Ok guys, a little update about what we're doing (this will go on the blog too). Please consider
we're not signing the following list with our blood, so the list is subject to changes
(Uh, I've been writing for 2 hours now... I hope you won't fall asleep while reading and please excuse my typos but I'm too lazy to proof-read now 
)Yo brothas and sistas, we had a bunch of interesting requests, we wrote them all down and got them prioritized. Then we mashed the list along with our own list, and a third list came out. But of course we're still 2 guys (and 1/2) working from their living room/bedroom and as we get a cool idea or some cool input (which is also easy to implement) we can't resist implementing it. Therefore, a littl update about what's going on at Yellow blue soft right now.
- The first layer of the code for the
shell extension (from Windows, right click on a file and "categorize with Tabbles") has been written and it works fine. We need to make it look pretty and fix a couple of user-experience glitches.
What will happen (at least for the first months) is that when the quick-tag window from Tabbles will popup from the right mouse click. This window does currently look as if it was run over by a truck, but it's technically a little elaborated as it does nearly everything else that Tabbles does, therefore it would take a while to code something similar to come our from the Explorer shell. We're planning to release a beta with the explorer integration this week.
- The
auto-tagging rules should also make it in the next beta. This was pretty straight-forward to develop and we don't see any issue in the current implementation.
-
Outlook integration: this is the new entry from last week! Well, actually we've been thinking of this for a while, and recently we've been talking more about this since we had a couple of requests from you guys here in the forum. Maurizio's friend (Manuelo) gave him a couple of hints about how to implement this: it still needs to be researched but from a first glance it doesn't look too hard. Here we are open to suggestions on what the Outlook plugin should do and how
Note: we think to release the Outlook plugin only in the Business version of Tabbles and you regulars from our forum can get a heaaaaaavily discounted price on that
-
Freemium: at some point in the next weeks we'll also be launching Tabbles lite - a limited version of Tabbles with no expiry date. We are discussing about the limitation
here and any opinion would be highly appreciated
.
For Tabbles Lite we're planning a real launch with blog coverage and a tuned-up website...and this is where I'm looking into right now. Btw, in the first 2 months of sales we had roughly 1000 hits per month and sold some 45 licenses (most of discounted, grossing some 700$). The amaaaaaazing guy at
Balsamiq.com grossed 10k$ in the first 6 weeks of activity and they had
20k+ visits on their site during the same period.
We never reallied worried too much about press and coverage (at my old job I used to wear a tie, fly to the prospect, speak some German and get a distribution contract signed
) therefore we really think we need to increase the "hype" and the "awareness" at this point
- any hints on this is also sooooo welcome.
Ok, what next? I guess that our development to-do list would easily keep us busy until the next spring... plus, we often have ideas/requests for new features/fixes/improvements... I'm just gonna make a rough list here of what we plan to implement in the next months.
- Change the way Tabbles handles the disks,
moving to the WMI API. Maurizio researched the WMI recently and it was positively impressed by the size and the power of this API. Basically this modification will allow Tabbles to read (and store) each disk's serial number. This means that Tabbles will recognize each USB stick, removable HDs by their own serial numbers and not by the letters assigned to them by Windows each time you plug them in.
A sub-feature coming along with this release will be the management of the DVDs/CDs: we still have to discuss the design of the GUI, but the core of this feature will include the possibility to create catalogs of discs and search their content using the the Combine feature: after you find the files needed in Tabbles, when double-clicking on the file Tabbles will ask you "please insert the disk labeled 'Warez Collection #128'".
...and here comes THE FEATURE:- Tabbles network sharing: a set of features allowing you to share your tabbles with your colleagues/friends over the LAN (YEAH!)
.
Well, where do I start from? I guess we all agree that Tabbles would rock if it would allow you to browse through your colleagues/friends/flatmates file categorization and would allow them to browse through yours (given that you allow them of course, and some tabbles are shared while some aren't...). We're aware of this from day 0, and we also knew that things need to be built gradually and therefore we launched the single user versions first (the ones you have today) expecting to develop a "network version" next year with the target of transforming Tabbles into a real DMS and start making some real money
. From the very early days we've been considering to develop the application using a client-server structure...it seemed the more natural way for us to this.
A client-server version would require:1) a lot of code...2) a lot of testing, including beta testing on the real battleground (a medium-size company's network along with its ICT guys giving us nasty looks and threatening us to rip our hair off is anything wrong happened to their beloved SQL servers...).
3) a distribution network in order to promote, sell, install and mantain the whole toy.
- shit, it's getting cold in here, let me wear my wool-socks...ok, done -
Because of the points 2) and 3) we labelled the project as "megalomaniac for us right now" and postponed it to "as soon as we can afford it". Then, about a month ago, Maurizio wrote me a cryptical (or encrypted?) while he was on holiday in some place between Malaysia and Singapore, mentioning that
he an idea about developing a P2P version of Tabbles... my first answer was "hey, what a BS! And a BIG ONE! Do you want to put Emule into Tabbles?". A while later another friend came up with the same idea making a long of list of the pros of a P2P version over the Client-Server...and at that point things became a bit more clear and we officially embraced the intent of developing a P2P version of Tabbles.
Among the pros:
1) much less code is needed
2) testing can be done by basically anyone who's on a LAN: no server installation is required!
3) as no server is require, it would be much easier to deploy, to mantain and thus to sell. Plus, if 2 people on the same LAN are using Tabbles, the 2 Tabbles will sort of "find each other", adding a viral flavour to the blend...
Among the cons:
1) it won't work for big LANs with many PCs (let's say >50) as long as a lot of optimizations are done (not impossible to overcome though).
2) won't work over the internet... Maurizio knows a bit about this as he was researcjing something similar for his
Tennis videogame...still it's a large feature, needs a lot of thinking and we definitely need to develop it gradually.
Approximate and very-early specs would include:
- it would
initially work only on shared drives and not on the shared folders' of the user's pc. The reason is that initially we don't want to worry about having Tabbles to share folders, therefore we want to assume that the folder is shared already.
-
we'll need some privilege management: we know that we need some tabbles to be shared and some to be kept personal. And the user must also be allowed to read/browse/use the other users' "tabbling" (categorization) or not to do it, for the sake of sticking to a small amount of files. The trade-off with those kind of GUIS is between power and easy-of-use... any suggestion on what's needed and what not would also be very welcome (there are some in the forum already).
Cheers,
Andrea
