Balsamiq Blog

8 Desktop Applications I couldn’t live without

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 25th, 2008 under Links — 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:

• Screenflow
• Adium
• Skype
• DropBox
• Skitch
• QuickSilver
• Typinator
• Gmail and Google Calendar (ok calling these desktop apps is a bit of a stretch)

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, Release Announcements — No Comment

Enjoy!

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Little updates here and there

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 19th, 2008 under Company / Business, Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — 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:

• ALL: moved the About dialog to the Help menu
• ALL: added a background color to the TextArea control
• Confluence / JIRA: added a javascript warning if you try to leave/close the Mockups editor without saving your changes
• ALL: you can now hold down CTRL while resizing or moving to temporarely turn off snapping
• ALL: added the ability to drag past the edges of the app to select and resize. This is worth another blog post: it took days, it’s not perfect and I’m not even finished (I’m missing auto-scroll on move), but the consensus is that what’s there is better than nothing. This was definitely NOT fun, look I even resorted to asking advice on StackOverflow!
• ALL: Dialogs now stay centered as you resize your editor window (this fixes an edge case in Google Chrome)
• ALL: you can now ESCape your way out of Quick Add.
• ALL: the app is now more respectful of your empty spaces. You can type spaces to make room for icons and they won’t get deleted. Same for empty rows in lists
• ALL: DataGrid now has text editing controls, so you can make the text smaller, centered, etc
• Desktop: added CTRL+L to toggle the UI Library

Bug fixes:

• Confluence, JIRA: added no-cache directives to work around IE7’s aggressive caching of the mockup’s XML data
• Confluence: now ignores carriage returns in the license key (this was bad, it would take down Confluence)
• Desktop (Windows): the open dialog now lists both XML and BMML files by default
• Desktop: removed leading “/” from PNG export confirmation dialog
• ALL: fixed an horizontal alignment bug in the Horizontal Curly brace control
• Confluence/JIRA: added /, \ and = to the illegal characters in the mockup names
• Desktop: “Save As…” automatically goes to the last folder you used (for real this time)
• ALL: fixed a bug with going back to “None” as the selection for List, TabBar and VerticalTabBar (now it works)
• Desktop: no longer adds .bmml.bmml.bmml…
• ALL: the mockup canvas now has a maximum size of 2880×2880. I had to add this because Flash cannot export PNGs bigger than that.

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, Release Announcements — 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!

— 3 Comments