Hi there. This week we’ve been focusing on the hosted version of Mockups (it’s coming along really nicely!), but we found some time to fix some long-standing tricky bugs and add a couple of keyboard shortcuts. Here’s the full list of changes included in this free upgrade:
Here are the links:
Unless there’s some crazy bug which needs our immediate attention, we are planning on skipping next week’s update, so that we can really focus on Mockups hosted. I want to go beta in less than a month, and there’s still a ton to do!
In the meantime, please keep giving us your feedback via our GetSatisfaction forums!
Onward!
Peldi
P.S. On the financial news front, March sales were simply INSANE.
Hello everyone, we hope you’re having a great day!
We’ve been busy this week with one big feature and lots of little improvements and bug fixes.
This is one of those features that’s been on our TODO for a while, and now that we have it we cannot imagine how we went so long without it.

Basically the name says it all: as you drag one or more controls around, you will now see a little blue snap line when the center of your selection aligns with another control’s center point.
This works both when moving or resizing, try it out!
We also changed the color of the snap lines that signal proximity, so that you can tell them apart from the ones that signal alignment. Look at this screenshot for instance:

We posted a few new templates on MockupsToGo: YUI Calendars, YUI Menus and Buttons, YUI Carousels. More are coming. It’s a great way for us to test Mockups, and we hope you’ll be able to save some time in your work by using our templates. Also new on MockupsToGo, a configurable Browser Window thanks to Olli Savolainen and an Image Shoveller/Filmstrip widget courtesy of Ian McAllister.
Linux users with the “file:///” error: Adobe is listening and needs your help reproducing the bug, please head over here and answer Sundeep’s questions if you can, thank you.
Last but not least, we received a glowing endorsment from Joel Spolsky, which is already posted on our wall, right next to our “Company Values 0.1″ list:

Here are the links:
Onward and Ciao!
Peldi and Marco
Hi all, this week’s free update comes with a new digital certificate and a host of bug fixes and performance improvements.

The dialog above is what you will see when installing Mockups from now on: it clearly states that what you are about to install comes from a reliable source (us), and not just some hacker somewhere.
The downside of this update for you early adopters
is that you’ll need to uninstall Mockups before upgrading, just this time. Full instructions here.
We also made the following bug fixes and performance improvements:
We are going to focus on the online version of Mockups for a few days, as more and more people are expressing interest in it.
To upgrade:
Ciao!
Hi all, Marco here with my first ever blog post as a Balsamiq employee!
This week’s update, as Peldi anticipated, adds “Open Recent >” to Mockups for Desktop. Thanks so much to Paul Cormier for the idea and to Erik van Eykelen for the excellent feedback, we have tried to incorporate most of it in the feature.
Here’s a screenshot:

In case you are wondering, the “Button Again.bmml” file is disabled because Mockups has detected that the file has been deleted on disk since you last opened it. Fancy!
We also fixed the following bugs:
As always, updating is as simple as installing on top of your current version, you won’t have to re-register or anything. Download the latest version here.
My first week at Balsamiq has gone. We had to do a little bit of everything: bureaucracy, development, bug-fixing, some IT, some office furnishing…
My professional habits changed completely in about half a minute. Mariah and Peldi make me feel really at home (in fact, the “office” is their home!). It’s wonderful, I like it so much!
There are lots of interesting things going on here at Balsamiq: I promise to blog about them, with special care to the audience of developers which follow us so passionately.
Ciao!
Hi there, just a quick note to let everyone know that I have decided to move the release day to Mondays or Tuesdays instead of Sundays. I want Marco to be involved in the release, but I don’t want him to work on the week-ends, that’s all.
The next release will contain a few bug fixes and a new “Open Recent >” feature for the Desktop app, which you can already test here if you’d like (we’re going to make some improvements on Monday based on some great user feedback, thanks everyone!).
Hi there, I thought I’d celebrate my 999th Twitter follower with a little blog post I’ve wanted to write for a while.
Back when I first started using Twitter, I treated it mostly as an extension of my blog, a marketing channel for announcements and customer service in case someone wanted to contact me that way.
Then I discovered Summize (now search.twitter.com) and the fact that you could get RSS feeds of the search results, and was amazed by its great marketing potential.
I started scanning Twitter for mentions of keywords related to my product and sent @-messages to people who I thought would benefit from using it. To make it clear I was trying to sell them something, I would start my Tweets with $$, a convention I came up with (and that I’ve seen a few others pick up, but it never really spread). Here’s the full blog post about it: “$$ tag for Twitter ads? I want to pay for Twitter!“, in which I declare that I’d be willing to pay Twitter $1 for each of these $$-tweets, thus solving Twitter’s elusive business plan in the bargain.
The best idea to came out of that whole post came in a comment by guruz from p300.eu, who suggested that 50 cents of that dollar could go to Twitter but that the remaining 50 cents should go to the receiver of the unsolicited Twitter message. Now that would be nice: getting paid to be advertised to? I want to live in such a World!
I have to say I felt like I was threading a fine line with the $$-tweets, so I was as cautious as I could be with them – I think I sent maybe a dozen total, and from a separate @balsamiqads account, as you can see for yourself. Nonetheless, my idea made some waves and I was even interviewed by Bob Walsh about it for his “Twitter Survival Guide” e-book.
As a way to be able to get to read the book for free
I also did an editorial review of it for Bob, and that’s where my Twittering really turned a corner.
The best part of Bob’s book, IMHO, are the interviews (minus mine, I guess, sorry about that). Specifically the one to Ben Metcalfe (@dotben) made me realize that I really wasn’t getting Twitter at all. Buy the book just for that interview, it’s worth it.
My use completely missed the social and collaborative nature of Twitter. In other words, why should anyone follow me when everything I do is pimp my product or spam people with unsolicited tweets?
At the same time, I started following @timoreilly, and noticing how much I was getting out of it. Most of his messages are Re-Tweets (RTs) of news that are interesting to me, he is acting as a human filter for his followers. What was I doing for my followers? Not much.
So I started slowly retweeting UX-related Tweets and others that I thought my be helpful. At some point someone pointed out the excellent TwitterSheep, which generates a tag cloud based on the Twitter bios of the people that follow you. Here’s mine:

Now that I know that most of my followers are web developers and software entrepreneurs I can cater my retweets to them and provide a better service.
Another aspect of Twitter that I was completely neglecting is the fact that Twitter can be so much better than Google sometimes. For instance, I once vented on Twitter about having spent hours setting up a mail server on my server. Within minutes I received a bunch of tips and links which would have saved me an afternoon of pain had I asked beforehand.
Asking for the Twittersphere’s help is still not second-nature to me, but I’ll try to remember to do it more in the future. I believe people generally like to help others, and I know I’ve answered a few questions in the past.
I have also started to have very interesting conversations about my product via Twitter, but I suspect FriendFeed might be a better venue for those (I have to admit I still don’t “get” Friendfeed yet, no matter how much I listen to @scobleizer rave about it).
Last but not least, just today I searched Twitter for Freshbooks before deciding whether to subscribe to their service or not, to see what people thought about them. I was pleasantly surprised to find @freshbooks had an active account, and impressed that they responded to one my tweets, and with a sense of humor, too! I am now a happy Freshbooks customer.
In case you’re wondering about the $$-tweets, I have completely stopped with those, for three reasons:
In a way this is very conforting, it means I can go back to focusing on making the best product possible (a product worth suggesting to your friends and followers), leaving the marketing to take care of itself.
I’ll leave you with a screenshot of my second monitor…Snackr at the top, TweetDeck is the left half, then Twhirl (for my @peldi account), then Skype and Adium.

…all applications I can’t seem to live without but that I love to QUIT, as it means I’m getting ready to get productive for a while.
All in all, Twitter rocks. Thanks for changing the World for the better @jack!
Onward!
Update: the fine folks at TwitterCounter.com were kind enough to send me a csv with my Twitter followers history over time, here it is with annotations:
Interesting!
Hi there. For those of you who came to the Atlassian Plugin of the Month webinar today, thanks so much for attending!
Huge thanks to Oren Teich of Replicate Technologies and Adam Wride of BigBrassBand for demoing the product!
If you missed it, here’s a recording of it, courtesy of Atlassian TV.
If you missed it, the $100 discount code is BBBREPL – valid until this Sunday, March 8th!
I am embedding the slides below as well. It was my first set of slides since reading Presentation Zen, and I’m pretty happy with them (you should see some of my old slide decks, brrr..).
The slides were made using SlideRocket, an online slideshow editor done in Flex. I hadn’t used it since its very early days, and this time I was impressed with it, it’s really polished and they seem to get the “whole product” concept, with the marketplace and all..
I also really like their online/offline flow (they have an AIR app for offline/backup playback). It confirms some of my ideas for how Mockups Online and Mockups for Desktop should interact – it’s a vision that will take a few more months to realize, I’m looking forward to working on it!
Feeling a great mixture of excitement, pride and trepidation, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Marco Botton, Balsamiq’s first full time employee.

Warning: the following section reads a bit like the “how we met” section of a wedding website, you may skip it if you’d like. You have been warned.
Not long after moving back to Italy I received an email that read something like this:
“Hi, my name is Marco Botton. You don’t know me but I remember you from high school (I am 3 years younger than you), and I also spotted you around the CS buildings at the University of Bologna. I stumbled upon your Facebook page and then on your site, and I was left speechless. I just wanted to tell you that you are awesome. ![]()
A little bit about me: I have been working as a C/C++ programmer at company ##### and I am building an iPhone application in my spare time, we’ll see where that takes me… If you ever need someone who’s a fast learner, knows his stuff about coding, good UIs, knows how to work in an international environment, uses Unix and Mac, has good taste, solid work ethics and is not lacking a good amount of ambition…I’d be happy if you could get in touch with me.
In the meantime, congratulations again and best of luck.
Marco”
I was immediately impressed, and replied that while I didn’t need anyone at the time, I was always happy to meet good people.
Marco and I met for lunch a little while later, and we immediately hit it off. One thing that I really enjoyed was having someone to chat about tech stuff with…I mean, my poor wife can only take so much talk about Twitter…
We’ve been having lunch together once or twice a month since, and it’s been great. With time, I started hoping to be able to hire Marco in the future, but I still couldn’t afford to, nor was too overwhelmed.
At any rate, I hired him for a small little project, implementing the “sketch it” feature of Mockups 1.5. Since Marco had never done any Flash/Flex before, I had budgeted about two weeks’ worth of work for it. Marco delivered it in 6 hours flat.
…
Around the beginning of 2009, things started to change: revenue shot up, as well as number of customers of course, which is wonderful, but also a bit overwhelming for me to manage alone (we passed 2500 customers last week, with about 150 new customers weekly). I noticed that during the week I had less and less time for coding, with email and customer service taking most of my time. Even if Mockups demands relatively little support, a single customer problem might sometimes take me 2 days to diagnose and fix, which meant that for those 2 days forward momentum had to stop completely. Other time consuming tasks are just part of running a business…sending out invoices, answering pre-sales questions, dealing with international taxation (I hope to write a whole series of blog posts on this hugely time consuming PITA topic one day), etc.
So I started using the week-ends for coding. Not sustainable, and not enough, especially with all that I have planned for 2009. I wasn’t happy about the slow speed of updates, and I found myself getting frustrated at every new incoming email, definitely an alarm bell for me. I was feeling like I was stuck in second gear, and I hate that feeling. So one day at lunch I bit the bullet and “proposed”…
Now, unless you are Italian you may not understand the magnitude of my request. People here don’t quit their jobs…ever. If you have a stable job you’re pretty much set for life…you may not have a long corporate ladder to climb, but you’re pretty much sure that you won’t get fired either. Marco is leaving a good, stable and relatively high paying job to take a one-year contract with “some crazy guy who had it made in the US and decided to move back to Italy regardless”.
We agreed to start with a 1-year contract because I was too afraid to do more (don’t forget I’m a total rookie entrepreneur here), but I know for sure that I’ll be able to pay him for this year (there’s enough in the bank to cover it already). We’ll see how things go this year, but I’m hopeful to be able to keep him on indefinitely starting in 2010.
In short, Marco is taking a big risk with me, and I really appreciate it.
Marco, being the classy guy he is, gave 6 weeks notice. His last day was on Friday, and today is already his first day at Balsamiq.
Marco’s job title, at least initially, is going to be “Tuttofare”, which means “do-it-all” in Italian. In other words, with time I want him to be able to do anything that needs to be done around here, from bug fixing to blogging to UX design to IT administration to customer service and partner management, you name it.
Just to give you an idea, these are the first tasks he’s going to work on:
What I love about Marco is that he’s not afraid of any of it…in fact, he’s eager and ready to tackle any challenge I throw at him.
I’m not sure yet, I am pretty much going to continue doing what I’m doing, but with Marco moving us forward with the TODO list I’ll be able to spend more time on longer-term items like finally putting together a reseller agreement, finally publishing some customer interviews on the blog, figuring out if AdWords is working or not, and all that other “soft stuff” that I just couldn’t get to before. Oh, and I hope to be able to reach inbox zero a lot more often.
To close, here’s a picture of Balsamiq’s current Worldwide Headquarters…notice our new matching IKEA desks and chairs, the big whiteboard, the bookshelf and the printer. Not visible in the picture is the fact that Mariah shot this picture…from the bedroom of our apartment!

We will update the company page to reflect these new exciting changes as soon as we can get a good picture of Marco, Mariah and myself together.
Please join Mariah and I in welcoming Marco to the Balsamiq family, his email is marco@balsamiq.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @balsamiqmarco.
Onward!
Hello everyone! This week’s free upgrade is a big one. So big, in fact, that it took two weeks to finish.
Here’s what’s new:
The old spiral notebook background has served Mockups well in the last 9 months, but the time has come to say goodbye. Please join me in welcoming the new “Graph Paper” background!
It looks SO much better, wouldn’t you agree?

This new background is a happy side-effect result of hiring an outstanding web application designer for the hosted version of Mockups…more on this on a later update.
The new background is drawn programmatically so it grows forever without stretching and saves us 30Kb in final application size in the bargain.
Many of you have asked for them, and here they are! Six new control types: Alert Box, iPhone, iPhone Keyboard, iPhone Menu, iPhone Picker, ON/OFF Switch and the “Pointy Button / iPhone Button” control.
Their usage should be pretty self-explanatory, but here’s a few details:


These new controls, coupled with the existing ones and the new icons (see below), should allow you to design most iPhone applications. As always, you can bring in your own custom controls if you need them.
Here’s a few sample mockups I threw together quickly: bonus points if you recognize all three!

Aside from the Mobile icons shown above, we have added a number of new icons you requested, bringing the total to over 150!
Here they are, shown in the new “XS” size:
![]()
To make room for all these icons I increased the size of the Icon Library, for less scrolling.
The Tree control got smarter and a lot more powerful, just look at the screenshot below for details:
You can now set the position of the little “tick” on the slider controls, as well as the amount of progress in the Progress Bar and the position of the thumb in any Scroll Bar.
Here are a few examples:

And here are the 3 new property inspectors which let you manipulate the values:
![]()
Simple, right?
At the request of some users, I have added support for text styles (bold/italic/underline and most importantly font size) to many control types, including Text Input, Text Area and even the Sticky Note control!
I had no idea, but the “auto-commit text on Enter” feature was hampering Japanese users from typing correctly. Thanks to Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator fame for bringing this to my attention and helping me fix it quickly.
Last but not least, what is probably my favorite new feature of this update.
The new icons and control types have made Mockups be a little slower to load, so I changed the loading pop-up a bit:

Thanks to our collaboration with the awesome InspireUX.com, you can now use the loading time of the app to learn something new and get inspired for the work ahead!
The randomly selected quote is only shown in the web and plugin version of Mockups, and only if you don’t have the application cached in your browser.
I love this little feature, many thanks to Catriona Cornett of InspireUX for her help with it.
Two long-standing bugs were squished this week, which is a huge relief:
Here are some other bugs that got squished in this release:
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:
Stay tuned for major company news coming out in the next few days.
Other than that, I am going to focus on the hosted version of Mockups for a week or two. It’s coming along really nicely…in fact, I’m so excited about it I can barely sleep these days.
That said, If there’s a bug that’s annoying you we’re all ears!
Onward!
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.