Home Forums General discussion Opinion on 1.4.5 Reply To: Re: Opinion on 1.4.5

mkayi
Participant
Post count: 31

hi,

the right hand pane lists the tabbles the directories and then the files and there’s no separation between them. I find that confusing as hell. It makes it also look like I nested Tabbles where I didn’t.

I can’t believe you defaulted that pane to the most confusing of all the view options in the explorer. I just today realized there’s really an explorer view which scrolls horizontally, because that’s exactly the view I never use. I use the details (clickable coloums) or large thumbnails.

Cool that I can see the dates. But, in the view as it is right now it’s not making an orderly impression. As the files are "all over the place" the dates are, too. I can’t check which files have been created just yesterday, e.g., at a glance, like in the explorer (detail view, sorted newest first).

1) making Tabbles portable (so that it runs from a USB) – many people asked for this

I can’t even think of any use for this, but I work on only one PC.

2) better web-browser integration (with a bookmarklet)

Huh?!

3) manually excluding some disk – a looooot people asked for this

What for? As of now, Tabbles only auto-tags what I told it to.

4) shared-tabbles (I don’t think I need to add anything here…)

unimportant for me.

It is strange, but each of the above just makes me shrug. Those things are themselves icing on the cake of an otherwise fully grown-up application (which – and that is the conclusion I am coming to right now – Tabbles is not).

What I am talking about is the very basics of your user experience. I can’t handle your new file list. It is a mess. It contains mixed information.
"Hey! Here’s the content of this tabble. Erm, right here at the start of the list there’s also a list of tabbles although they are not really in that tabble, you know? Nevermind. By the way, you have to read that list both from top to bottom and from left to right." And so on. The pagewise separation is also very annoying.
This thing needs cleaning up.

Also, the longer I think about it the more I get the impression you put yourselves in a really bad position: I know that the windows explorer is a monster. There’s incomparable manpower behind most of the Microsoft products and they know their shit.

Now, enter the enthusiastic startup with an exciting idea. Some adapt others don’t. The new UI gets dropped and the startup decides to choose the road taken (unlike Robert Frost, hehe). Decision is made, obviously, so I won’t whine about that spilt milk.
But some things to keep in mind:

– Now, you are competing with a beast. (whereas before you were utterly unique – I hadn’t seen anything like it)
– If you make it look like explorer, make it work like explorer. People will expect it and will consider lacking functionality a mock-up. ("Huh? XY should be here. They don’t have that.")
– when you achieve that goal, you still have a twist in the user experience where the user needs to understand the abstraction concept behind Tabbles.
– This means you have twice the workload. Maintain an explorer-clone and work out a UI concept which affords using Tabbles! The same way a riffled surface on a scroll bar affords dragging. Noone even needs to explain that to me. I happen to just understand how the element wants to be used. That is a tough task. And now, it comes on top of creating a beast of an app.

I liked Tabbles, but maybe you understand… I am worried.