Balsamiq Blog

Confluence Team Hosted, now with Mockups!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 29th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Looking for a best-of-breed, highly usable hosted wiki for your team or company? Well, now you have one more reason to choose Confluence Team Hosted, Atlassian’s online version of their excellent enterprise wiki product: effective immediately, all Confluence Team Hosted customers will have access to Balsamiq Mockups for Confluence, free of charge (see Atlassian’s announcement here).

Here’s another way to look at it: if you are looking to use Balsamiq Mockups to collaborate on wireframes with your team or company, want the power of a killer wiki behind it (for specs, requirement docs, test plans, you name it), but don’t want to install anything on your servers, Confluence Team Hosted is just for you.

Pricing starts at $49/month for 10 users, $89/month for 25 users and only $149/month for 50 users, which is ridiculously cheap for what you get. See here for all the details.

Answers to Some Questions You May Have

How can I take advantage of this incredible offer?
Simply head to the Atlassian Confluence Hosted website and sign up! You’ll be up and running in no time. There’s a free 30-day trial too.

Is this the “Mockups Online” you have been hinting at?
No. Confluence Team Hosted now allows you to use Mockups collaboratively online, but it’s more geared towards companies who need a full wiki as well as a collaborative wireframing solution. Confluence Team Hosted starts at 10-users packs and includes more than some of you might need. I am working on a “Mockups-only” hosted website (called “Balsamiq Mockups Online”), which will be entirely focused on Mockups and have pricing plans suitable for individuals and all the way up to enterprises. Stay tuned here for updates.

Do Confluence Team Hosted customers get Mockups for Desktop for free like Mockups for Confluence customers?
No, not at this time. But I do offer volume discounts for Mockups for Desktop here.

I will be updating the website shortly to include this new exciting way to take advantage of the power of Balsamiq Mockups.

Read Atlassian’s announcement here.

Onward!

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Text Formatting, Flickr Integration and More!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 24th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Hi all. Today’s free weekly update to Balsamiq Mockups is a big one:

• added support for rich text editing with the _italic_, [link] and *bold* characters. Full details on this blog post.
• I reworked and finally switched on Flickr integration! You can now load images from your Flickr account or search Flickr for ‘that perfect picture’. Just switch to the Flickr tab in the Import Image dialog:Please respect the authors’ copyrights at all times, you’ll see the licensing for each photo as you preview it, and you’ll be able to go to the image’s Flickr page via the “see original” link:

  You can also add a special ‘cc-only’ tag to your search to filter out “All Rights Reserved” photos and only get Creative Commons licensed results.

• small but handy change: Paste (CTRL+V) now puts controls 20 pixels to the right and 20 down from the original, instead of 10. Why is this handy? Because a SHIFT+arrow key ‘power-nudge’ also moves the selection 20 pixels, so if you want to line up the pasted controls with the original, just make your CTRL+V be followed by a SHIFT+left arrow. Handy!
• I seem to have improved things a bit for the elusive “UI library and background keep reappearing” bug.
• Though most unglamorous and painful, I spent most of my time this week fighting against the remaining and elusive “save as” bug which plagued a couple of you. With the help of some extremely patient and collaborative customers it appears I finally squashed it all, but this was a resilient little bugger so you never know…fingers crossed. Thanks Rajan, Terry and Deborah!

So, without further ado, let’s install the new build!

• Mockups for Desktop: here
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Web Demo: here

Before I leave you, a quick reminder to check out the ever-growing MockupsToGo.Net (announced here last week).

Onward!

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_italic_, [links] and *bold*!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 21st, 2009 under Development / Technical, Mockups, Release Announcements — 10 Comments

Hi there. I just finished coding a new feature which I think you may like.

You can now use the following notation to format only certain parts of your control’s text:

• for italic, use _this notation_
• for a link, use [this notation]
• for bold, use *this notation*

Here’s a screenshot of what the above text looks like in a Paragraph control, for instance:

The shortcuts will work almost everywhere, where it makes sense.

You can escape *, _, [ and ] characters with \*, \_, \[ and \], so if you want to write “this [is] some text” and don’t want the “is” to become a link, just type “this \[is\] some text”.

This is a big change so before I push it live I’d love it if some of you could help me test it by installing the pre-release build and playing with it for a few days (as always, no guarantees). If everything goes well, I’ll put the change in this Sunday’s weekly 1.5 release, update the help page and all that good stuff.

For feedback, post it here or on GetSatisfaction (there are a number of threads about this feature already).

Onward!

— 10 Comments

 

 

 

Introducing “Mockups To Go”

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 17th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 15 Comments

I am extremely happy to announce today the immediate availability of “Mockups To Go” (www.mockupstogo.net), a user-contributed collection of ready-to-use UI components and design patterns built using Balsamiq Mockups.

The idea for the community server came from Michael Bourque, and he describes it better than I ever could:

Michael writes: “It would be great to one day have a website devoted to sharing designs created by people (like you) using Balsamiq Mockups. It would be similar to UI Patterns, except you could download each user submitted mockup bmml file. Each design would have a threaded discussion for people to openly share ideas and collaborate on design. Perhaps it could be powered by the Confluence wiki.

This would be a community powered site, and would exploit the power of Balsamiq Mockups, but most importantly would promote reuse and awareness of good design.”

Four months later, MockupsToGo.Net is exactly it, except that it’s powered by the incredibly easy to use blog-via-email system called Posterous.

Here’s how it works:

Downloading and Using Components

1. After installing today’s new build, you will find a new item in the help menu:
   
2. Selecting the menu simply opens a new browser window to MockupsToGo.Net, where you can then browse or search for a particular component.
3. Once you find what you need, simply download the BMML file and open it in Mockups for Desktop. Then you can simply “Select All”, Copy, and Paste it into your mockup. If you are using a plugin version of Mockups (or the web demo version) you can import the BMML via the Import feature instead (Importing won’t erase your current mockup, it will simply add to it).

You may also subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to keep track of new components as they get added over time. I have also set it up so that new posts are announced on my @balsamiq Twitter account.

Givng Back: Uploading your Own Components to Mockups To Go

Thanks to the magic of Posterous, it couldn’t be simpler. To upload a new component to the site, you just send an email. Here’s a sample one:

Things to notice:

• the email must be sent to post@mockupstogo.posterous.com
• the subject of the email contains the name of the component / design pattern
• the body of the email contains your name and a brief description of your contribution (these are both optional, but encouraged)
• there are 2 attachments, one is the BMML file and the other is the exported PNG of it

That’s it! Once you send it I will get an email, and approve it with one click! If you don’t see it live on the site within a reasonable amount of time, send me an email and we’ll figure it out.

Thank Yous

I have already mentioned that this was Michael Bourque’s idea and not mine, but what I also wanted to share with you is that Michael really took the time to make me understand the value of it (it took me a while but now I’m a total convert). Not only, he contributed a number of useful controls already, and pushed me to make the site as simple as possible to contribute to (thus our choice of Posterous, I had gone with a custom wiki site at first). So thank you so much Michael, this really is “your feature”.

There are another 2 people I want to thank: Michael Rawlings and Theresa Neil. They both helped me refine the site and contributed to it in the last few weeks, and again pushed me to make it as simple and usable as possible. You can see some of Michael’s contributions on the site already, and Theresa has lots to add but has been busy finishing up her new book with Bill Scott (yes, these are the guys behind looksgoodworkswell.com).

Thanks so much guys, and a thank you in advance to all of those who will be contributing to Mockups To Go!

Also in today’s update

I spent a couple of days this week working with Eugene Mirotrin and S. Dharmarajan debugging 64-bit-linux saving and opening issues. The latest Mockups for Desktop build fixes most of these issues, but it might take a little longer to really nail it all down. Still, this takes care of most of it so I recommend upgrading if you’re having similar issues.

To Download the latest build:

• Mockups for Desktop: here
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Web Demo: here

Onward!

— 15 Comments

 

 

 

Look ma’, I’m in the paper!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 15th, 2009 under Company / Business — 8 Comments

Today’s edition of Il Sole 24 Ore, one of Italy’s major newspapers – think “Italian Financial Times” – published an article about Balsamiq and yours truly (click on the image for a bigger version).

Printed newspapers might be dying, but there’s definitely something special about seeing your own name “in the paper”! My parents certainly are proud.

How did this happen? Simple: the journalist (Emil Abirascid) read this blog review and thought Balsamiq was interesting enough to contact me and send me a few questions via email. Thanks so much Fabrizio!

— 8 Comments

 

 

 

Work on Stuff that Matters

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 11th, 2009 under Company / Business — 3 Comments

I was going to simply ReTweet this but I wanted to add a couple of thoughts and they wouldn’t have fit in 140 characters.

Here’s the tweet by @timoreilly: “New blog post: Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles http:// tinyurl.com/8ugj7o”

The article resonated with me, I highly recommend it. If I were to state my “big hairy audacious goal” for Mockups it would be

“to make the World a better place by helping people build better software“

Clearly it’s not on the same league as what a Google.org or The Gates Foundation might do, but for a tiny startup like mine I’d say it’s a pretty big goal, and audacious enough. I certainly feel passionately about it.

Tim’s first point is to “Work on Something That Matters to You More than Money“. The quality/usability of a GUI has a tremendous impact on people’s mood: words like “frustrating”, “horrible” and “annoying” are fairly common when describing software, and if you were ever forced to use an enterprise HR or Payroll system you know how maddening bad software can be. On the other hand, excellent software elicits powerful feelings as well. I simply LOVE the ease of use of DropBox, Posterous, GMail and yes, Mockups too. Using them makes me feel creative, confident and powerful. I believe that if all software was well made, people would lead happier lives. Life is too short for bad software. If I had a small role in helping people design better software, which in turn made its users happier and more productive…well that matters to me a lot more than money.

As for Tim’s second point “Create More Value Than You Capture“, I think we’re doing OK there as well. Clearly Mockups saves people time (or they wouldn’t be buying it so much), and we give more and more licenses away every day (Mariah woke up to 81 license request emails just yesterday). This sentence also resonated with me: “Look around you: How many people do you employ in fulfilling jobs? How many customers use your products to make their own living? How many competitors have you enabled? How many people have you touched that gave you nothing back?“. It sure helps me put things in perspective and feel better about the copy-cats that are popping up…hey if they also help people make better software, I guess we all win in the end!

As for point three, “Take the Long View“, that’s something I have known from the start (a lesson I learned from working on essentially the same product for over 6 years at Adobe). It takes time for software to mature, you just have to stick to it and improve it a little every day. This doesn’t mean it has to be improved forever for the sake of it (I HATE bloatware), but there’s lots of other aspects which could make the software more useful which also need work, like the community-contributed website for common UI patterns that we’re working on. Good software lives for a long time, so you’d better be prepared for it (and be excited about the prospect!) when you start it.

• Read Tim O’Reilly’s latest blog entry here: Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
• Watch this talk he gave last September (relevant topics start at around minute 8):
  
• Follow @timoreilly on Twitter – his retweets are where I get most of my high-quality news these days.
• Also relevant, watch this short video of Guy Kawasaki talking about “Making Meaning”:
  

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

First 1.5 Weekly Relese of 2009!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 11th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Hi there. I didn’t do a weekly release last week because I didn’t have much to put in and no-one would have noticed anyways.

Today, the new build brings us:

• The ability to hide Mockups on the mac with APPLE+H (GetSatisfaction thread here)
• The BMML format was enhanced to save each control’s dynamically measured dimensions…you will see soon why this is important…Mike C-B are you reading this?
• I fixed 3 bad bugs that all had to do with file paths: Export All as PNG now no longer creates nested folders (GS), Cloning works well on linux (GS) and Export/Override no longer acts weird (GS)

The changes above mostly apply to Mockups for Desktop, so go get it!
Peldi

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Uncommon (i.e. Very Valuable) Startup Advice From Dharmesh Shah

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 7th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 3 Comments

Dharmesh Shah is one of those names that keeps coming up for me. In the startup/entrepeneurship books I read, in the blogs I follow, on Twitter…and his quotes are usually very smart and to the point. Foolishly, I never bothered investigating more about Dharmesh until two days ago, when he popped up again, this time by leaving a comment on my very own blog!

I have also been following @OnStartups on Twitter for months but somehow never made the connection in my head.

So I headed to OnStartups.com and found Dharmesh’s talk from The Business of Software conference:

Although it’s a bit all over the place (apparently he had the wrong deck), I really liked the talk, mostly because there’s more than a few little nuggets that I had never heard before, or at least never heard expressed as clearly before, like “partnerships when you’re first starting up? don’t do them”, which confirmed a hunch I had in my gut.

Highly recommended. I am going to be following Dharmesh’s advice more closely from now on. You should too.

P.S.Oh, great, now I see that Dharmesh is the developer behind the excellent Twitter Grader as well…see what I mean? The guy’s everywhere! Reminds me of a great Steve Martin quote: “Be so good they can’t ignore you” (minute 52, also a great video to watch).

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Balsamiq Roadmap for 2009

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2009 under Company / Business — 12 Comments

This is part two of a two-part post about what happened in 2008 and my plans for 2009.

So 2008 was great, no, it was beyond great. I quit my job, moved to Italy and started Balsamiq Studios LLC, my first company. It went very well.

Perhaps I should be more cautious, but I have a feeling 2009 will be even better. Here’s why.

Lots and Lots To Do

I am looking at my TODO list and I have 12, yes twelve projects listed which should keep me busy for the year, and then some!

The name of the game is “Integration”

Most of my big projects for 2009 have to do with integrating Mockups in your preferred way to work.

• I have 4 more server-side integrations of Mockups planned (with more possible), just like the Confluence, JIRA and XWiki plugin versions I shipped in 2008. Each of these has the potential to increase my revenue another 20-30%.
• I am working on a hosted version of Mockups – yes, I am no longer afraid of going SaaS, and lots of people have been asking for this. You’ll be able to work on your mockups online, share them with others and get feedback on them, all from your browser (or from Mockups for Desktop), all for a monthly or yearly fee.
• I want to build the hosted version in a way that can be sold as an enterprise, behind-the-firewall application. And sell it.
• I am working on 3 or more “web connectors”, i.e. ways to load and save your data on the web from Mockups for Desktop.

I wish I could tell you what products I am integrating Mockups with but I’ll keep them as surprises, I don’t want to jynx myself!

I am thrilled about each of these projects, as making great pieces of software talk to each other is something I love doing (there’s something magical about it, that’s why I make Web Office Plugins after all). I will likely contract out part of the development work for some of these, and some platform providers have even offered to help me with development in order to make the project happen. Very exciting.

Client Side Enhancements

Everyone knows that linking mockups together is the last big missing feature of Mockups. I have started a GetSatisfaction thread about it just the other day, but I am itching to start implementing it (I think I’ll do a phased approach, a little bit at the time), so stay tuned here or on Twitter for updates. It’s coming, soon.

Other big client-side enhancements I have planned for 2009 are, in no particular order:

• double-clicking on groups to “dive into them” and edit their contents
• adding support for “UI packs” such as iPhone, mobile and social media UI control packs.
• adding a light-weight Rich Text Editor for the Paragraph and Label controls (for bold, italic, bullets, etc within the same control)

On top of that, there will always be bug fixes and little enhancements here and there…I am releasing every Sunday morning these days so keep updating!

More “Community Features”

I just love the little (ok, not so little) community that has formed around the Balsamiq GetSatisfaction forums in the last 6 months. Your feedback keeps me going every day and makes the product as good as it can be. I haven’t worked on a feature that didn’t come from a customer request since the day before I launched in June. It’s wonderful to know that people will put what I’m working on to use immediately, and that it will make them more productive and ultimately happier.

The collaboration with InspireUX (look in the Help menu for the “I need inspiration” link) is also one of my favorite features. I always read one of Catriona’s quotes at the beginning of a long Mockups session, it gets me fired up and pushes me to do my best.

In 2009, I want to help nurture the Mockups users community with the following:

• a Balsamiq Mockups Community Server (BMCS) – this will be a wiki with Mockups installed on it for people to share common UI components and design patterns that they created with Mockups. Think “Login Page” or “Registration Page” or a simple error message dialog. I am working with some customers on this and plan to launch it at the end of January. In the future I want the Desktop version and the hosted version (and all other versions actually) to integrate with BMCS so that you’ll be able to import pre-made mockups directly from them.
• I plan on retweeting any good UX-related tweets I come across. If you know of someone I should follow to help me with this service, let me know!
• I plan on blogging about any user experience that blows me away, like Dropbox, Posterous, PivotalTracker, StackOverflow, PrintWhatYouLike.com and others.
• I plan on publishing interviews to customers whose jobs have been changed by Mockups, so that you’ll be able to learn their workflows and experiences.
• I just talked to Mariah, and we decided that starting today, in addition to giving free licenses away to do-gooders, non-profits etc, we will also donate licenses to any high-school class that asks for it.  We just ask the teacher to email us the name of their school and class and the number of students in the class, and Mariah will send them all a license.

You may think that I want to do all of the above as a marketing scheme, but you’d be wrong. Community “features” are just as important as features built with code. Knowing that there’s a community of support behind a product is a wonderful feeling, and I want my customers to feel that from day one. Plus it’s pretty lonely over here, so really I want to do it just for my own benefit.

My Goals for 2009

My goals for the company are simple: keep existing customers happy. Make new customers, make them happy. Make all customers more productive. Provide top-notch experiences, both in the product and in any interaction with Balsamiq Studios. Stay transparent, stay human, stay green and socially conscious.

Financially, my goal for Balsamiq is to reach $400,000 in revenue, with a stretch goal of $500,000. It will be tough, but I think I can pull it off.

Personally, this will be another year of intense learning. I will have to go from “mr. Do-it-all” to be Balsamiq’s CEO, which will mean having employees, delegating, setting up relationships with resellers and partners, perhaps incorporate in Italy as well (yay for micro-multinationals!), and hopefully make some non-critical-but-very-formative mistakes. With all that I have planned for 2009, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for it.

Onward!

— 12 Comments

 

 

 

A look back at 2008

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2009 under Company / Business — 13 Comments

This is part one of a two-part post about what happened in 2008 and my plans for 2009.

First, a few numbers about 2008:

• days in business: 196 – that’s 6 months and 13 days, or 28 weeks. See my June 19th launch post here
• products: 1 – Balsamiq Mockups
• product variations: 5 – Balsamiq Mockups is on the web (free demo), for your Desktop, for Confluence, for JIRA and for XWiki
• total individual SKUs: 89 (I fear that’s too many, but “give the people what they want” right?)
• product releases: 5 major ones (1.0 on June 19th,  1.1 on July 20th, Mockups for JIRA on September 9th, Mockups for XWiki on October 5th and 1.5 on December 19th) and countless, almost daily, small ones.
• total revenue: $162,302 ($39,000 of which in December alone, and growing steadily)
• total expenses: $29,574 (I have started paying myself one tenth of the previous month’s revenue)
• total paying customers: 1,322 (Mockups for Desktop: 1,259, Mockups for Confluence: 43, Mockups for JIRA: 18, Mockups for XWiki: 2)
• refunds given: 2 (one customer had problems with an early build and I offered him a refund, and another customer turned out to be a do-gooder after purchase so I gave him his money back)
• licenses donated: over $100,000 worth (this is hard to calculate precisely because we gave many organizations unlimited licenses for all of their employees)
• website stats: ~214,000 unique visitors and ~565,000 page views
• average daily users of the free online demo: ~450
• blog posts published here: 106
  
• products reviews: ~470, overwhelmingly positive (highlights: The New York Times, twice on ReadWriteWeb, 3 or 4 times on Hacker News)
• Twitter mentions: ~1,000, also overwhelmingly positive
• GetSatisfaction forums topics: 381, with hundreds of people contributing (I am so thankful!)
• SEO: I have the top spot on Google for searches for balsamiq, mockups and web office plugins – yay!
• interviews: 6 (of which 2 podcasts: net@night with Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur, and Startup Success with Bob Walsh)
• money raised from investors: $o (the most I was ‘in the hole’ for was $2,078, back in April)
• number of employees: 1 – it’s still mostly just myself, with my wife Mariah donating some of her time lately to give away licenses
• hours of work saved to customers: countless

Overall, I couldn’t be happier with Balsamiq’s first 6 months of operations (and that’s a huge understatement).

This little startup has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, an incredible learning experience and the ultimate thrill-ride. For one guy with an idea and a laptop, I think I made quite a splash!

Next, let’s talk about 2009, for I am SUPER EXCITED about it!

— 13 Comments