Balsamiq Blog

Bootstrapping a Micro-ISV, Exposed

Balsamiq Mockups Page on Facebook

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 9th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Mockups — No Comment

Hi there, just a quick note to let you know that I just created a Balsamiq Mockups page on Facebook.

Become a fan and meet other people who like Mockups as much as you do! :)

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New Product: Mockups for JIRA Personal

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 7th, 2008 under Business, Company, Mockups — No Comment

I know I know, it might not be the smartest thing to release a new product every day, but I’m too excited to sit on this one.

The news: if you are running a free JIRA 3.13 Personal License, you can now make it even better by adding the new Mockups for JIRA Personal for just $149.

The license can be used exclusively on JIRA Personal, and is good for 3 users. It also comes with 3 personal licenses for Mockups for Desktop.

So now you can have a killer JIRA environment for yourself or your little startup, all for the price of less than 2 Mockups for Desktop licenses.

The build and the shopping cart are already live, so what are you waiting for? Go get Mockups for JIRA Personal now, and turn yourself into an agile software powerhouse! :)

Many thanks to Andreas Knecht of Atlassian for providing me just the API I needed to make this possible. Atlassian really understands how to write good platforms and how to treat their ecosystem right, they keep impressing me more and more! Good job guys, the first round of drinks at AtlasCamp is on me!

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New product: Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 5th, 2008 under Business, Company, Mockups — 4 Comments

Hi there. Less than a month since shipping Mockups for JIRA, I have some more exciting news to share.

In case you didn’t know, XWiki (xwiki.org) is both a generic platform for developing collaborative applications using the wiki paradigm and a set of products developed on top of it.

The excellent XWiki Enterprise, for instance, is a full-featured, highly usable and really powerful wiki. Oh and did I mention that it’s open source, free software? :) If the words “open source wiki” make you uncomfortable, don’t worry: XWiki is a mature product - the  first release was in 2003, can you believe it? - and it’s backed by XWiki SAS, a Paris, France-based company that offers support, training, hosting, consulting and custom development around the platform - here’s a sample of XWiki-powered projects.

So it is with great pleasure that I am announcing the immediate availability of Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki, the latest version of Balsamiq Mockups.

You can download it, test it and if you wish, buy it today!

Quick and dirty Screencast

I suggest watching the video in HD and going full-screen, it’s so much better! Here it is as well.

Benefits of Mockups for XWiki

“Mockups for XWiki brought us the power of two great tools to put our

customer and the project team on the same page.” - Luis Arias, Pilango

Using a wiki for software or web site design makes your team more productive. Add the ability to create, edit and embed UI Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups and you’ll save even more time and money. On top of that, with quick and easy iterations, your software or web site’s usability will be much higher, resulting in happier customers and ultimately more sales.

Mockups for XWiki is tightly integrated with XWiki: the UI mockups stay with the wiki page, are versioned and you can specify who in your organization is allowed to edit mockups and who isn’t.

Always wanted Mockups but couldn’t afford a wiki?

XWiki is free! With all the money you are saving on the wiki software, you’ll certainly be able to afford Mockups for XWiki, right? :) Licenses start at $900 for a 25-user, perpetual license. That’s only $36 per user!

Licenses come with a year of free support and updates: see here for full details.

I’m sold, what do I do next?

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me via email, IM, etc.

Special Thanks

Most of the development for this product was done by Luis Arias, a rock-star developer of Colombian origin living in France who happens to have joined XWiki’s founder Ludovic Dubost as employee #1 back in 2005. Luis has since moved on to start Pilango, a lifestyle company focusing on crowdsourcing applications, but his deep knowledge of the XWiki platform and his passion for high quality software made working with him a real pleasure. Luis was the first contractor I ever hired, and I’m afraid he has spoiled me! :) Luis has already used Mockups for XWiki for one of his personal projects in a coporate setting with great success, and is interested in working on collaborative design projects using Mockups for XWiki.

I would also like to thank Guillaume Lerouge and Pascal Bouche from XWiki SAS: it is thanks to them that I can now boast about being an “XWiki technical partner“. I am looking forward to working with them and everyone at XWiki in the future.

On a personal note, building this 4th version of Mockups has been a great project for me. Working with someone else after three months of being by myself was quite refreshing (I missed the human interaction!), and I am looking forward to doing that more…stay tuned. OK, back to Image Upload, Choose your Font and Printing Support! :)

Peldi

Wait a minute: what about Twiki? Wasn’t that next on your list?

Well, I’m glad you asked! :) I have had “Mockups for Twiki” on my TODO list for a long time, mostly because a friend at a very large tech company told me that if I ported Mockups to Twiki his company might buy it. Recently I looked into the licensing for Twiki (and MediaWiki, and Mindtouch Deki Wiki), and they are all open source applications released under the GPL license. The GPL license has a clause in it which might be interpreted in a way that forbids developers from selling proprietary plugins like I do. It’s a gray area, and unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer on the subject (here’s one, here’s another, here’s some legalese, here’s a controversy…). Because of the grayness of this area, I have decided to put ports of Mockups to Twiki, MediaWiki and Deki Wiki on the back burner for the time being, at least until I after I investigate the question and its risks fully with my lawyer.

You’ll notice that I have removed mentions of Twiki from this web site for now…but you never know, it might come back one day! Stay tuned for updates.

I have waited until Mockups for XWiki was ready to announce this so that if you like Balsamiq Mockups and open source wikis, you now have an option! XWiki is still open source and free, but it’s released under LGPL, which is more commercial-plugin-developer-friendly. :)

Onward!

[Update: you can now read Luis's blog post about this and the XWiki partnership announcement as well.]

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A small enhancement: Background Transparency

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 2nd, 2008 under Mockups — 5 Comments

Hey there. Just a quick post to show a new little enhancement I just added.

You can now set the transparency level of the background color for the Tree, the TextArea and most importantly the Canvas/Rectangle control.

This is especially useful for the Canvas/Rectangle control, so that you can now, for instance, create a multi-select list by just overlaying a semi-transparent green rectangle with no border over a List control (see picture above).

Small feature, small UI footprint (just a slider next to the color-picker), 15 minutes from start to finish, hopefully big impact: love it!

The new builds are all live, so get them now!

Unrelated: I’m gearing up for a big announcement on Monday, I can’t wait! ;)

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500 customers!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 1st, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Business, Company — 6 Comments

I just sold a license to my 500th customer!

That’s a much bigger number that I expected to reach in such a short time (it’s been less than 3 and 1/2 months since I launched), but so far I don’t feel that it has impacted my ability to provide customer service at the level I want to (here are some quotes, I have more to add).

Some of the customers you might be familiar with:

  • the US Senate
  • Microsoft Mac Business Unit
  • Intuit
  • Adobe Systems, Inc.
  • Autodesk
  • DropBox
  • Atlassian
  • Xerox Corporation
  • US Airways
  • e-MDs
  • PR Newswire
  • Wells Fargo Bank
  • Warwick Business School
  • Iowa State University
  • Newcastle University
  • I Love Rewards Inc.
  • Directi
  • Brunner
  • Fuel Interactive

I am also very happy to have donated over 125 licenses to do-gooders so far. Some names you might recognize include:

  • Kiva
  • WWF Australia
  • Harvard University
  • Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
  • The Indiana Foster Care Adoption Association
  • LDS Church
  • Rady Children’s Hospital
  • GoSustainable
  • Penguin’s “World Without Books” program
  • Boy Scouts of America
  • KQED / Quest
  • Amnesty International NL

(a longer list is on my customers page)

I also donated over 140 licenses to bloggers and mavens, and it’s definitely paying off: Mockups has been reviewed 233 times so far!

:)

Ok, back to work, so much to do, so little time. Onward!

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8 Desktop Applications I couldn’t live without

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 25th, 2008 under Uncategorized — 2 Comments

I should really be doing something else right now, but I wanted to get this out.

I think it’d be fair to say that I use “the cloud” and web apps more than anyone I know. Still, there are still some desktop applications that I use all the time, and cannot imagine a future without them.

Here are 8 desktop tools that make my work so much easier:

Interesting enough, I just realized that they all sit happily next to each other on my Mac’s menu bar!

Now that is one good looking collection of great software! :)

If you helped create one of those apps in any way, I thank thee.

One of these days I’ll also post a list of web apps that I rely on or that I really admire, if people are interested.

Ok, back to work!

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Added 7 New Icons

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 24th, 2008 under Mockups — No Comment

Enjoy!

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Little updates here and there

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 19th, 2008 under Business, Company, Development, Mockups — No Comment

Hi there, sorry for not blogging for a while (a whole 10 days!), but I’ve been pretty busy with both Balsamiq work and life in general: after 3 months “on vacation” traveling around Italy, real life is starting here in Bologna: we are buying furniture, unpacking boxes, dealing with immigration for my American wife (so fun!)…plus our little one started school last week, talk about milestones! :)

Anyways, a quick update to list the improvements and bug fixes I made since the last “update” post of August 31st:

Feature improvements:

Bug fixes:

So if you haven’t upgraded in a while, maybe today is a good time to do it? Download and install Mockups for Desktop, for Confluence or for JIRA now! ;)

Business Update: has it really been 3 months already?

Things are still going really well for Balsamiq. Today is exactly the 3-months mark since launch, and Mockups keeps getting rave reviews and tweets. Sales are growing nicely, and the combined income from the 3 different products makes for some exciting variations week by week. I’d love to share more but I promised I’d save it until revenue reaches $100K, and I’m only half-way there. Oops, did I say too much? ;)

What’s next

Two other BIG things are going on:

  • I am very close to announce the port of Mockups to another wiki platform. Stay tuned for more, I’m excited about it!
  • I have started implementing the “image upload” feature, a.k.a. the #1 most requested feature. Wish me luck! :)

Thanks for reading this far and have a great day!

Peldi

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Mockups For JIRA: now shipping!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 9th, 2008 under Mockups — 3 Comments

I am thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA, the latest version of Balsamiq Mockups.

You can download it, test it and if you wish, buy it for just $799.

Quick and dirty Screencast

I suggest watching the video in HD and going full-screen, it’s so much better! Here it is as well.

Benefits of Mockups for JIRA

“Editing with Mockups for JIRA saves a lot of back and forth and makes the remaining back and forth so much more productive.” - Adam Wride, Advanced Process Designs

If a picture is worth 1000 words, how many words is a UI Mockup worth? Whether you’re using JIRA as a bug tracking, project management, or support tool, or all of the above, Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA will add the ability to visualize UI concepts quickly and easily, reducing churn, improving your team’s productivity and overall increasing the “communication bandwidth” between your JIRA users.

  • Be Agile: JIRA has already sped up your development considerably. Mockups allows anyone, technical or not, to jot down feature ideas quickly and easily. Add a UI Mockup to a new feature issue and improve the chances it will get built!
  • Improve QA/Dev Relations: Issues bounce back and forth because plain text is not enough to convey what’s wrong. A screenshot helps, but sometimes what you really need is a new UI variation.
  • Great for Beta Programs: Your beta testers live inside your product day in and day out. Let them contribute to it visually via Mockups and make your software as good as it can be.
  • Crowd-source! You get it. Transparency is good for business. Empower your customers even more buy giving them the ability to show you how they think your software should behave. You’ll be amazed by the wisdom of the crowds!

Feature Tour: Adding a UI Mockup to a JIRA Issue

To add a UI Mockup to a particular JIRA issue you simply click on the “Add/Edit UI Mockup to this issue” link:

You will be taken to the Mockups Editor, which you may already know from testing it on this web site or the desktop version. Here’s a quick video reminder of how fast you can create mockups with it:

When you are happy with your mockup, you simply go to the Mockup menu:

and select “Save and Close” (also note the “Save as New Mockup” menu item, which is exclusive to Mockups for JIRA. More on that below).

You will be prompted to name your mockup, and the software will auto-generate a simple date-based name for you, which is handy when you have many mockups on the same issue:

You can just hit enter to accept that name or give it whatever name you wish.

You will be taken back to the issue:

Notice how the UI Mockup is now attached to the issue, both as an image and as a bmml data file (BMML is the flavor of XML that Mockups uses). Also notice how Mockups for JIRA has added a comment to the issue for you, saying “Worked on UI Mockup: mockup name“. This means that if any of your co-workers is watching the issue, they’ll get an email notification to check out your new work of art. :)

So that’s the basic workflow of creating a new mockup for an issue. It gets better!

How to edit / iterate on Mockups

Say you want to tweak an existing UI mockup or create a new mockup as a variation of an existing one. The workflow is simple. Click the “Add/Edit UI Mockup to this issue” link again:

This time you will be presented with a dialog like this one:

You will then be able to either start from a blank canvas or edit an existing Mockup from the ones already attached to the current issue.

To simply iterate on the same mockup, you just select “Save and Close” from the Mockups menu, to create a new mockup variation, you select “Save as New Mockup” instead.

If you select “Save and Close”, you’ll have a chance to enter an optional comment about your edit:

As the dialog says, if you leave the field blank no notifications will be sent. Otherwise your comment will appear on the Issue’s comments list, and watchers will be notified.

That’s it! Couldn’t be simpler right? ;)

Administration Interface

Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA has a simple interface to register your serial key and to keep track of your support period. Simply go to the ADMINISTRATION tab and notice the “Balsamiq Mockups License” link on the left:

This will take you to the licensing screen, which looks very similar to JIRA’s licensing page:

That’s it!

I’m sold, what do I do next?

You can download Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA and take it for a test drive. The software is fully functional, but until you register you’ll see a big “Balsamiq Mockups Demo” watermark on the mockups you generate.

If you are ready to buy, here’s the link! Mockups costs $799 per JIRA installation, regardless of what version of JIRA you are running.

Special Thanks

As usual, without Jonathan Nolen and Richard Wallace’s help from Atlassian this product wouldn’t have been possible. I also wanted to thank Adam Wride and Bill Quintrell from Advanced Process Designs for providing me with enormously useful feedback during the last phases of development…Mockups for JIRA 1.0 is so much better because of their ideas.

On a personal note, this is a big milestone for me. It shows that my strategy of building Web Office Plugins and porting them to multiple platforms is not just talk! We’ll see if it pays! :)

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Another small improvement: Selection in Menu and Tree

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 31st, 2008 under Development, Mockups — No Comment

Hey there, the title pretty much says it all, but here’s a picture too: :)

I also fixed a bug with Mockups not showing up on startup when you used it on a secondary monitor and don’t have it plugged in when you launch it again - an edge case, but pretty bad if it happens to you. :)

Get the latest versions (for Desktop or Confluence) if you want these updates!

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