Dear Tabbles followers, we are glad to announce the release of Tabbles 4.0.27, which fixes major bugs and brings us very close to getting out of beta. This update took us a couple of months, especially because we had to do an architectural change to the Sql engine. Let me start with the bug fixes:

First, for about a month, the Tabbles installer has been failing on most machines. This was not our fault. Microsoft changed a remote file, which made our installer fail. This is now fixed, and everybody should be able to install Tabbles again.

Second, some people could not make Tabbles Local to work: when they pressed the “go” button, they would get a crash. This was not our fault either. The culprit was the software “Ad-Aware” or “WebCompanion” from Lavasoft. See here for instructions for removing it completely. So, everybody should now be able to use Tabbles Local.

Another major problem fixed was that Tabbles had problems connecting to Sql Servers on a network that is very slow, because the first “handshake” call would timeout. In particular, Sql Server hosted on Windows 10 seem to have this problem. If you use Tabbles Lan, we suggest hosting Sql Server on Windows Server, or at least on Windows 7. Anyway, now we have increased the timeout, so Tabbles should not fail to connect to Sql Servers on slow networks. (But you should fix your network anyway.)

Let us now come to the main technical improvement. Basically, we have largely rewritten our logical engine, improving its performance, especially if you have files on network drives and many machines in your organization. In particular, you might have noticed that, the first time you started Tabbles on a new machine, a very long synchronization task would start, which was needed for you to be able to see files tagged on other machines. This does not happen anymore. Technically, if a file was on a network drive, previously we stored in the database many copies of that file, one for each machine in your organization; whereas now we store that file just once. So no synchronization is needed anymore: everything happens on-the-fly. In addition, everything is much faster due to other sql optimizations we made.

This improvement is very important for us, because it means that Tabbles is finally ready to be deployed in organizations with hundreds of machines and thousands of tagged files, without performance issues. And even if you have few machines, you will notice a performance improvement.

We have also completely translated Tabbles in French and Chinese. (and German is coming soon).

We also did some customizations on commission (caching thumbnails on network drives), and we implemented a few often-requested features such as the “select all” menu option (useful for example if you need to drag all the files in a zip folder).

So what’s next? All the important features planned for Tabbles 4 are now done. Next, we will implement some minor features, improve the documentation (which is still very lacking), wait until we become confident to have fixed all the important bugs; and then we are going out of beta, and start planning Tabbles 5. (Which, in case you are curious, might feature a GUI much more integrated into Explorer, or a web interface that runs in browsers).

Take care everybody, and thanks for your support.