Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Release: New Default Font (on OS X) and more

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 25th, 2009 under Release Announcements — 2 Comments

Hi everyone!

We have a fresh new update for you to download. Here’s what’s in it:

• If you are on a mac, the default font for Mockups is now Chalkboard, a nice little font built by Apple in 2003 and included with OS X 10.2.8 and beyond.
  
  It looks similar enough to Comic Sans MS not to be a big break for long-time Mockups users, but it also possesses the incredibly important quality of being…NOT Comic Sans! Windows and Linux users are still stuck with Comic Sans until we find a suitable replacement: help us out!
• Added support for font size and checkboxes to the Tree control:
  

We also fixed the following bugs:

• the little arrows that denote linking no longer show up in the exported PNGs
• locked controls with links now work properly in presentation mode
• links in Vertical Tabs when the tabs are on the right-side now work properly
• If you want to type a series of star characters, like this *****, you no longer have to escape them like this \*\*\*\* – you can, but it’s not required
• Fixed a bug with the vertical positioning of the text in the Vertical Curly component
• in Mockups for Desktop, when you close a tab the next one is selected (instead of a random one like it used to be)

Updating Instructions

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Web Demo: here

Coming soon: WebORB integration!

A few weeks ago I was approached by Mark Piller of The Midnight Coders, the main guy behind the WebORB application server for RIAs, about a project they’d been working on.

It’s a web service which converts BMML (the flavor of XML used in Mockups) into a full-blown 3-tier client-server Flex application. The client-side code is a Flex representation of the mockup, and the server-side code generated can run in either .NET, Java or PHP. The generated server-side code provides all the data from the controls in the mockup to the corresponding controls in the Flex application.

It’s really really cool, so I decided to link to it from the app:

You can find more info about the project here: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/develop-ria/balsamiqapp

Before we release the generator into the world, we’d like to give you a chance to test it out and tell us what you think. There are still some bugs to iron out, and the docs are still in draft stage. Mark has also promised to have a screencast demo ready soon.

At the moment the link is only included in the pre-release build, which you can find here. If everything checks out, we’ll merge it all into our next update. For any questions or issue with the WebORB generator, please head over to WebORB customer support.

Thanks Mark and everyone at The Midnight Coders for this super-cool project!

— 2 Comments

 

 

 

Matilde’s Mockup of Her Ideal Computer

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 25th, 2009 under Customer Stories — 2 Comments

My friend Nazim just sent me this photo of a paper wireframe designed by his friend’s daughter Matilde, who is six years old:

Aside from the awesome alphabetical keyboard layout and wonderfully stylized mouse and trackpad (is that a finger on the button?), I love the main UI, roughly translated from Italian below:

• unintelligible
• unintelligible
• games
• photocopies
• to color and to dress up
• everything else including boys

I am sending Matilde a serial key for Mockups for Desktop, I cannot wait to see what she’ll come up with next!

— 2 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Improved Presentation Mode

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 18th, 2009 under Release Announcements — 1 Comment

Hi everyone. Apologies for not doing a release last week, but we’re really busy with lots of very exciting projects and we grew as a company! So in a way you could say that we “released” Valerie onto the world!

This week’s update brings one main new feature, an improvement to how “Full Screen Presentation” works:

When you start a Full Screen Presentation, either by clicking on the button or the menu or hitting CTRL+F, you’ll now see the two little toggles above in the lower-right corner of your screen. They’ll fade out in a few seconds, but you can always bring them back by mousing over the bottom-right corner of the screen.

The first toggle is for showing and hiding linking hints and the big pointers. You can now turn them off if you’re using the presentation mode to test a new UI on some user and don’t want to give them hints on where to click, or simply if you find the big pointer distracting.

The second toggle is for showing and hiding markup elements, such as sticky notes, arrows and callouts (any control under the “Markup” tab in the UI Library). This is useful if you want to just look at your UI without the annotations that surround it.

The state of the two toggles is remembered across sessions, and in the Desktop version you can use the “m” (or “M”) and “l” (or “L”) keys to toggle the two settings as well.

We also made the blue link highlight a lot more faint, it was too distracting.

This feature is the result of a few rounds of great feedback from Michael Bourque and all the others that contributed to his GetSatisfaction thread, thanks so much everyone.

I promise to never again make the mistake of releasing a big feature without getting help from the community like I did for the linking feature. My apologies and thank you so much for your continued support and feedback, I really appreciate it and enjoy our conversations on GetSatisfaction tremendously.

Other changes in this update

• slowed down the double-click speed to 400ms (from 200), and added some code that detects the distance between the two clicks, which should take care of a few double-click related bugs
• added font sizes 60 and 72 for text
• made the app much more resilient to unknown BMML data (thanks to Max’s SWT->BMML importer for bringing these up)
• the Import dialog now properly sets focus on the text area, so that you can now just CTRL+SHIFT+E and CTRL+V and ENTER to import, no mouse needed
• the pull-down menus for the Link and Image inspectors now grows to show the whole file name
• fixed an issue in which Mockups though the SHIFT key was down when it wasn’t, resulting in the wrong mouse pointers being shown
• changed the key modifier for ignoring the elements under the mouse when dragging from SHIFT to ALT, which makes much more sense. Sorry about this change but it’s an advanced feature and only a few days old so hopefully it won’t be too hard to switch
• added “Select List” as another name for the ComboBox control
• fixed a bug with the selection highlight not showing up when you select the last row of a DataGrid that’s never been manually resized

Updating Instructions

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Web Demo: here

Have a great week everyone!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

SWT->BMML: an Interesting New Mockups Extension

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 13th, 2009 under Mockups Extensions — 4 Comments

Hi there. I wanted to share with you an interesting new little project by Max Rydahl Andersen, a core developer at JBoss (@maxandersen on Twittter).

In short, it’s a way to transform an existing dialog built in SWT (the widget framework used in Eclipse based projects such as Flex Builder) into a BMML representation, ready to be imported into Balsamiq Mockups.

Check out this short video demonstration:

Here’s Max blog post about the project: Instant Mockup for Eclipse SWT Applications

What I like about this tool is that while a lot of people have been asking for exporters from BMML to various programming languages*, this is the first time I see someone importing from an existing UI into Mockups, and makes a lot of sense!

In the real world, being able to start from a blank slate is a luxury, most often than not you’ll be iterating on an existing UI in order to improve it. Having a quick way to import a GUI to Mockups is a huge time-saver.

Anyone up for building an HTML+CSS -> BMML importer? It would be so cool to be able to specify a URL and have a BMML representation of that page returned. Mockups such as this one would take 2 seconds to build! I realize that HTML+CSS is a huge beast, but hey that’s what they’ll pay you for right? If you’re interested, I have documented the BMML format here (yay for open formats!).

Thank you so much Max for starting this project and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow! The code is all on github so if you’re a SWT developer I encourage you to dive in and help out, you’ll all benefit from Max’s awesome week-end project!

Peldi

*I know some of you have already started working on this, and I can’t wait to be able to share about your progress!

— 4 Comments

 

 

 

Please Welcome Valerie Liberty to the Balsamiq Family

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 12th, 2009 under Company / Business — 6 Comments

Hi everyone. It is with immense pleasure that I get to introduce to you Ms. Valerie Liberty, Balsamiq’s #2 employee and “Chief Operating Officer, Wow! Division.”

I’ve known Valerie since back when I started at Macromedia in 2002, and have always admired how she can get ANYTHING done, with the incredible capacity of making it fun and painless for everyone. Her enthusiasm and passion are contagious, and her focus on doing outstanding work is unparalleled. Oh, and her resume is pretty darn impressive, if you ask me!

Valerie’s job title is “Chief Operating Officer, Wow! Division,” inspired by Zappo’s #1 core value “Deliver WOW Through Service.” As such, she will be in charge of most of the day to day administration for our US company, answering sales and pre-sales questions, sending invoices and tracking payments…taking care of book-keeping (we call it “counting the beans”), updating our internal wiki as well as the balsamiq.com website, helping Mariah hand out free licenses, interviewing customers for the blog…and as we grow she’ll be in charge of HR-type tasks such as publishing and evangelizing our company values and writing an employee manual…in short, she can do it all!

Valerie is based in the San Francisco Bay Area (at GMT-8), while the rest of us are in Italy (GMT+1), which means that we should now be able to really cover the globe when it comes to support…while one of us is sleeping, the other can answer the phone, your emails and your tweets!

I love that we’re still so small but we have already set up a global support organization, it sounds so cool! Kidding aside, with customers in 56 countries, it’s a must. This also means that I will no longer have to stay up until 1:00am every night to keep up with US customers, or at least not every night. I’m SO looking forward to going out to watch a movie with Mariah…it’s been well over a year.

I have already made some changes to the site to reflect our new structure, and will be updating the company page shortly:

• sales@balsamiq.com now goes to Valerie and Peldi – to be used for any sales, pre-sales or post-sales questions (from “I need a quote.” to “I lost my key.”)
• support@balsamiq.com now goes to Valerie, Mariah and Peldi – for any other support request
• we each still have our personal email address of course, and our inboxes are always open! Use val@balsamiq.com for Valerie, marco@balsamiq.com for Marco, mariah@balsamiq.com for Mariah and peldi@balsamiq.com for me.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to work with Valerie every day, and I am looking forward to many years of it!

I am confident that our level of customer support will get even better thanks to her, and that we’ll be able to keep it as high as we want it (i.e., legendary) even as we grow.

I would also like to publicly thank my adviser and friend Sarah Allen, for helping me realize that the time was right for me to seek help and for putting me in touch with Valerie just at the right time! Here are two quotes from the chat we had about it which really drove the point home for me:

“what would you be able to achieve if you had an extra hour every day?“

and

“by doing things that you don’t like to do you are hurting the company. The company needs you to do what you’re best at. Let someone else who loves to do those things take care of them.“

Thanks Sarah, you’re the best!

Chances are you’ll be interacting with Valerie a lot in the future, so please join me in welcoming her to the Balsamiq family, either via a comment here, a Twitter message (she is @balsamiqVal) or an email to val@balsamiq.com.

Onward, together!

[Update: this post was picked up by Hacker News (thanks so much!), so you can follow and contribute to the discussion there if you'd like]

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

Why I haven’t been blogging as much

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 9th, 2009 under Company / Business — 8 Comments

Hi there. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you already know that lately I haven’t been sharing as much as I used to. It’s true and it pains me, so I want to try and figure out the reasons for this change by writing about them below.

The main reason is purely mechanical: with over 4500 customers and over 200 new customers every week, I have little time left for blogging, or anything other than customer support for that matter. I spend my days in GMail and have been feeling like I’m “chasing” my business for the last few weeks…by the time I have answered the most urgent messages and dealt with the bank/accounting/beurocracy issue of the day it’s usually already 2pm, which leaves little time to do everything else. It’s very frustrating and I am working on it (more news on this VERY soon), but let’s just say that I now fully understand why Joel Spolsky suggests keeping your marketing, resources, quality and revenues in lock-step in this great Inc article from last year (make sure you check out the infographic). I have been actively holding back on some exciting changes because we cannot manage any more customers than what we’re currently attracting at the moment…something I never thought I would have to do and certainly a good problem to have…still, it’s stressful, trust me. Thank goodness for Marco and Luis who keep development going and for Mariah who keeps sending tons of free licenses out every day.

All the other reasons are related to the fact that Balsamiq Studios is growing and maturing as a company.

Let’s talk about blogging about our financial results for instance. I received huge amount of attention each of the four times I shared our numbers in the past…I wasn’t doing it as a marketing ploy but it sure worked as one! Everyone likes to hear of other people doing well, myself included. Problem is, we are now doing SO well that we are embarrassed to talk about it. Although we’re always happy to share our figures if someone asks, publicly talking about them on this blog would just be boastful and distasteful, it’s simply not our style. The reason I talked about the numbers in the past was to reassure potential buyers that Balsamiq will be in business for the duration of their support period, and hopefully the years ahead. Now that we make enough to cover our yearly salaries every month, that’s no longer needed.

Another reason for not blogging as much is that my own personal need to blog is not as strong as it used to be. Just like most parenting blog (ours included) don’t last more than a couple of years, once things start humming along and you start getting into a rhythm, the insecurities that resulted in the need for venting dissipate. We are now “out of the tunnel”, if you will…plus with Marco here every day I get to vent to him instead of here on the blog…poor Marco.

I am also personally in transition…I no longer feel like a total newbie at this entrepreneurship thing but I am definitely far from being an expert, confident enough to give advice to anyone. On one hand I can’t really ask dumb questions publicly any more (I am embarrassed to show our big enterprise customers how clueless I am in some areas), and on the other I’m no Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Marc Anderssen, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuck or Seth Godin…maybe in 20 years, if ever.

Speaking of which, I would love to speak at some conferences in 2010 – mostly because it’s a great way to travel, I like to speak in public and I don’t like paying to attend conferences – but I’m not really sure I’m in the position to teach anyone anything yet…let me know if you disagree (hi mom!) and if so feel free to suggest some topics I could talk about!

So there you have it, I think that’s why this blog is getting a little more centered on product announcements and yes, more boring than it used to be. I’m ok with that, at least for now. I am trying to build what DHH calls “a little italian restaurant on the web”…so while it’s good to know the owners and know that they are doing well, that shouldn’t be the reason you go eat there: it’s the quality of the food (ehm, product) that matters most.

Interestingly enough, while this blog is becoming a little more corporate, I am becoming a little more personal in what I share on Twitter…so let’s chat over there (@balsamiq) if you’d like!

Onward!
Peldi

P.S.If you can think of something we should blog about, don’t hesitate to ask! For instance, Marco is thinking of doing a set of more technical programming series of posts, and we’re thinking of doing a “customer success stories” series as well. Would those be interesting to you?

[Update: this post was picked up by Hacker News, you can follow/contribute to the discussion there]

— 8 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: “Failed to Save” Alert and Other Little Things

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 6th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 3 Comments

Hi everyone. This week’s release is a small one since we’re still mainly focused on the Mockups web application and on lots of other behind-the-scenes changes we hope to be able to share with you soon.

This is what’s in this week’s update:

• Mockups for Desktop: finally added an alert when saving a file fails (usually due to the file being read-only on the file-system). Thanks to all who contributed to this thread and especially to Day with the testing help!
  
• holding SHIFT when the mouse is over some controls will ignore them so that you can drag-select other controls. This is a small change but it’s pretty handy, here’s a quick video demonstration:
  
• Mockups for Desktop: added support for CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to loop through the open mockups backwards (thanks Leon Barnard and stephen.friedrich for the idea)
• Mockups for Desktop: made the activation window  a bit bigger and improved our licensing code a bit
• Mockups for Confluence: mockups with a + in their name now export to PDF
• Mockups for Confluence 1.5.8: when exporting to PDF, you no longer get an error
• fixed a few other bugs here and there

Updating Instructions

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Web Demo: here

Next on the List

For next week’s update I’d like to take care of this topic (enhancements to the linking feature to use it for user-testing) and make some progress on this topic (porting the linking feature to Confluence, JIRA and XWiki) so if you have any input on either please share it now!

Onward!

— 3 Comments