Tabbles Press FAQ

"..inspired by WinFS, or rather, what WinFS should have been."
(Henrik W. Hansen - Senior ISV Developer Evangelist @ Microsoft)

Where do I start?

Our homepage: http://www.tabbles.net/
The announcement on our blog



What is Tabbles ?

Tabbles allows the users to organize, browse and find their files/folders/urls in a new "relational" way. It allows to place a file into several "folders" without duplication/shortcuts, and to browse them by combining concepts (e.g.: "invoice" + "Customer Smith" + "2008") independently from where they are. The easiest way to define it is "Relational File Management System" and it does most of what people were expecting from WinFS.

How does it work?

Tabbles unifies the concepts of file tag and virtual folder: the user can tag files - or put them into virtual folders - and later browse the tags, as if they were folders. It builds a layer on top of the file system and therefore does NOT move/delete/copy files or folders. All it does is saving the tagging data in its internal database, with no risk of messing up with files/folders. Being a desktop app, drag'n'drop, copy'n'paste, keyboard shortcuts are supported.

How is this different from a file manager (like Windows explorer), a desktop search engine (like Google desktop) or the Windows 7 Libraries?

Windows explorer: it only allows you to store files into hierarchical folder, and that exact file can only be in one folder...with Tabbles you can forget about this.
Google desktop: it reads through files and tries and guess what they're about. Tabbles uses sure informations, as the user's categorization and the folder structure. Searching is mainly done using the Combine function "show me all the files/bookmarks linked to the tabbles 'google' and 'Chrome OS' "
Windows 7 Libraries: they allow the user to group and show the content of several folders at once. Tabbles creates a virtual files system with cross-linked files and folders, it allows the folder to group and show the files and folders based on their relations to "concepts". Files and folders can be navigated "horizontally" - independently from their position on the disks.

Are there other cool things I should know?

Features:

the tabbles (tags) are persistent: the tabbles look and behave like folder (you need to create one) and then once a file is tagged, the file can be moved or renamed and its tagging will follow it. Tabbles can automatically tag files and folders based on auto-tagging rules (same principle as the Outlook rules). The one-click tagging feature makes a pop-up come out of the taskbar each time a sensible file is created/saved (based on user-configurable rules) for super-fast tagging.

Tabbles is written entirely in F# and WPF. The data is stored in a proprietary server-less database, a simple XML file which typically doesn't grow larger than a few MB.

What’s your next step?

We're internally testing a client-server version allowing colleagues/friends to share their file tagging over the intranet... a bit like delicious.com, but for documents and files.


What’s the business model?

It's the good old pre-Web 2.0 model: we sell software licenses. We're also looking into a complementary ad-based model, but first we need to find a smart way to deliver sensible ads.



What’s the funding status of the company?

We're currently bootstrapping the company. We're planning to seek funding this year.



How many people work on Tabbles?

Three, all co-founders:
Andrea D'Intino, Sales & Marketing
Maurizio Colucci, Development
Irma Sta, Legal-Finance

We're also proud members of the Microsoft BizSpark program:

What is today's news again?

Can I get a logo?

Sure: you can find various logos of the company and the product in our media kit in our press room.

What about the social networks? Twitter, facebook, blog?

Of course we do, it's 2010! :-) Here is our twitter account, our facebook page, our blog (rss), our youtube page, and we have an OPML to aggregate all our feeds.

What does Tabbles look like?

Here are a few screenshots, you can download them all from here.

I have more questions!

Please write us then :-)

Media

Tabbles 1 min intro, from youtube (direct link) and a playlist with 9 more training videos.

We have 9 other training videos, the whole playlist is here