Hello again,

lool, I understand your frustration, but please understand our points too:

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.

now it looks pretty much like explorer, so far this is giving the following results:
1) previously 90%+ of the people uninstalling Tabbles were marking "I can’t figure out how it works" as the reason why they uninstalled… since the GUI change the trend is DRASTICALLY changed.
2) a guy wrote us: "Hi, I had looked at Tabbles in its earlier version and it just seemed like a gimmick. The new interface is really MUCH improved – so much that I bought it!".

Here the point is about the concept of improved: it seem that for most of the people a good interface is one they understand (or believe they understand) at first glance.

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).

I understand this is so for you, but given the questions we asked around (on the forum and outside) it doesn’t seem to be the case. We have 2 cases of people (office workers) who had to uninstall Tabbles as it "listens" to network drives that don’t really matter for them – causing the pc to slow down and making the network unaccessible…this should indeed be true for everyone working in an office environment: this is a "blocking" thing for them, meaning that if it’s not there, they can’t use Tabbles at all.

Equally, virtually everyone has been asking for the shared-tabbles since day one and we agree this is the most interesting upcoming feature of the software.

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.

We know this! And we’ll do some clean-up… it’s just not the top priority. 🙂

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 hear you, but:
— no one wants to hear about the fresh startup: people want solutions to their problems and they have to be easy to use
— we’ve been focusing in making the GUI as similar as possible to Explorer: you double-click into Tabbles and you get into them being presented a "virtual tree", the concept is very new but it’s "retro-fitted" to an old GUI concept. Believe when I say that we spent countless hours discussing about this… What we believe now is that had you seen Tabbles 1.4.5 today for the first time, it would have looked way more user-friendly than if you had seen Tabbles 1.3.0 or something (if this is correct, this means we’re on the right track)
— Tabbles is a tagging tool and offers other functionalities than Windows Explorer. One day (hopefully) it will do the same things as Explorer. But still our unique functionalities are the ones we’re willing to push.

I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m putting a wall between your needs our plans, but scheduling work is never easy and everyone would like us to develop his/her dream app. We’re trying to wrap-up everyone’s desires and try and go where the best balance of money/development time is – choices aren’t easy and we definitely need feedback. The point here is that this conversation happened already (as long as many others) on the forum and while I know everything going on here, you obviously can’t…

Btw: I’m uploading the 1.4.9 in a bit: there are some "+" next to the combinable tabbles, both in the body and in the tree… let’s see if this helps a bit.

Peace!

Andrea