Balsamiq Blog

Bootstrapping a Micro-ISV, Exposed

Looking for Mockups 1.5 testers

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 20th, 2008 under Mockups — 5 Comments

Hi there, I am approaching release quality for Mockups 1.5, and am looking for volunteers to test the pre-release version.

If you are interested, simply go to the Next Release Preview page and download the Desktop version or try the web version. That page also contains a list of new features and improvements coming in 1.5 (I’ll keep updating it as I add stuff).

I will add Confluence, JIRA and XWiki versions to that page as well later today.

For feedback and bug reports, simply use the GetSatisfaction forums as always.

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it! I hope this will be an exciting, solid release.

— 5 Comments

My thoughts on software piracy

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 19th, 2008 under Company / Business, Development / Technical — 30 Comments

A fellow software entrepreneur emailed me today with this question:

My question is, as I am trying to get an application of mine built in AIR, and it is commercial software, with features disabled that I want enabled after entering a license key…. since AIR sends out your whole SWF file that can easily be decompiled, what do you recommend doing to protect your IP since it’s basically being given away free with every download? It could also be easily cracked I assume.

What he is referring to is the fact that Adobe AIR application files are really in essence simple Flash movies (SWF files), zipped up. SWFs are, and have always been, fairly easy to decompile, which means that you can run the SWF through a piece of software which will spit out the original source code for the application (what he refers to as “your IP” in the question).

He suggested I answer in a blog post, so here it is.

My short answer is this: I don’t do anything to protect against decompiling, and I’m not worried about it.

The following is my current thinking on software piracy and what to do about it. These are just my current views, I don’t claim them as great ideas of my own. It’s just what I have learned so far, from different people, books, blog postings, etc.

Also, I realize that the rise of SaaS might make this less relevant in the future, but who knows…I think the future is hybrid, we’ll see.

The software buyer/hacker spectrum

I don’t like generalizing, but here it goes. I believe there are 3 main categories of software users when it comes to purchasing software versus stealing it: “those who’ll buy”, “those who might buy” and “those who will never buy”.

I the pie chart below I refined it a bit to 5 categories, and since I don’t know how big they really are, I intentionally made all the pieces the same size, except for the yellow one, which I believe is the biggest one:

Let me describe each piece before discussing how I approach each one.

At one end of the spectrum are those who will never spend money on your software. This category includes actual criminals who will steal your SW to repackage it and sell it, high school kids who like to show off their hacking skillz, and also very legitimate and respectable entities like the Free Software Foundation others who simply believe software should be gratis (the strikethrough is due to a mistake of mine in confusing free as in speech vs free as in beer. My bad, I respect the FSF!).
Then there’s a piece of the world population who simply cannot afford to spend money on your software, or at least not a lot. These people probably don’t feel great about using cracked versions of your software, but they do it because they need it and cannot afford what you are charging for it. In other words, they have bigger problems to deal with.
I think the majority of people in the world fit in the yellow (gray?) area in the middle. They’ll use pirated software if it’s easy to get, but will pay for it otherwise. The more expensive the software, the more these people will shift towards the red pieces.
Then there’s a piece that only pays for software because they fear getting caught stealing it. I think this pie includes a big chunk of businesses too.
The last piece is the nice guys, the honest people who pay for what they use, pay all of their taxes, etc.

I try to please each segment of the population with a different approach:

for the criminals: you can’t beat them on technical grounds, just forget it. If people want to crack software, they will (code obfuscation, call-home schemes or not. These guys write decompilers before breakfast). The way to deal with this is to have a nice End User License Agreement on your site as well as a Terms of Use document. Make sure that each download link says “I agree” on it, and basically give people the impression that you have done your homework, have a lawyer and are not some rookie waiting to be taken advantage of. Oh, and do keep a good lawyer handy to help you if the time comes. If you find out that someone is selling your same product under a different brand, I believe that a strongly worded letter from your lawyer might go a long way…then again, who knows. But as I will explain later, this doesn’t matter that much.
for the hackers: again, don’t try to beat them with crazy encryption schemes, because they are better than you: what you consider a nuisance to code is their passion. My approach is this: try not to make enemies and don’t give them a challenge. If you are perceived as “a nice company”, the likelihood you will be targeted by hackers is lower (I wonder how many Windows viruses were created because of MS’s arrogance and offensive remarks about linux over the years). This is, in small part, why I give so many licenses away to non-profits and do-gooders of all kinds. Also, if the software is cheap to start with, has a free version available, and the license key looks fairly simple to hack, why bother hacking it? I believe these are all factors that contribute to why only 16 people have Googled “balsamiq mockups serial” so far (in over 8,800 search-generated-visits).
for the “I believe software should not be paid for” crowd…just give them the software for free! I am a fan of OSS, and though it doesn’t make sense for me financially to go that route, I like to contribute by offering free versions of all my software to open source projects. Plus it’s not like they would pay for it anyways…
for those who can’t afford it: offer a fully functional but “somewhat uncomfortable” version of your software for free. This way they’ll be able to use the software (some) and not even bother looking for a cracked version of it somewhere. This is what I do with the Mockups demo on this site. It nags you every 5 minutes, but you can dismiss the nag and keep working. You cannot save mockups to file from the software, but you can export the XML and save it in a text file, only to re-import it later. In short, it’s a bit of a pain, but you can use it. It’s a fine line: you want to give enough away to be useful, but you want to make it annoying enough that people will rather buy the full version, for convenience or for added features. Oh, and give the full version away to those in this category who ask you directly, in exchange for a promise to spread the word about it. Again, it’s not like you’d get their money if you had stricter protection…
then we have the yellow guys. These are who your licensing code should be designed for. You want to shift as many of these as possible towards the green side, not the red side. Here’s what I do: I have a license key that’s fairly simple to read or type (it will be something more or less like this made up one: eOLi0odswsqklKz/C36lOzM0srD9E0MjIxNjM3MgCBGQw3). The key alone doesn’t unlock the software, it needs your full name as well (it’s encoded in the key and the two have to match). The size and format of the key are important because making it too long or hard to deal with (like having them download a license file from your servers than placing it on a specific directory, or having the software “call home” on launch) would reduce the usability of your software and give this kind of user the impression that you really don’t think they should be trusted. The fact that the key has a name in it is a big psychological deterrent to sharing it. If I found a key on a cracked site, I’d be able to immediately trace it back to the owner. I believe this, coupled with the accessible price of my software, is enough to sway most of the “yellow area” people in the buying direction.
The “embed the name in the key” trick works well for those who buy the software because they fear getting caught with a cracked copy as well. Another thing to do here could be to embed the key (and thus their name) in every file that your software generates. I don’t do this, but I know some do.
for those of you who pay for my software based on your moral values, I thank thee, and wish you happiness and prosperity. The world needs more of your kind.

To sum it up:

give lots away
have a simple key with a name embedded in it
relax

In the end, the code doesn’t matter that much!

A couple of months ago I was explaining to my dad how I try to be as transparent as possible, sharing my revenue numbers, designing my features in the open, blogging about it all, etc. I believe it builds trust in Balsamiq and frankly I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.

At the end he asked me: “Ok, I think I get it. But what is “your secret”? What’s the thing that, if someone stole or copied from you, would mean catastrophy for your company?”

I thought about it for a second, and I realized that there isn’t a single thing.

Mockups is a simple product, a good coder could create a clone of it in a couple of months starting from scratch. Someone could post a crack for my licensing algorithm on a BitTorrent site today.

I don’t think either would spell catastrophy for Balsamiq.

People buy products from companies they trust and respect, and who treat them well in return. People buy software if they know that the people behind it care for your success while using it. They want to see the software improved continuously and with a passion. They care about a sensibility for usability and attention to details.

These aren’t things one can steal.

I believe Balsamiq is successful so far because of all that I do every day: the site, the blog, the promotions, helping customers, listening to their ideas…and of course improving the product with new features and bug fixes. It’s one big puzzle, every piece contributes to the whole (what Geoffrey Moore calls “The Whole Product Model”).

Some resources

I am a huge fan and avid reader of the Business of Software forums, a community of small software vendors. Here are some links on this topic taken from there. As you can see, none of my ideas is original or revolutionary, though there is some debate about these topics…

Here’s another article, which I have only scanned quickly but seems in line with my views: Piracy and Unconventional Wisdom

Something funny

While I was writing this post I thought about checking if Mockups had in fact been cracked without my knowledge and was available for download somewhere.

So I did some research, and while “The search of balsamiq was not successfully” [sic] on Astalavista , I did find something on TorrentTractor. Check it out, one of the files is 833Megabytes! Now, the original Mockups for Desktop file is less than 3Mb right now…I pity the fool who downloads almost a Gig of crap, likely full of viruses, trojans and who knows what…I couldn’t have done a better job at polluting the hacker sites myself!

In conclusion

I want to leave you with a quote from Pete Santangeli, which I think sums it all up nicely: “the best way to slow down your competitors is to give them your source code”.

Brilliant!

Peldi

[UPDATE: someone just anonymously posted my licensing key generation code in a comment to this post, which I deleted. Anonymous hacker: congrats, you are better than me! I'm sorry you didn't post your name or I would have sent you a picture of a medal or something. I have deleted your comment because, like I say in the post above, I am trying to convince people in the "yellow group" to move towards the green area...not make it too easy for them to go towards the red (Balsamiq is how I am trying to make a living after all). I hope you'll understand. I'm going back to work now...]

— 30 Comments

Some Excellent ISV Advice from Jason Fried

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 17th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 6 Comments

This is so wild…watch the video below…I could have given the exact same talk! OK, probably a lot less eloquently, but I am amazed at how closely what Jason Fried says maps to my thoughts about software and Balsamiq.

One thing that they do differently from me is to jump straight into HTML+CSS for their Mockups. I still think that’s too time-consuming compared to using Mockups to flesh out your UI ideas. I do agree that you don’t really need more than a mockup, or a set of mockups, as a spec.

If you think about it, this is all just common sense. Hats off to 37Signals for turning common sense into a great self-marketing tool! Only in this crazy industry…

And before you comment with jabs that balsamiq.com looks a lot like 37Signals.com, you should know that the design is mine, I have the Illustrator file to prove it! I designed the site at what I think was peak of my “37Signals fan-boy” phase, so I’m not surprised if it comes across as heavily inspired by it. I like the text-heavy, readable style, what can I say? (I’m actually not very satisfied with the site’s navigation structure, I’ll work on it as soon as I have some free time).

Anyways, thanks to 37Signals for speaking for all of us small bootstrapped lifestyle ISVs who like to solve small problems really well!

— 6 Comments

“Minor Edit” support in Mockups for Confluence

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 16th, 2008 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Spurred by a customer’s email, I have made the following enhancement to Mockups for Confluence today.

The problem is that when people create and edit UI mockups in Confluence, they often make many small edits in rapid successions as ideas congeal in their mind. This results in a lot of email notifications sent out to people who are subscribed to the page with the mockup on it.

So starting today when you go to “Save and Close” a mockup, you’ll see the following dialog:

Yes, it’s the same dialog I already show in Mockups for JIRA.

Basically if you just hit “Save”, the edit is considered a “minor change”, and no email notifications are sent out.

If instead you type a comment in the box describing what you changed, notifications are sent and the comment is displayed in the page’s history.

Nice and simple, and solves a real problem. Love it! You can get the latest build of Mockups for Confluence here.

Thanks so much to Jim Hibbard from Spectrum K12 School Solutions for coming forward with this issue. Real-world usage stories like the one he described in his email are exactly what I need to make Mockups better for everyone!

— No Comment

One more way to get Mockups for Desktop for FREE

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 16th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing — No Comment

Hi there, I have done this with a few people already and it’s worked out so well that I have decided to make it a policy: starting today…

If you are willing to demo Mockups to an audience of at least 15 people (at a user group, a conference, a BarCamp), email me your info and I’ll give you two licenses, one for you to keep and one to give away at the event, FREE of charge.

(from the Mockups for Desktop page)

I hope you’ll take me up on the offer!

— No Comment

Personal: What’s your story? Why start Balsamiq?

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 14th, 2008 under Company / Business — 31 Comments

The following is a story that I told many people already, but didn’t think was interesting enough to put on my blog until a certain Tamales Princess I know practically forced me to write to so here it is.

A little background

When I moved to the US in 2001 after finishing my master in CS at the University of Bologna my 5-year plan was to squeeze as much knowledge as possible from “big corporate America”, then come back and start something of my own here in Italy. It took me 6.5 years, and there’s still a ton to learn, but here we are. This is the story of how I came back.

A New Way to Work

About two years ago we (my team at Adobe) decided to try and use wikis for our internal team documentation. We evaluated many wikis, and I was very skeptical about them, based on my belief that no-one other than the engineers were going to use a tool that required you to learn crazy nerdy markup. Then a colleague found Atlassian Confluence (thanks Raffaele!), and I was in love: WYSIWYG editing, hierarchical pages (that could be moved!), PDF export, nice, clean UI and a level of usability that I have seen rarely – using it you get that feeling that “every feature you need is where you’d expect it to be” and “every button is right where it should be”. Like Adobe’s Contribute (the first version) or, hopefully, ConnectNow.

So I became one of Confluence’s most vocal proponents on the team, dumping tons of documents into it and encouraging everyone to do the same: a thing that worked was a rule set by our team’s VP (thanks Pete!), which went something like this: “never answer a question via email: write the answer on a wiki page and send a link instead“. This, coupled with how great Confluence was, worked wonders. Within a few weeks even the most skeptical project manager was won over, and within months it had become an integral part of our work (as an Engineering Lead, the tools I spent all day in were Confluence and my IDE for coding).

Within a couple of months, Confluence usage magically started spreading like wildfire to the other teams, some even converting their documents from previous MediaWiki installations. Then it was HR, legal and everyone else. Pretty much within a year a company of 6000+ people had completely transformed the way we worked (I may be exaggerating a bit here, but that’s how it felt to me at least).

That’s when I thought to myself: “I gotta get ON this“.

Call it Web Office, Enterprise 2.0, Work 2.0, this stuff is powerful.. It’s a new way to work and it makes everyone more productive and the resulting work is better, which I believe impacts the bottom line directly as well as everyone’s morale. I truly believe that we’re in front of one of those “no going back” techonologies like broadband, cell-phones, clothes dryers, etc.

The Stars Started to Align

So that was in my mind when a few other things happened:

my boss quit and I was given the opportunity to take on his management responsibilities (one of the things that I still wanted to learn before coming back)
our landlord told us that he wanted to sell our place (i.e. kick us out) within a year
my parents reminded me that they were missing out on my son’s formative years and that
we always had a place to stay in Italy if we wanted to
we heard that friends were preparing to spend $22,000 a year to send their kid to PRE-school in SF
we started getting a bit tired of being parents in San Francisco without much of a support group.

Enter Mockups

In that context, the idea for Mockups came when a Product Manager I worked with expressed her frustration about not having a simple tool to put her vision into a feature spec (hi Randah!). I could tell that she had exactly in her mind how the UI should behave but didn’t know Photoshop/Fireworks nor had the time to learn how to use those tools to mock up a user interface.

So I did a litte research for her, and couldn’t really find any tool that would fit the bill. Everything was either too expensive and complicated or not really good. Plus those were all desktop tools and didn’t fit with “the new way we worked”.

During our evaluation of Confluence we had discovered Gliffy, a Confluence plugin for Visio-style charting. It used Flash and rumor had it that it was built by just two guys in San Francisco. I had heard that they were doing ok financially, and I thought to myself: well two guys doing ok makes for ONE pretty happy guy!

So here it was: Mockups was a small enough idea that I could build it myself, with the angle that I would make it work in Confluence and maybe other Web Office applications.

Plugins make sense for a small vendor like me: it’s an add-on sale, you don’t have to convince buyers of the value of the platform (the platform vendors take care of this expensive task), all you do is add a feature, simple. I follow the platform’s pricing model, marketing and sales channels, even my EULA is modeled after Atlassian’s. Basically it’s a low-risk purchase for Atlassian’s existing customers. As a one-man-shop, that’s the most I can achieve by myself.

Since that first idea my vision has expanded a bit. My current business plan is to build 2 or 3 plugins a year, and to port each of them to as many wiki/web office platforms as it makes sense.

The real surprise to me has been the high demand for a Desktop version of Mockups, which as of today accounts for 72% of my revenue (and a whopping 95% of individual sales!). That means that only 5% of my sales come from companies who have adopted the Web Office way to work…I predict it will take another couple of years for it to change (in the US, longer abroad). When it does, I’ll be ready!

I’m digressing, back to the story.

Nights and Weekends

I think the vision for Balsamiq started to cristallize in my head around August 2007. The project I was working on at Adobe was shipping in the spring of 2008, so there was my deadline: I wanted to have a sellable version of Balsamiq Mockups for Confluence for the spring, so that I could quit my job and launch Balsamiq right after. I had some savings, but with a family to feed, I couldn’t afford to take time in between. Plus who knows how long it would take before I became profitable! It turned out to be pretty quick, but that’s another story.

So I started my “second job”: every night, after putting the baby to sleep, I would work for 4 hours in the kitchen (roughly 8pm to midnight). It’s amazing how much progress you can make, a little bit at the time, even when you are tired from a full day of work. I would do the more tricky parts on Sunday mornings (my wife and I agreed I could have 3 hours on Sunday mornings for Balsamiq).

At some point I felt like I needed more time…so we went on vacation in Mexico with a bunch of friends! I highly recommend it: lots of people to help my wife with the kid, no Internet connection to distract me, just good old-fashioned coding on the beach!

There I am, building the scaffolding of the Balsamiq Mockups codebase.

The rest is pretty much history: I gave notice on April 1st, moved to Italy on May 2nd, finished with Adobe work on June 15th and launched Balsamiq 4 days later.

Ok, but why?

The main reason I started Balsamiq was to keep learning. My job at Adobe was terrific, I really loved it, but engineers there are really sheltered from the outside world (which makes perfect sense). I wanted to see what it took to do “the whole thing”, from coding to marketing to legal to customer support to sweeping the floor of my office.

I want to see how much a single person can achieve with an idea, a laptop and the Internet. I want to learn what my limits are. Being the product of just myself, Balsamiq is a tangible representation of “the best that I can do”, which is fascinating to me.

I want to build software that solves real problems, makes people more productive and elicits powerful feelings. I want Balsamiq to be known for its customer service and I want it to be part of a new breed of startups: small, bootstrapped software companies with big ambitions.

I believe I do my best work when I lead a small team of four or five people. I want Balsamiq to get there, organically, one sale at the time. The money, as long as there’s enough to live comfortably and re-invest in the company, is secondary.

So far, I’m loving it. The ups and the downs, the easy days and the stressful ones. It’s been an incredible learning experience already. If you care, I’ll keep sharing what I learn on this blog. If you don’t, I’ll do it anyways, so that I have a record of it for myself.

Onward!

[UPDATE: you can read more comments on the Hacker News thread about this post]

— 31 Comments

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!

— No Comment

New Product: Mockups for JIRA Personal

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 7th, 2008 under Company / Business, Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 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!

— 1 Comment

New product: Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 5th, 2008 under Company / Business, Mockups, Release Announcements — 5 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?

Watch the video above if you haven’t yet: here it is in HD.
Look at the product’s home page for more details.
Read the documentation for a full tour of the Mockups/XWiki integration.
Download the free 30-day trial and give it a spin on your own XWiki installation.

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.]

— 5 Comments

A small enhancement: Background Transparency

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 2nd, 2008 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 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!

— 5 Comments

Hi this is Peldi from Balsamiq. This blog is a mixture of product updates, company updates and posts about my experiences as a programmer-turned-entrepreneur. If you're into 37Signals and A Smart Bear, this blog is for you.