Hello there,

Thanks for your report and explaination. I’ve just tried Rainbow Folders myself – nice app btw – and I can’t see that Tabbles can not "see" the folder… we’ll work on this, until then you can "decolorize" the folder with Rainbow Folders and the folder will be there again.
You can change the folder’s icon by Properties > Customize – this works fine with Tabbles. 🙂

A.

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

hello there! Always happy to hear some constructive criticism 🙂

I do think the window which lists the files need a major overhaul, really (with a separation between files and available tabbles as the very first thing).

What do you mean? What is your problem with it? Please explain us 😮

Besides, if you want to go Microsoft standardized why do you have the user scroll horizontally?
mkayi

Well, the horizontal scroll is one of the standard ways that Windows Explorer offers… we’re planning to do more of course

Needed: A topdown list sortable by file name, created and modified date, size and so on (like, you know, in the product you now aim to mimick… ).

we know this too… it’s on our to do list (but it’s a lot of work though)

Right now, I can sort by date (cumbersome through a menu, not a coloumn header like in the MSExplorer), but I can’t see the dates, can I?

Yes you can! View > File view

All in all: once you make the decision to copy the Explorer you have to be at least as good as the Explorer so the user really feels that the ability to add tabbles to files comes as the icing on the cake. Right now, it’s a bit erm… half-assed. Is there a non-rude word for this? In german it would be half-hearted which is nicer, heh…

Yes, this is where we’re heading… the point is that even if it doesn’t seem so, Windows Explorer is a monster application, and recoding the whole of it would take time. Now, the question is not if, but only when, and more precisely, do you think it’s more important to have the column view or:

1) making Tabbles portable (so that it runs from a USB) – many people asked for this
2) better web-browser integration (with a bookmarklet)
3) manually excluding some disk – a looooot people asked for this
4) shared-tabbles (I don’t think I need to add anything here…) 🙂

So, the answer is: we agree on the path but the path is looooong. Patience, my young padawan, patience is the key for The Force©

"nefycee" wrote: instead of a vid will try again to explain

I would like to have a option to fade out/hide color groups the workplace.
Right-click on one of tabble of this group and I can chose "fade out all tabbles of this group"

ok, I get it now…
my friend, we won’t actively developed that part of the software for a while… we’ll write your idea down and keep it in the drawer for later 🙂

A.

"mrdna" wrote: Considering that, for me at least, the files can populate relatively slowly (a half sec to a full sec at the slowest) couldn’t this delay the display rather significantly? Make it act or look like a program hang?

I agree! 😮

Hello there everybody,

"mrdna" wrote:

…and this is precisely why I don’t use the nested tabbles – In addition to making the classic workspace rather useless in intuitive drilling into my info (following an idea thread) it also requires adding upwards of 5 (or more!) very useless tags to all my files. And yes, Maurizio, for me, and it sounds like how mkayi is using it, using the nesting function -does- make the workspace useless to our way of use and the negates the reason for using tabbles in the first place.

This was pretty much my exact argument when you implimented this version of nesting and why I’ve asked for a switch or some other way to allow the user to chose whether the parent-tabble is inherited, at minimum. In the workspace, have the tabbles break out by parent tabble, much like it does by color group or alpha.

Ok, let’s see if we get it right:

– what you like of the old main window is that you can have all the tabbles always visible and zoom/pan to have a better look over them.

– what you don’t like of the nested tabbles is:

1. * it reduces the usability of the old main window because you see only a portion of the total tabbles, and when you double click into one you’re brought to the file-window and to the tree.

* when you using the tree, you have to click into each node (tabble-father) in order to see its children, and this is a lot of work each time…

Did we get it right?
If so, what if we put a button in the tree that allows you to open all the nodes at once, or even better, one level at once? This way you would click once (or twice…) and have all the tabbles visible in the tree. I believe this would improve the situation and solve 50% of the problem. 😮 :geek:

I guess (please let me know if I’m wrong): that we could split the left 50% this way:

• * 25% = having the tabbles to group differently within the tree (alfabetical, color group etc.) – this may be done soon or later

• * 25% = the fact that by zooming/panning you feel you have way more control – this is more complicated for us…

What we’ve been thinking too is implementing a view mode in the old main window where you can see all the tabbles at once (regardless of their nesting) and get them grouped by color… this is also feasible but rather complex to implement therefore we can’t put in top of our roadmap right now… 😕

Hi Alexander

"ahajtin" wrote: Hi

I think this new interface is a big mistake 🙁

Previous idea with fast zoom in /zoom out above big field with grouped tabbles was MUCH, MUCH better than this ‘foldered tree’. Idea to make innovative software ‘secretary proof’ looks bad for me.

Of course it’s just my opinion.

Best regards,
Alexander Khaytin

I’m sorry to hear this… the reason that pushed us towards this redesign is that 95% of the people uninstalling Tabbles did it because they couldn’t find out how it worked. Therefore we moved to a more traditional design (also following the review we got from PcWorld which did harshly criticize our design choices).

We do indeed believe that this version works better and of course we’re expecting some "resistance to the change".

It would be really nice if you could try using this new version for a few days and get back to us again afterwarda… 🙂

Thanks,

Andrea

"mkayi" wrote: hi there,

guess: circled tabbles are tabbles with tabbles in them.

nope… circled tabbles are "combinable" – if you combine them what the tabbles already open you’ll get a non empty group.

"mkayi" wrote:
I admit I did not feel to comfortable with nesting tabbles. Do files added to child tabbles automatically inherit all of the parent tabbles? (which is the expected behaviour on my part)

What do you mean "inherit all of the parent tabble"? No, I don’t think they inherit anything… :-O

"mkayi" wrote: If I create tabbles according to my colour groups and put all the tabbles of those groups in there, does that mean that in the classic workspace the tabbles all disappear and end up in single tabbles with the name of my colour groups?

yes… we did forecast you’d have this problem… 🙁
this is quite a large usability shift. We need to find a solution to make everyone happy, but it won’t be easy…

"mkayi" wrote:
That would make the classic workspace less attractive as I would have to drill down into tabbles to find things I might not be thinking of when opening the app, you know?

Yes.. that’s a side effect of the thing. The good side of it is that if you didn’t know the old main window existed, you wouldn’t care and you would use Tabbles like you use Explorer today…

I’m really looking forward to hear more comments in the next days, I want to see how long it takes for you to get used to the new GUI.

Thanks,

A.