Balsamiq Blog

Another small improvement: Selection in Menu and Tree

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 31st, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — 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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New File Extension: BMML

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 30th, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

After getting a nod from my superstar customers, I have changed the default file extension used by Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop from XML to BMML. It stands for Balsamiq Mockups Markup Language, and it’s still the same human-readable XML format you are used to (the file format didn’t change, only its name).

What’s in it for you? See for yourself (58 seconds, no-audio):

Now you can double-click on one or more mockup files and they’ll open…you guessed it, in Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop! No more cursing at Internet Explorer or Dreamweaver…no offense!

Plus now you get a nice little smiley-face icon for your mockup files, which should make them easier to spot if you have a very messy desktop like I do.

While I was at it, I also added a handly drag-files-to-Mockups-to-open-them feature, which you can see demonstrated in the video as well.

It’s important to note that you’ll still be able to load and save files with the XML extension if you’d like. In other words this change is backwards compatible.

I will be rolling out this BMML change to Mockups for Confluence and for JIRA as well in the next few days, which should help you disambiguate mockup attachments from the rest.

Oh, this should also help Steve Moyer and his Maven plugin, bonus!

So what are you waiting for? Install Balsamiq Mockups for Deskop 1.1.52 now!

Onward!

In case you are following, next week I’ll be focusing on improving the Mockups for JIRA alpha (I need your feedback!) and another little project I’ll tell you more about soon.

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New icons!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 29th, 2008 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

You asked for them, you got them! Sorry this took a little while. We (i.e. my lovely wife, the hand behind all of Mockups’ icons and UI controlsI) also re-drew some of the previous icons, which looked too jagged and rough (those on the right in the screenshot above).

The new icons are in the latest version, already live for your desktop or for Confluence!

If you need more icons, just ask for them in the GetSatisfaction thread and we’ll draw them too!

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Export your Mockups from the Command Line!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 27th, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — 5 Comments

Hi there, I just added a new feature to Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop, which I hope will help you integrate it in your workflow even more.

In short, you can export your UI mockups from the command line.

Here’s the syntax:

Balsamiq Mockups export <inputXMLFilePath> <outputImageFilePath>

exports the provided xml file to a PNG file

Balsamiq Mockups register <organizationName> <serialKey>

registers this Mockups copy with the provided serial key info

Balsamiq Mockups unregister

un-registers Mockups from this computer

You only need to register your copy once per machine, then you can export PNGs from your Mockups’ XML files whenever you need to.

The export process is near-instantaneous, and you should only see a quick “flashing” of the app.

Will you use this feature? What for? Email me and we’ll write a nice case-study blog post about it!

Many thanks for Steve Moyer for the idea, the support and the feedback during the implementation. He is building a plugin for the Maven build system which will allow the automatic generation of Mockup PNGs during the “site” phase. These PNGs can be referenced from other project documentation, or the Mockups can be viewed from an automatically generated gallery of thumbnails. Stay tuned for updates!

The new feature is already live in today’s Mockups for Desktop build. Go get it!

On a personal note, I loved building this feature because it took me back to my mostly-linux days of college…I love the Unix phylosophy of “many small, specific, well-written and flexible tools working together to achieve great things”…turning Mockups into a tool that fits in that ecosystem makes my inner geek very happy.

Onward!

P.S.Today’s build also fixes a few other issues: DataGrid headers are now properly gray, I added a Close All function, the editor shows up properly in large mockups, and finally the location of the last opened or saved mockup is remembered properly now.

— 5 Comments

 

 

 

Mockups for JIRA: getting close!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 25th, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups — No Comment

The video below has no audio. You can also watch the HD version of it on Vimeo.

As you can see, Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA is pretty close to becoming a reality.

The build is approaching beta-quality: if you’d like to help me test it, email me and I’ll send you a link with instructions.

On the licensing front, Mockups for JIRA is going to cost $799 per JIRA installation, regardless of what version of JIRA you are running. I think it’s a fair price, and I already validated it with some prospective customers. I’d still like to hear more opinions on ir, so please email me or add a comment if you’d like.

Also, if you have comments on the way I integrated Mockups on JIRA, let me know! I am not a JIRA guru so I might have missed out on some useful integration feature opportunities.

I was shooting to have a ‘for sale’ version at the end of October, but since I am early I might move that up to the end of September.

Exciting times!

Peldi

P.S.Once again, without Jonathan Nolen’s precious wiki docs, email and IM support, this product wouldn’t exist. You, my friend, are brilliant, and I thank thee!

UPDATE: Here’s another video on how to iterate on UI mockups with Mockups for JIRA. Let me know what you think!

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Faster faster faster!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 24th, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

The faster you are able to create your UI mockups, the happier I am.

In the last few days I made some improvements which should help you get your work done faster.

Here’s what you’ll get if you upgrade to the latest build:

• Scrollbar Inspector: another awesome Michael Matti idea. Here it is in action (39 seconds, no audio):
  
  The feature is available for the following UI control types: Accordion, Browser Window, Cover-Flow, Data Grid / Table, Dialog / Window, List, Rectangle/ Canvas, Tabs Bar, Text Area, Tree Pane and Vertical Tabs
• Resize multiple icons at the same time: an iron_Lung idea, demo below (18 seconds, no audio):
  
• Performance improvements; with the help of gregorE, Adam, Kristi, and iron_Lung, we narrowed down the performance problems some of you were having to being mostly caused by memory leaks, of which I found and fixed about 50.
• z-Ordering keyboard shortcuts: another iron_Lung request, you can now send to back and bring forward your controls with the familiar CTRL+SHIFT+[ (send to back), CTRL+[ (send backwards), CTRL+] (bring forward) and CTRL+SHIFT+] (bring to front) keyboard shortcuts. As with all keyboard shortcuts, these work best in the Desktop version.

This build also fixes some funky resizing issues with Tag Cloud, Data Grid, the Tree and the Menu Bar: now if you make the control “too small to fit the text”, you won’t see text “hanging outside the edges” any more, the text that doesn’t fit will simply become invisible. This fix came after painfully watching Patrick Sullivan Jr. of EditWeapon try Balsamiq for the first time and hitting the bug.

Notice something in common with all the updates above? Yes, they all came from suggestions from current and prospective customers. This means that if there’s something you don’t like or would like to see improved in Mockups, speak up! It will very likely get added quickly and if it’s a problem, I’ll drop everything I’m doing in order to fix it ASAP.

I have a few more Mockups-related announcements up my sleeve for the next few days, stay tuned.

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Lessons learned in Font Licensing

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 17th, 2008 under Company / Business, Mockups — 9 Comments

Hi there. If you have been following Balsamiq Mockups, you’ll know that a number of potential customers have been turned off by my choice of “Comic Sans MS” as the primary font in it. Not being “into fonts” myself, I had no idea that this font was so passionately hated by designers everywhere.

Aiming to please, I posted a survey here two weeks ago, in which I asked users which font they’d like me to use instead. The alternatives were Architect Small Block, Smiley, Graphite, Blueprint, Tekton, Komika Text and Chalk. I realize now that my decision to put up the survey was a rushed one. Let me explain.

The importance of Family

Mockups uses regular, bold, italic and bolditalic versions of Comic Sans MS. Of the 7 substitute fonts listed in the survey, only 3 (Graphite, Blueprint and Tekton) offer the four variations (a.k.a. the “family pack”) which I would need.

Now, this doesn’t automatically exlude other fonts since variations of those could be designed by the font authors, but still, that would take a considerable amount of effort and make the licensing price much higher (more on this later).

Font Licensing: welcome to the jungle

I had never given a thought to the fact that fonts are someone’s intellectual property, just like a book or a piece of software. Clearly, it makes sense: someone spent time and effort applying their creativity towards creating the font, and so they should be rewarded for it.

Unfortunately, from my outsider’s point of view font licensing is more of an art than a science. Look at the license for Architect Small Block and the one for Graphite, for instance. Wildly different, both in length, content and “spirit”: one says “Treat this font as if it were a book”, while the other seems adapted from Adobe’s other software licenses. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find a license document for Blueprint: myfonts.com sends me to fonts.com, which doesn’t show a license anywhere (if you see it let me know). So I tried to go to Monotype Imaging’s website directly, and a search for Blueprint shows you a link which sends you…guess where?…back to fonts.com! The circle is complete! Looking around Monotype’s website the closest thing I could find was this fonts for developers page, which shows promise but no EULA anywhere that I could find. The “buy fonts” link on Monotype’s site sends you back to Fonts.com (they must own both), so I gave up.

I did notice one commonality amongst all of the licenses that I could find: none permits embedding the font into an application (what I would need to do for Mockups). Some licenses are for installation on a single computer, some for up to 5 computers (and maybe some printers). The closest thing I could find to a mention of embedding is in Adobe’s license:

14.7.5 You may embed copies of the font software into your electronic documents for the purpose of printing and viewing the document. If the font software you are embedding is identified as “licensed for editable embedding” on Adobe’s website at http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/legal/embeddingeula.html, you may also embed copies of that font software for the additional purpose of editing your electronic documents. No other embedding rights are implied or permitted under this license.

Does my application count as one of my “electronic documents”? I doubt it. Would “editing your electronic documents” apply to Mockups? I doubt it, those are YOUR electronic documents, not mine. If you go to that link, you’ll see that only Tekton is on the “editable embedding” list. Also, from the rest of the license agreement it seems to me that Adobe really doesn’t want you to install/use the font on more than 5 machines, so I’d rather not risk it. I could contact them to find out, I guess.

I guess what I learned is this: fonts have licenses, each license costs a non-negligible amount of money, and volume/embedding licenses are not really common, or at least not common enough to be clearly spelled out in the EULAs. If I want to “do the right thing”, I would be entering unchartered territory.

Ouch.

The Survey Results

After such sobering thoughts, let me share with you the results of the survey so far:

There were 50 answers, which is not a huge number but not a tiny one either.

Things to note from the chart:

• Architect Small Block is a very nice font. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer a family pack and is licensed as a book. More on this later.
• Blueprint is a favorite but I cannot, for the life of me, find a license document for it
• Komika doesn’t have a family pack either
• 10% want to keep Comic Sans! More on this later too.
• Graphite is not in the “editable embedding” list (not that it matters that much)
• Tekton, the one font which has a border-line chance of making it (family pack + editable embedding license) is people’s least favorite font (it figures under “other” in the chart).

Architect Small Block: an excellent font by an excellent microISV

As the results were coming in and Architect Small Block (ASB for short) looked to be a winner, I investigated its licensing (it’s the one that says “treat this as a book” from eariler). Since I didn’t see an option for embedding the font, I looked for the font creator: QuietDesigns Inc.

After my Monotype Imaging experience, it was such a pleasant surprise to stumble upon a small, extremely-user-friendly-if-not-glitzy website. I just love a website with a face on it – it makes me trust them so much more. Plus the fact that QuietDesigns is a fellow micro-ISV made me like them even more.

So I wrote Ron an email asking about embedding options. We went back and forth as this was the first time someone requested such a thing, and his answers were thoughtful and honest every time. It’s so nice to be doing business with other small businesses, it’s a new thing for me.

Anyways, Ron gave me what I think is a fair quote for a basically unlimited-users license for his excellent font to use in Mockups…and by now you might have guessed it’s in the hundreds of dollars. Which, I repeat, I think it’s fair, when you compare it to other licenses (Graphite, for instance, is $29 per person).

Ron, is even willing to consider making a bold, italic and bolditalic version of ASB, but it would obviously take a few weeks and make the licensing price that much higher.

I told Ron that I would think about his offer, and that’s why I am writing this post.

What to do now?

The way I see it, I have four options in front of me:

1. keep using Comic Sans MS: sure not everyone likes it, but everyone HAS it, they already have a license for it (it came with the OS), and I don’t have to embed it (I don’t embed it today). This has the nice side effect of keeping my application’s size small.
2. go with Architect Small Block: this would mean spending thousands of dollars and waiting a few weeks: although I like the thought of supporting someone with great customer service and a good product, and if I had infinite money and time this would be my choice, I now wonder if it’s worth it. This would be the single biggest expense of Balsamiq’s history. Is it worth it…for a font? (no offense)
3. try to contact Adobe to see if I could get an “application embed” license for Tekton…your least favorite font…I have to admit that the thought of doing this gives me shivers
4. find another font! Is there a font out there which would work well with Mockups, has a family pack and is free (or cheap) to embed in commercial applications? I don’t know. Do you? If so, please oh please share what you know in the comments or email me about it! Please don’t send me a link to a “free font” site, I need to see a license for the font I end up using.

Of the four options above, if #4 is not possible, #1 (keeping Comic Sans MS) is obviously the most appealing to me. This would basically mean that I did the whole survey for nothing and set wrong expectations in my customer-base, which I’m not proud of. This is why I feel like the decision to run a survey was a rushed one.

Any other option I might have overlooked?

Comic Sans MS, superhero font?

The other day, as I was considering all of this, I ran into this video:

Will Comic Sans MS save the day in our case too?

The best comment wins a license

Until I figure out what to do about it, I am closing the survey.

As promised, the person with the funniest comment wins a license of Mockups for Desktop. Here’s an excerpt of the comment:

I hold Comic Sans in the sort of contempt that’s usually reserved for celebutards, cold sores, and Crocs. Not just because it’s ugly — though it’s certainly a toad among fonts. It is much worse than ugly: it is inescapable, having consumed the informal font space for a decade. (Which makes it the cane toad of fonts, I suppose.) All because, for millions of users, it’s the font that looks least like Times New Roman when trying to style text on their preloaded-with-Windows PCs. It’s installed, it’s already paid for, it sort of works, so what the heck.

No point blaming all those Microsoft users. But we’re designers, damn it, and we know and deserve better. Thanks for holding Mockups to a higher standard.

If you wrote this (and can tell me which font you suggested to use instead), email me and I’ll send you a license for whomever you choose.

In closing

Thanks for reading this far. Clearly I don’t really know what to do about this, and to be perfectly honest I’d like to close this “font issues” chapter sometimes soon: my TODO list is waiting for me!

If you have any words of wisdom on this matter, please don’t be shy and leave a comment, I’d appreciate it.

— 9 Comments

 

 

 

InspireUX and Mockups: get inspired!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 12th, 2008 under Mockups — No Comment

I am extremely excited to announce a new little feature of Balsamiq Mockups:

Clicking on the menu will simply open a new browser page to www.inspireUX.com.

If you don’t know InspireUX, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Catriona Cornett is truly doing an outstanding job putting together “quotes from people who truly understand the importance of a positive user experience“. I follow the site’s updates via Twitter and let me tell you, getting a new Tweet from her is such a treat each time.

I am extremely excited that Catriona agreed to let me link to InspireUX directly from Balsamiq Mockups.

One of the goals of Mockups is to help designers and developers to build better, more usable software. So the link to InspireUX right in the Help menu, IMHO, is a great addition.

Life is too short for bad UX! Thanks Catriona! Go InspireUX!

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$$ tag for Twitter ads? I want to pay for Twitter!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 11th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing — 11 Comments

I love Twitter and can’t remember life before it. It’s a whole new channel of communication, with its own dynamics and conventions. I like how it fits nicely between instant messaging and blogging, and I hope one day it will be as pervasive as the phone.

I have talked in the past about how I use twitter both for personal life and for advertising Balsamiq Studios, my small business.

I basically have an RSS feed of a Twitter search result page for some keywords related to my product (here it is), and when someone tweets something relevant, and I feel that my tool might help them, I tweet back with a link.

I have had an incredible success rate with this direct way to advertise my Mockups tool, but the approach has elicited both good and bad responses.

The problem is that my “direct advertising tweets” don’t look any different from my other tweets.

So, starting today, when I tweet back for business I will start my direct advertising tweets with $$, to clearly denote that the tweet is an ad. For example:

@foobar $$ here’s my prototyping tool: http://is.gd/NmM

I’m putting the $$ after the @username to keep with the current conventions.

Not only, I am ready to pay Twitter a dollar for each of my tweets that starts with $$ – Evan, just store my credit card info and charge me once a month, that’ll be fine.

Yes, I could easily “cheat the system” and save money by not putting the $$ signs at the beginning of my tweets, but if this convention takes off people who advertise without it will be treated as spammers. In other words, it’s the honor system coupled with karma points. In the interest of keeping a good reputation for my company, I’ll pay each time.

Plus, the fact that each $$ tweet costs a dollar will refrain me from sending too many ads and focus on the ones that I feel will be more effective, which means that users will only get a tweet for me if I really think my tool will help them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, as a consumer, I would love to be advertised to this way.

Sure big companies might start spending big money and ad-tweet lots of people, but I’m sure Twitter clients could be set up to ignore $$-tweets, or only the ones from certain people/companies.

What do you think? Will you start using $$ for your advertising Tweets too? Is there already a convention for this and I totally missed it?

[UPDATE #1: I love guruz's suggestion below of 1/2 of my dollar going to the $$-tweet recipient. Brilliant!]

[UPDATE #2: someone suggested setting up a separate account for $$-tweets, so that people who follow all @ replies don't get spammed with them. I think it's a great idea, so I am now going to use @balsamiqads for $$-tweets].

— 11 Comments

 

 

 

Recommended Mockups for Desktop upgrade

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 9th, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Today I finally had some time to dedicate to bug fixing and performance tuning.

Here’s a summary, roughly in order of importance

• the big one: in some instances, Mockups for Desktop wasn’t saving data to disk properly on “Close Mockup” – a customer ran into this today and it resulted in him loosing an afternoon of work. I feel horrible about it and gladly refunded his money, the first time this happened (luckily Paypal makes this very easy and at no cost).
• the Horizontal Curly brace text positioning bug that Michael reported. Man this was a pain, Flex doesn’t really deal well with wrapping text
• when you have a big scrolling mockup, the property inspector now will stay visible (you will no longer have to drag around to find where you left it)
• when you have a big scrolling mockup, the Quick Add feature will place controls where you can see them (thanks again Michael for the bug report)
• I made a performance optimization which I thought might make a big difference, but apparently didn’t. Still, the code is cleaner and I know for a fact that some a good amount of CPU cycles are no longer being wasted on measuring control dimensions over and over again.
• a second performance optimization made a big, noticeable difference: now importing mockups, pasting and ungrouping controls are all MUCH faster (I was wasting cycles in the way I selected the imported/pasted/ungrouped controls)
• In Mockups for Desktop, if you hit CTRL+W and there are multiple dirty mockups, you will only be prompted to save the one you are closing, not all of them
• In Mockups for Desktop, if you hit CTRL+Q or CTRL+W twice you no longer get the “are you sure” dialog twice (one on top of the other)

All the new builds are already live (Mockups for Desktop 1.1.29, Mockups for Confluence 1.1.26), I highly recommend getting them before you run in the “close doesn’t save” bug.

My apologies for not catching this sooner, I really do feel bad about it.

Performance tuning is a way of life more than a task, so I’ll keep digging. I also have lots more bugs to fix and little features to add, so it’s back to work for me!

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