Balsamiq Blog

Killer Mockups Webinar: Feb 25th, 10:00AM PST

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 19th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business, Mockups — 1 Comment

Hi there. I am SO excited I can barely type.

The news: I am co-hosting a “Plugin of the Month” Webinar for Atlassian next Wednesday (Feb 25th, 10:00am PST). There are still some spots available, so click here to register!

Why is this super-exciting? We just went through the ‘dressed rehearsal’ practice run, and let me tell you, you won’t want to miss this one!

Instead of me doing a regular old product demo, you’ll get to hear Adam Wride and Oren Teich tell you how Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for JIRA is helping their two hot startups develop killer products in a more agile, productive and fun way.

The seminar should run for about 30-45 minutes and will also be recorded, but if you join live you’ll be able to ask any of us questions in real time. Click here to register.

Oh, and one more thing: I will be giving out a $100 discount code for Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for JIRA at the end of the webinar…so what are you waiting for,  register while you can!

See you on the 25th,

Peldi

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

No update this Sunday

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 19th, 2009 under Mockups — 3 Comments

Hi there, just a quick note to let everyone know that I won’t be publishing an updated build this Sunday.

I am in the middle of too many interrelated changes so I’d rather wait a week and publish it all at once instead of shipping a half-baked update.

What are these updates?

• adding 30+ new icons
• adding iPhone-specific controls
• letting you set the position of the thumb in sliders
• letting you use [+] and [-] symbols in trees (instead of folder icons)
• if I get to it, dramatically speeding up download time for the app
• and more…

The good news is that you can always find the latest, work-in-progress build, here. The new icons and the first 3 iPhone controls are there already, check them out!

Peldi

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: lots of little things

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 14th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 6 Comments

Hi there. This week’s release brings about a bunch of bug fixes and little improvements here and there. I still have lots to do so I’m releasing this one a day early just to get it out of the way.

Here’s the full list, in no particular order:

• made the Tag Cloud control more compact and a bit smaller
• added text styling support (bold, italic, underline and size) to the following UI Controls: Vertical Tabs, Tooltip, both Tab Bars, Button Bar, ComboBox and of course Button
• added an “XS” size for icons (16×16 pixels)
• fixed a bug with CTRL+Enter re-opening the text editor
• You can now cut controls or text with SHIFT+DELETE as well as CTRL+X
• The Tooltip control was renamed to “Tooltip / Balloon” and you can now specify which way the pointy tip should go:
  
• Buttons, Checkboxes, Radio Buttons, Round Buttons and ComboBoxes now resize nicely even if they contain big icons
• fixed a bug with images being saved with absolute paths in BMML files instead of relative paths (had to do with paths with spaces in them)
• renamed “Clone Mockup” to “Clone As New Mockup” in the right-click menu
• fixed a bug with the vertical positioning of text in the Vertical Curly Brace control
• fixed a bug with very large mockups not exporting to PNG sometimes
• added a second row of text to the Browser Window control (use to show the URL. Bonus feature: type anything that starts with www and Mockups will pre-pend http:// for you automagically)
• Hitting Enter when selecting an icon via the Icon Inspector no longer opens the editing input field as well
• fixed a very strange bug with pasting menus…as a nice side effect this fix might actually result in a snappier app overall!
• Mockups for Confluence: fixed a long-standing bug with viewing old mockups when looking at a page’s history (this was a big one!)

How do I upgrade?

It depends on your version, but in general you simply install the new build on top of the current one. Here’s how to get the builds:

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

Plans for Next Week

I still have some bugs I’m fighting with, like the occasional inability to save on linux or the misteriously reappearing UI Library.

Mariah also graciously drew 7 pages full of new icons and iPhone-specific UI controls (below), so I hope to be able to integrate some of it in next week’s update.

Lots to do, so I’d better get back to it!

Onward!

Peldi

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

Meet Riley – 8 year old, Application Designer

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 11th, 2009 under Customer Stories — No Comment

I just received the following email, which I am publishing with permission:

Daugher using Mockups
I absolutely love Mockups. I run a software practice and we have about 40 ongoing projects. I have taken a few of my guys’ designs and redone them in Mockups in a fraction of the time and with greater explanation of the requirements. They were blown away that the “boss” could do it. Thank you for that little pleasure!!

At home my eight-year-old daughter saw me using it and begged to try it. Within minutes she had a few layouts done for Chat Palace. Attaching the png and a picture of her working on it. So funny.

Kevin H.

Thanks Kevin, it’s emails like these that make it all worthwhile.

Also notice how Riley’s mockup in the first photo is different than the one attached…she’s already iterating in order to provide her users with the best possible experience! Brilliant.

Riley, welcome to the fun and exciting world of website/application design!

So, who wants to fund Chat Palace and make it a reality?

I am following up with Kevin to see if he’d be interested in putting us in touch with Riley’s school, as we’d be happy to donate them a school-wide license…Riley could teach the course!

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Weekly Release: Bug Squashing Time

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 8th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

I have added a lot of new code in the last few weeks, so it makes sense to focus on quality for a little while.

Here’s the full list of fixes in this week’s free upgrade:

• First up, the “misteriously reappearing UI library bug“, (a.k.a. the bane of my existence). Although this is turning out to be an incredibly hard to eradicate bug, I am publishing my changes today because they appear to improve things and have the pleasant side-effect of making the application snappier overall. Warning: you might have to re-set the application’s size, position and list of open mockup files on first launch, as well as the visibility of the UI library and the notebook. You’ll have to do this just once, these values will get remembered across sessions thereafter. If they don’t, my apologies, but there’s a workaround: please close the app, delete the #SharedObjects folder which you can find here:
  • On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#\Local Store\#SharedObjects
  • On Mac OS X: <your user home>/Library/Preferences/BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#/Local Store/#SharedObjects
  • On Windows Vista: C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#\Local Store\#SharedObjects
  • On Linux: ~/.appdata/BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#/Local Store/#SharedObjects

  then relaunch the app, fix it one more time and you should be good to go. In case you’re wondering, there seems to be something fishy with Adobe AIR not being able to write to local sharedobjects in some cases, and just failing silently. Grrr.

• all dialogs have a focused button when they open again. This means that in most cases you’ll be able to just hit the ENTER key to accept the default action and close the dialog box. This used to work but got broken in the first 1.5 release when I added the invisible-but-important feature of displaying the OK and Cancel buttons in a different order depending on what operating system you’re running.
• Going from QuickAdd to editing position and size directly and hitting the delete key no longer deletes the selected control. Thanks SO MUCH arv43 for his awesome bug report (with a screencast even!)
• Importing mockup data containing images now properly updates the image inspector pulldown showing the images in the mockup.
• Importing mockup data containing web or Flickr images from the Desktop to the Confluence, JIRA or XWiki version (and vice-versa), no longer breaks the whole app. This was a tricky one, thanks David B. for reporting this!
• added some new control names for better Quick Add goodness (many thanks to Ari F. for the suggestions):
  • “Button Bar” –> “Button Bar / Tab Bar”
  • “ComboBox / PullDown Menu” –> “ComboBox / PullDown Menu / DropDown List”
  • “Date Chooser” –> “Date Chooser / Date Picker”
  • “Title” –> “Title / Headline”
  • “Text Input” –> “Text Input / Text Field”
• fixed a bug with Text Styles Inspector not displaying the right font size
• fixed a rare but dramatic bug with pull-downs which would put the whole app in a strange state
• fixed a bug with the List Inspector not showing the right selected row in some cases
• when using / or + to send focus to Quick Add, you will no longer have to manually delete the / or + characters from the Quick Add Input box before using it. Thanks again to David B. for raising the issue!

Next week’s release will be similar to this one, but perhaps with a couple of small feature improvements as well.

If there’s a bug that annoys you, please let me know! I’ll bump up its priority and try to fix it right away. For instance, I’m going to takle this one next since Michael’s asked so nicely.

How do I upgrade?

It depends on your version, but in general you simply install the new build on top of the current one. Here’s how to get the builds:

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

Onward!

Peldi

— No Comment

 

 

 

2000 customers

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 6th, 2009 under Company / Business — 7 Comments

Hi there, just a quick post to record the fact that today marked the 2000th customer of Balsamiq Mockups.

That’s 2000 monetary transactions, the number of Mockups users could easily be double that – lots of people buy volume licenses and a single Mockups for JIRA license can cover a whole organization. Not to mention the hundreds of licenses we gave away so far.

To celebrate the occasion, I have updated the customers page with a partial list of customers (just companies, I left out individuals of course) and of free license recipients (scroll down the page to see them).

The thing that makes me most proud is that there are lots of companies on the list which I really admire and look up to, it’s a great satisfaction to know that they appreciate my little product enough to buy it.

Speaking of the customers page: every customer has agreed to the license agreement which states that I am allowed to post their name on that page, but if you’d like me to take your company’s name down for any reason I’d be happy to do so immediately.

In case you are wondering I am currently adding over 130 new customers each week, but I don’t have enough data points to know if it’s a stable figure or not. I’m hoping it will keep growing!

Also, 2000 customers is a lot for just two people to support (my wife Mariah is in charge of giving licenses away). I don’t feel completely swamped yet, and my customers still seem pretty happy overall,  but I’m really excited about not being a two-person company for much longer…more news on that soon…not soon enough actually!

Here’s another link to the updated customers page.

Ok, back to bug-fixing!

Peldi

— 7 Comments

 

 

 

My Bookshelf

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 6th, 2009 under Books — 18 Comments

Hi there, a couple of people have asked me for this so I quickly put together this collage of my home office’s bookshelf, as well as my e-books folder.

Some books I consider essential and read more than once, some I didn’t like at all and some I haven’t gotten to yet.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Notably absent from the photo is “Getting Real“, which I just lent out to a friend.

And here’s my ebooks folder:

Sorry for the not-very-descriptive names.

If you have any questions about any of the books, ask away in the comments!

Now that you know what I read, are there any books you’d recommend?

— 18 Comments

 

 

 

Sarah Allen joins Balsamiq’s Board of Advisers

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 5th, 2009 under Company / Business — 3 Comments

Sometimes I wonder what I did to get so lucky in life. This is one of those moments. Sarah Allen has agreed to join Balsamiq’s already star-studded Board of Advisers.

Who is Sarah Allen? I am frankly very surprised no-one has written a Wikipedia page about her (yet?), so here’s a snippet from her bio:

Sarah has been developing commercial software since 1990. She began focusing on Internet software as an engineer on Macromedia’s Shockwave team in 1995. She led the development of the Shockwave Multiuser Server, and later the Flash Media Server, introducing streaming video and multi-party communication in Flash Player 6. She has also developed software tools for multimedia, digital video, and graphic arts at Adobe, Aldus, and The Company of Science and Art (After Effects). She was named one of the top 25 women of the web by SF Wow (San Francisco Women of the Web) in 1998.

In other words, she rocks. Hard.

Sarah was my boss at Macromedia at the beginning of my career, and since then she’s been one of the people I look up to the most, both professionally and as a person. I have learned so much from her and I am so excited to be able to be able to continue do so in the future, I missed her!

As she announced today, Sarah is currently ‘going solo’ after almost 6 years of leadership at Laszlo Systems. I suspect it won’t take long for some exciting startup to snag her as CTO (and they should be so lucky!), so I suggest you take advantage of this rare moment and do whatever you can to get her to help your team with whatever software problem you’re facing!

Please join me in welcoming Sarah to the Balsamiq World!

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

Mockups for JIRA now integrates with GreenHopper

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 1st, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

I am extremely pleased to announce that Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA now integrates seamlessly with GreenHopper 3.4, which released today.

If your company uses Atlassian JIRA chances are you’re already familiar with GreenHopper, the excellent agile project management tool which gives you a way to visualize your upcoming releases, organize your tasks, and plan your development.

Here’s a quick overview by Atlassian:

The integration is very simple and intuitive: if you have installed both GreenHopper 3.4 and Mockups for JIRA 1.5.15 (yesterday’s release), simply go to the Planning Board and click on the little “Issue Actions” menu on any card. Select “Add/Edit UI Mockup” from the dropdown and you’ll be adding or editing wireframes to the current issue using the familiar Mockups for JIRA interface.

Simple, fast and just where you expect it to be. In a word, agile!

I’d like to thank Jean-Christophe Huet and the guys at GreenPepper Software for helping me make Mockups the first plugin to integrate with their excellent software, and I’m looking forward to collaborating more in the future.

• Learn more about GreenHopper or Download GreenHopper 3.4
• Learn more about Mockups for JIRA or Download Mockups for JIRA 1.5.15

Onward!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

Near-Real-Time Collaboration with Mockups and DropBox

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 1st, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 9 Comments

Hi all. I am excited about this week’s update because it enables powerful new collaboration capabilities in Mockups for Desktop without compromising the simplicity of the tool.

I am calling this week’s update “the DropBox release”.

What is DropBox?

DropBox is the easiest way to share and store your files online. Think of it as a shared folder on steroids. Its simplicity is a thing of beauty. I have been using it for months to transfer files between my desktop and the balsamiq servers, to share files with contractors and whenever I need to quickly post something to the web. I highly recommend watching the video on their home page or taking a quick tour. Chances are you’ll sign up immediately. Oh, and it’s free for up to 2Gb of storage, and very cheap after that.

So why is this “The DropBox Release”?

This week’s free upgrade contains two features which, together with Dropbox, work wonders for collaborating on wireframes, both with clients and colleagues.

The two features are:

• I renamed the “Export All Snapshots to PNG” feature to “Export All Snapshots…”, and it now asks you to select a folder in which to export all the snapshots of the mockups you have open:



• I added a feature which checks for updates to the mockup file you have currently open in the background. If Mockups notices the file on disk is more recent than when you last loaded it, it gives you an option to reload the file to accept the changes.

So why are these two little features so important for collaborating on your Mockups? Let’s look at two scenarios.

Scenario #1: developer working with a client

Say you are devloping software for someone with the help of Mockups and DropBox. You already set up a shared DropBox folder with your client, so that you can share files easily back and forth.

Now whenever you need to make a change and send a new image to the client for review, all you have to do is use the new “Export All Snapshots…” feature and tell Mockups to save all snapshots in the shared DropBox folder.

Your client will receive a notification of the files that changed and be able to see the changes immediately. The BMML files live somewhere else on your hard drive, the client only gets the PNG images. Oh, and Dropbox also keeps a copy of every version of the files, so your client will be able to see how the mockup evolved over time. Bonus!

Here’s a quick screencast I made to illustrate this workflow (QT version):

Scenario #2: Working Together

Now say you are working with someone who also has Mockups for Desktop installed. In this case, you can save the BMML files in DropBox directly! You both open the same file in Mockups at the same time, and whenever one of you makes a change and saves the file the other person will get notified (usually in less than 5 seconds), hit the “Reload the File” button and see your changes immediately, just like that!

To repeat: in order to share a change all you have to do is save your mockup normally…DropBox will take over and send it around, then Mockups will notice and everyone will see your changes, in SECONDS! Magic!

Here’s a quick screencast I made to illustrate this workflow (QT version):

This is especially handy if your mockups contain images, as you only need to save them in one place (I have an “images” folder under each of my DropBox folders)…so you’ll no longer need to zip your bmml+image files before sending them around…in fact you won’t be emailing anything around anymore!

Obviously you could use any other folder-sharing technology with Mockups to achieve the same results…but I doubt it will be as polished and easy to use as DropBox is.

Other changes in this week’s update

Mockups For Confluence Bug Fix: I finally fixed a bug with mockups with spaces in their names not showing up when you exporting the wiki page to PDF. Also, while I was at it, I removed the “edit this mockup” link from the PDF output since it doesn’t make sense there.

New Application Icon: I finally created a new icon for OS X (and Vista?)….it still shows that I’m not an icon designer, but at least the pixelated jagged lines are gone…

How do I upgrade?

Upgrading Mockups for Desktop is free, fast and painless: just go here and install the latest version on top of what you currently have.

For Mockups for Confluence, download and instructions are here.

On a personal note, I am very proud to have now linked Mockups with what I consider three of the best Web products out there: DropBox, Posterous (with Mockups To Go) and GetSatisfaction (via this site). These 3 companies truly understand the importance of usability and simplicity, and do a great job at keeping their software simple while enabling powerful workflows, something I always strive for as well. Someone should acquire the 4 of us and turn us into a killer company! Just kidding, Balsamiq Studios is not for sale, I’m having way too much fun right now.

Happy collaborating with Mockups and DropBox!

Peldi

P.S.Stay tuned for an exciting Mockups for JIRA update tomorrow!

— 9 Comments