Announcing Tabaway

Every morning, I would open up my RSS reader and go through all of the articles and YouTube subs. I'd open the ones that interested me the most (my time is limited, after all), and then, the problem began:

You see, I like to watch stuff on my iPad next to me while I work on my desktop/laptop. I also like to read articles on my iPad. In the past, I used Safari exclusively, so I'd just drag and drop all of the tabs in a group, and then do the tab overview thing on the iPad and arrange them in order that I want to watch and read as they conveniently look like tiles. Easy.

However, since I don't use Safari anymore, I've found this method no longer works. Now I primarily use Zen on my computer, and I use Brave on my iPad. All of the sync stuff that I found went through servers I couldn't 100% trust (I don't 100% trust Apple either, which is why I stopped using it), and they didn't show a tab grid view. They showed only a list view. This is annoying to me as I'm a rather visual person when it comes to tabs.

Another annoyance with tabs is that when you have a ton of tabs open, you're using all of your memory, and you never see what is open. Stuff just gets buried in a tab line with compressed letters along the top (or side) of your browser. You just start to ignore it and never deal with it. Then, things that are important are hard to find and you never see what you're supposed to be looking at next. Having 50 or 100 tabs open, or even more, just becomes an endless blur of things to forget.

That's why I initially created Tabaway. Now, I send all of my open tabs with right-click "Send to Tabaway" and they land on the server. There, I can drag them into visual groups on the boards, make different boards, have them in grid or list view, and even mind-map things. It's become a complete organizer for most things for me. I can also create notes on the fly (even on my phone on the Tabaway page), and have todo lists in them displayed on the page, and more. I can divide the page into as many columns as I want, resize the groups across as many columns, colour them, make Kanban boards, and a lot more than that. It's become my digital archive, my "what's next?" app, and even my sharing app. Yes, I can even share boards with other members and even publish things publicly if I find them to be interesting. I can also archive articles which I want to save for later, and it's searchable, taggable, and can include my own AI API key, or none at all.

And what's awesome is: I don't forget what tabs are open or where they are. I can see little icons of them with pictures. Visually, it's entirely different than a line of forgettable grey tabs.

And there's even more. But you'll have to see it for yourself. Right now, because it's beta, it's completely free. I'm limiting the sign-ups for the moment, but there's a queue if you missed out on this week. There's also a forum where you can post feedback, bugs, and even a suggestion/wish list - for participants only.

One thing I should also mention is that it's an .eu domain because I like the protections that the EU gives to its users. That means that the site is fully GDPR compliant. You can download your data completely with one click, and you even have a curl command which you can use to back up regularly anytime you want. And, if you don't like it, you can instantly delete your own account and everything will be gone. Your data is your data. Just as I moved off of iCloud services because I no longer trusted them, I don't want to put others in the same hellish position which I went through when I had to get everything off of their servers.

So, give it a try if it interests you and please do post on the forum if you have any thoughts and/or feedback, or bug reports. I'm definitely eager to see how others feel about it.

Please do keep in mind that this is a one man shoestring operation. I'm doing my best. If something breaks, please let me know but you don't have to yell at me to get me to understand that it's important to you. It's important to me too. :)

– N.

P.S. There's a ton of easy to understand stuff in the Help page, so please check it out! :)