One of the constant trade-offs we find ourselves making here at Tabblo is between power and simplicity. Power is usually related to finer layout/style/content control and is something we achieve by giving you more knobs to turn. Simplicity is often (though not always) the exact opposite— removing choices so that the whole experience of making stuff online feels more approachable.

Another way to think about simplicity that does not put it at odds with power is to replace the word simple with the word light as in lightweight or lightness. When an authoring experience feels lightweight it is more pleasant, enjoyable, and likely to be repeated more often with better results. And best of all instead of thinking of the whole experience as “make it simpler by taking out options,” you can think of lightness as “make it lighter by pushing the advanced options deeper into the guts and exposing just enough to make most people happy.” Interactive designers call this “progressive disclosure” and as a design pattern it is something that has been a little overdue here at Tabblo.

Today, we’re launching a new make process (see image) that collapses a few steps into the main editor window. This not only makes the overall experience lighter but it also lets you see your layout and style changes in-situ. And lastly, should you start with an online webpage and choose to turn that into a poster or book, you can without having to start over.

So get playing with the new lightness, and as always, send us all of your thoughts by commenting over at Tabblo Issues.

Ok, I promise that this is the last post related to browsing content, ratings, etc. for a while. But this feature is cool enough to blog about.

Ned spent Saturday working on a way to navigate the site by people’s favorites list, and we’ve just pushed it live. In a nutshell what this does is let folks see who has marked a tabblo as a favorite and what else they’ve marked. It is very “web 2.0″ in that the new navigational overlay takes advantage of a gesture that you are making for yourselves (bookmarking something as a favorite) and uses it to provide a virtual tour for your fellow tabbloers.

We had discussed this feature months ago as a possible replacement for ratings but it was not until last night when I saw it on a staging copy of the site that I realized how much more powerful it can be. Give it a go by starting at any of my favorite tabblos.

One final note: since we make people’s favorites lists public (though the tabblos on those lists are not necessarily visible to everyone), this new way of navigating the site does not reveal any information that wasn’t there before. What Ned has done is expose it in a much more digestible format.

Have fun.