess I won't be that much on the forum... Maurizio will be posting news/betas as the stuff keeps happening

Peace!

A.

[Andrea]

HELLO WORLD!

As some of you might have noticed, we had a little break (not even 2 weeks) and now we're up and running again. So, what's going on?

One bad news and one good news


let's start with the bad news:
the WCF experiment didn't work out
Basically Maurizio has been writing a bunch of code in order to create a server version of Tabbles which could communicate with a Tabbles-client. The client-server communication was actually happening, but after this he realized that he couldn't implement the database "lock", making it impossible for the system to work. Well, it is called Research and Development for a reason...

the good news:
Instead of making a proprietary client-server thingy, we'll use a normal database (Microsoft SQL Server Express)
This is actually the most normal thing to do... So, what will happen is that there will be a number of Tabbles-clients who instead of keeping the database in memory all the time will use a normal database to store/retrieve data.
This gives a number of advantages compared to the first experiment we did, above all scalability and performances. It will require the users to install the MS SQL database (the Express version is free with the only limitation that the db has to be smaller than 4GB - which shouldn't be an issue for us as our dbs are typically 30-40MB)

Questions you'll be willing to ask:

1) why we're using Microsoft SQL Express instead of MySQL?
- the reason is that Microsoft SQL supports Linq and the development tools are integrated with Visual Studio, making everything much easier for us. In reality, there are ports of Linq for MySQL so there is a fair chance that Tabbles will work with MySQL as well, but we're targeting Microsoft SQL Express because it's just easier for us to start with that.
And once again, Microsoft SQL Express is free, so you shouldn't worry about buying an expensive piece of software...

2) what's happening with the current version which doesn't require any db installation?
- it will still exist, Maurizio says he will first need to implement the code required for Tabbles to use Linq and then to do some more coding to make the previous system fitting into the new one.


...but first of all, a bug-fixing release is coming soon

Besides: we've been working VERY hard for quite some time now and still not enough money is flowing in. I'm started a while ago "pushing" the software to various magazines, sites and so on, and the next steps with marketing will be to find out how to do some advertisement and to find some resellers. Needless to say, our need for support (both moral and...physical) is now growing day-by-day so whatever idea you may have to help us spreading the word (which is not this or that feature) please don't hesitate to tell us

Thanks everybody!

A.

[Andrea]

Small release - 1.5.3 coming soon...
with a few bug fixes and a new list visualization (we hope JFW will be happy od this!)
After this, the next release will be one where Tabbles uses an SQL database and tabbles can be shared

1.5.3 - lista visualization

screen_temp.png (245.19 KiB) Viewed 517 times

[Andrea]

another small (!!!) feature - totally surprising for me too (but really cool!!!)

It doesn't really need any explanation...coming in 1.5.3

1.5.3 -> nested tabbles view

screen_temp2.png (218.96 KiB) Viewed 503 times

[KaptK]

Above looks great! I was going to suggest something like that for the front view so you could navigate to different Tabbles quickly instead of having to use the tree at the side Thanks!

[Andrea]

One more little (big update) on the way:

Short term -> 1.5.3 -> bugs, new view, eastern languages

* We're doing one big round of bug-fixing
* Adding the view showed in this post
* (Hopefully) Adding support for Chinese/Japanese (Arab and Korean too?)

Less short (but not too long) term -> 1.6.0 -> new shared-tabbles p2p strategy

Something interesting happened in the past days...can't really talk about it yet (no - we're not being bought by anyone! ) but anyway this event triggered a rethinking the shared-tabbles p2p strategy (more info here and here).

The way we'll be embracing will be merging user-dbs in memory in real-time. I don't think I need to bug you more with this, but briefly the outcome of this should be a serverless p2p-ish sharing functionality.
Now, this thing have several limitation, first of all the fact that memory and CPU time will grow along with with the number of shared-users, but given that the amount of users will be limited, this solution should work for real!


Mid-term -> 1.x.x -> SQL-powered Tabbles

Pretty self-explaining... this thing will allow MANY users to share their tagging and be very solid and reliable. It will take quite some work though, but let's stay positive

°^°^°^°^°^°^°^°^°^

Sales & Marketing bs -> my own to-do list

* New graphics for the homepage with a nice "cross-linking" pic instead of the dull screenshot - I actually got inspired from the screenshot that chip.de took of our video... and thought "hmmm, this looks cool indeed!"
* Banners based on that pic...
* Some serious SEO on our site!
* Uh, just did some shopping and bought 2 domains... gonna make 2 minisites on them

...Comments? Suggestions? Insults? Always welcome!!!

A.

[Andrea]

--==## CELEBRATION TIME!!! ##==--

Today, 17th of June 2010 at 18:31 (GMT+1), the first 2 databases have been merged, and it seems that Tabbles is NOT slowing down!



What is going on:

Maurizio has been working on shared-tabbles p2p technology (more info here and here).
Basically, instead of loading only 1 DB, Tabbles would load N DBs, one for each user, have them all in memory at the same time, and whenever a query was done (e.g.: showing the content of a tabble or a combination), Tabbles would query all the databases and merge the output of the queries.
The great question lying behind this approach was: will this merge badly slow down Tabbles? And based on our first test we believe that the answer is a BIG FAT "NO"!

Check out the pic here:

First 2 database merged - shared-tabbles

db_merged.png (173.35 KiB) Viewed 353 times

What you're looking at:

Look at the left-side tree: If you know Tabbles a bit, you'll know that it would be awkward to have 2 tabbles named "Companies" and "Company" as well as "Document" and "Documents"... you're indeed looking at Maurizio's and mine database merged into one. They exist in memory as 2 separated entities, but when Tabbles generates the list of Tabbles in the Workspace, the 2 databases gets merged in real-time. In this case we're looking at roughly 50k files combined.

Let's summarize, so far we observed:

- The merging process of several does not provide a visible slowdown.
- The memory use is not increasing visibly.
- The slowdown factor will be proportional with sum of all the files present in all the database (e.g.: if there are 10.000.000 files - coming from 10 or 100 or 10.000 users - then probably things will look less shiny, but not less shiny than if the 10.000.000 files were from one user only!) and most of the waiting happens indeed when the files are being output as sorted.

What needs to be done now: EVERYTHING!

This was just a veyr first prototype. Now we're missing:
- A sharing privilege system, allowing to decide who can tag files to this tabble and who can only browse it...
- The handling of the user and the machine: each DB must be unique and linked to the user and the machine.
- There should be tabbles created automatically for each user, so that colleagues will know they're browsing something I tagged...
- Maybe (please give us hints on this one!) a system to filter/separate files tagged by "me" and by "other people" - how would you like this to be done?
- Some new graphics...


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HI 5!



P.S.: the first person (or not-person) who is gonna ask "when is this gonna be ready?" will be beheaded, his license will be k-lined and he's gonna be publiclly mocked in the forum!