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

2 Responses to “Weekly Release: New Default Font (on OS X) and more”

1. Jose Says:
   May 29th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

   This is exiting news.
   Could you publish an example (perhaps video) on an example: Mocked up in Balsamic and then implemented and run using WebORB? Thanks Jose

2. Sergio Loscialo Says:
   June 26th, 2009 at 7:36 am

   Any thought to using Segoe Print as a replacement font for Comic Sans?

   [Peldi: Hi Sergio. Is Segoe Print a widely installed font? I'll do some research, thanks for suggesting it!]

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