... versus Dragthing? - Pangea Software

Well, I wrote TabMeister because I wanted something cleaner and more Apple-esque than Drag Thing. Personally, I think DragThing is incredibly ugly and dated looking, so I wrote my own tab utility that was designed to look sorta iPhone-ish. So, it's really just a matter of preference, but in my case I hated DragThing enough to spend the time to write my own app.

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Sunday, June 17 2007 @ 08:56 AM PDT

... versus Dragthing? - Frank_Martin

Okay, I'll go along with that explanation. Tabmeister is leaner in the interface, and a lot faster and easier to setup than Dragthing.

I personally rely on some things in Dragthing that I don't want to give up, like the hot key to show/hide the Dragthing docks, and the powerful contextual menus on every dock item, and the desktop Trash, and the extensive color, appearance, label and font options, and the spring-loaded folders. These are just the settings I use and value, and that don't have an equivalent in Tabmeister; Dragthing had hundreds of other settings not in Tabmeister that I don't find useful, but someone else might. Dragthing is best for people who desire interface customization, in-depth.

But the clincher for me, and the reason I can't recommend Tabmeister to anyone at this time, is the fact that processor utilization for Tabmeister is running at 7.5 to 8.9 percent continuously on my machine, whereas Dragthing is using 0.5 to 0.7 percent.

Measurements shown are for when both applications are idle, i.e. no tab is clicked. Machine is a Powerbook G4 1.67 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, OS 10.4.10, Dragthing 5.8.1, Tabmeister 2.0.3. Apple's Activity Monitor was used to measure the processor utilization.

And when a tab is clicked, Tabmeister utilization spikes to about 11 percent and stays there as long as the tab is up. Dragthing utlization goes to about 3.6 percent and drops back immediately to the idle value even if the tab stays up.

My comparison was for Dragthing configured to display one dock containing 6 tabs. Tabmeister was configured exactly as the demo, with just 2 tabs.

I wouldn't give up ten percent of my processor power for any interface enhancement whatsoever-not even if you paid me the shareware fee. Feature bloat may be sidestepped, but bloated processor usage is insidous. In this case, the more feature-laden product is also vastly more efficient, at least on my rig.

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Friday, July 06 2007 @ 11:26 PM PDT

... versus Dragthing? - Deephouse

On my Mac Mini core 2 duo TabMeister uses between 0,10 and 0,60% idle and between 2.2 and 3.8% when opening a tab. This is in demo mode and with just one tab with three Word files in it and a demo tab called bling.
So (at least in demo mode) the Intel code seems more optimized than ppc code.

I find the appearance of the tabs plain ugly though. Colors look really washed out (no matter how bright a color you select), font color can't be adjusted and the black line around the tabs can't be adjusted either (let alone removed). If the developer could fix the color issue and provide us with these options I would be very pleased. Looks aside, the idea behind this app is excellent and it functions well, it just looks terrible.

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Thursday, October 04 2007 @ 06:26 AM PDT

... versus Dragthing? - Frank_Martin

I just tried Tabmeister on my Intel mac and found processor utiliization the same as you reported. So, Tabmeister is efficient on intel macs, contrary to my earlier report concerning PPC macs.

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Sunday, May 18 2008 @ 07:59 PM PDT

... versus Dragthing? - pvonk46

"i-Phone ish"... well I guess it's all a matter of taste. I'd use the description: klunky-ish.

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Friday, July 06 2007 @ 11:02 AM PDT