One Dot Oh
Despite the fact that the terminology is from a long-forgotten era of packaged software, today Tabblo goes 1.0, meaning that we are officially taking the “beta” label off of the site’s logo and using a Sharpie to sign all of our names on the cages at the data center.
For us being out of beta is an important milestone, not because it implies that we are bug-free (we certainly are not), but because it means that we’ve reached a set of features and capabilities which we feel define the core Tabblo experience.
Just to recap:
Tabblo aims to be the best place online to put together photos, words, and template-driven customizable design for the purpose of telling stories that can be securely shared, collaborated on, and printed in innovative ways.
Over the past six weeks we’ve had the added benefit of an active community that has helped prioritize features, suggested improvements to core parts of the application, and even taken an active role in defining the future of our printed product offerings. We’d like to take a moment here to thank all of you and let you know how much we appreciate the help we’ve gotten thus far.
Now, on to some of the 1.0 highlights:
1. Prints & Frames: Though we did not originally set out thinking we would provide prints, you have asked for it repeatedly, and we’re listening. Since silver-halide printing is not an expertise of ours, we looked around for the best possible partner and settled on EZPrints as our preferred online partner (you can read more about EZPrints compared to other services here).
Additionally, we’re also launching framed posters at the 11×17 size which was also a popular and loud early request. You have three available options on the frame, and as we get up to speed, we will be adding more.
2. Better, Faster & Easier:
We’ve done a lot to improve the overall experience: from the new photo organizer to the rectangle template layouts to the new editor for swapping and resizing images– all the speed and stability improvements were all aimed at ensuring that tabblo composition was faster, easier, and more fun.
One special area of improvement worth mentioning is the uploaders; as Linus Torvalds once said, given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Having had users trying just about every kind of OS/browser/uploader combination has really helped to harden the uploaders and the upload process for all five of our current upload/integration options.
3. More ways to participate:
Our invitation machinery (and its associated privacy system) is rich and powerful, and a lot of you have been happy with the way that it keeps your photos and tabblos secure and visible only to your guests. But sometimes on the web, what you need is a private link that can be forwarded, pasted into documents, and shared in other ways without the overhead of a full authentication system. Our new “shareable links” are the answer to this; you can now IM them, email them (and have the email forwarded) while still feeling good about the privacy of your tabblos.
What’s next?
We’re very excited about what July is going to bring to Tabblo in terms of new collaborative features, so stay tuned to the blog and forums for announcements and news as to where development is going.
Happy tabbloing!