Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Release: Performance, Bug Fixes and more…

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

Hi there. Sorry we skipped the last two weeks but things have been really busy here at Balsamiq central – we are days away from starting up the private beta program for the Mockups web app (announcement coming here soon).

In this week’s release we focused on performance and stability, but we were able to sneak in a couple of new little features as well.

Here’s the scoop on today’s changes:

• Performance Improvements – we made a number of changes here and there to increase the application’s responsiveness and reduce both its memory and CPU footprint. I hope you’ll agree with us that the changes are noticeable. This kind of work is never really “done”, so expect more improvements in the future as well
• Fixed an issue with the Paragraph control not properly aligning the text in some cases. Thanks Eric for the help on this!
• New little feature: we added a label at the top of the Property Inspector which tells you the type of control you have selected or how many controls are selected. Here’s a screenshot:

  

  Thanks so much Jeff, Michael and Humancell for convincing me to add this!

• Mockups for Desktop: Mac OS X “crash on startup” bug – this was a really hard one to fix, but I think we got it. Thanks so much for everyone who helped debug via the GetSatisfaction forums. Please report there if you still see this issue.
• Mockups for Desktop: if you switch to a different mockup while editing text, the text is automatically commited for you.
• Mockups for Confluence: you can now specify the width of the mockup image embedded in the page (GS thread). Just add the width in pixels as the 4th parameter in the macro, like this: {mockup:my_mockup_name|3|c|640} – this means “embed the 3rd version of the mockup called my_mockup_name, center it and make it 640 pixels wide”. The image’s height will adjust automatically to maintain the mockup’s aspect ratio. More details in our help page.
• Mockups for Confluence: we now fail more gracefully if a user deletes the version info in a {mockup} macro by accident (we add version 1 instead of throwing a stack trace)
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed two big bad old image-related bugs.

How do I update?

• 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

On other news, Balsamiq Studios turned one on June 19th. Has it really been a year already?

I will write a blog post about it in the next few weeks, but at the moment I want us to keep a low profile for a few weeks as we catch up with email and bug fixes, unleash the private beta of the web app and prepare for Balsamiq’s next growth phase.

Have a great week everyone!

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Weekly Release: WebORB Integration and More

by Peldi Guilizzoni. June 10th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 2 Comments

Hi there. The main feature of this week’s release is the previously announced WebORB integration.

The nice folks at MidnightCoders (the creators of the WebORB application server for RIAs) have created a web service which converts BMML 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.

To access this functionality, just select “Generate Flex Application (WebORB)…” from the Help menu:

You will see a nice little dialog with some explanation and a big “Generate Application” button:

The generation step only takes a few seconds, after which you’ll be able to download a .zip with all the files necessary to deploy it and run it from the midnightcoders’ website:

You will also find lots of instructions there on how to deploy it and a link to their support forums in case you need help with anything.

I am really excited about the possibilities this feature offers and I’d like to once again thank Mark Piller and all the guys at MidnightCoders for making this possible.

This feature is available on all versions of Mockups starting today. It doesn’t support linked pages at the moment, but we’re working on it…this is just the beginning!

Also in this release

With the help of the community we (and with “we” I mean Marco) fixed a number of bugs this week:

• fixed the “Can’t open multiple files from Windows Explorer” bug, which was a really tricky one!
• fixed “SHIFT-key appears to be “stuck” when moving selected objects” bug
• fixed an issue with the hand pointer in presentation mode not working properly when navigating between mockups with the left/right arrows.

How do I update?

• 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!

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Atlassian Summit Trip Report

by Peldi Guilizzoni. June 9th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business, Trip Reports — 5 Comments

Last week we participated in the Atlassian Summit, Atlassian’s first worldwide conference and Balsamiq’s first foray in being a conference sponsor.

Below is an account on what happened and what we learned from the experience, in hope it will be useful to some of you!

My Goals

When Atlassian approached me back in November asking me to sponsor for their first ever user conference I jumped at the opportunity. First of all, it was very affordable ($2,500 for a bronze-level sponsorship if I remember correctly). Second of all, it put something on the 2009 calendar so that we would have an opportunity to come back to San Francisco and see all of our friends, and third of all, it sounded like a great learning opportunity.

Oh, and it might be good for business as well.

Preparation

To help me prepare for the conference I hired my good friend Megara, whose full time job used to be organizing the American Ophtomology Association’s yearly conference (about 25,000 attendees) and is now a freelance event planner. The Atlassian summit had 320 attendees, so it was a walk in the park for her.

She helped me ask all the right questions to the Atlassian folks, who BTW did a splendid job at keeping sponsors informed of everything: their “Summit Sponsors” Confluence page was the one place to find all the info, and it was always updated, we got notified of every change…ah, the power of wikis.

A great idea on their part was to record the monthly webinars they hosted for sponsors and post the recordings in .m4v format so that we could listen to them on our iPhones. Brilliant! If this seems iPhone-snobbyish to you, know that I am not convinced that EVERYONE in the Bay Area has an iPhone, that’s pretty much all you see walking around the city.

Our marketing material

Megara thought we should have business cards to hand out. I had printed and cut out some lame ones in the past, so I asked her if she could come up with some prettier ones. Being the multi-talented woman she is, she drew some very pretty ones, and came up with a company logo to go with it as well:

I like the bottle and the “We add flavor!” tagline on it, so you might start seeing that around here more in the future.

We also created a flyer to hand out at the booth to talk about the product and our company. Atlassian mentioned that in order to use less paper they were going to print out the conference schedule on a single page and “accordion-fold it”, which I thought was a cool idea – yay environment!

So I came up with the following mockup for our own accordion-folded flyer:

One thing to note is the “Balsamiq Restaurant Guide” in the back, which has an interesting genesis: after setting up the 6-columns mockup and starting to fill it in I thought “what the heck am I going to write in all these pages!?.”

Given that question, I went back to my principle of trying to be useful to others in whatever I produce, so I thought: “the people I am going to give this to are likely from out of town and might stay in San Francisco for the whole week because of JavaOne, so what could be useful to them?” – but of course! A list of our favorite San Francisco restaurants and bars! The added benefit is that because of the restaurant guide people were going to be more likely to hold on to the flyer and look at it more than once. Ha! Marketing!

Once the mockup was ready, I made the decision to go low-tech: if Megara or I tried to create a design-y brochure, it would have come out mediocre at best (we’re not graphic designers, as this site or Mockups itself makes it very clear, and I didn’t want to spend money hiring one). So I asked Megara to use her beautifully legible and fun handwriting instead!

I think the result is more personal, fun and definitely stands out from the other flyers that were given out at the conference. I am really happy with it.

The booth

For the booth setup, we continued with our “personal touch” and food theme: I smuggled imported 24 little bottles of 75-year-old balsamic vinegar with me on the plane, to give out as a “conference special” to anyone who bought Mockups while at the conference (this turned out to be wishful thinking, as people needed to go back and get permission to buy from their bosses, which makes sense). Still, the little bottles looked very nice on our desk right next to the looping video demos.

Megara had also prepared a big tray of little caprese tartines, which we drizzled with the vinegar. It sure beat the candy other people were handing out! She also brought a big basil plant, which smelled wonderful and looked great.

Manning The Booth

I had never sponsored a conference or “worked the booth” at one before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. In fact, I didn’t really have time to think about it until Megara and I started setting up the booth. I told her “I hope no-one comes and talks to us” – I like when other people say nice things about Mockups but I don’t like to “pitch” or “sell” it myself, yuck.

So it took me a little while to get used to the thought of it, but Megara once again had the perfect advice: “don’t sell it, just talk about why you built it and how it solves the problem for you”. I can talk about that all day!

Manning the booth means doing a lot of talking…person after person comes up and asks you to describe your product to them, so you have to have a quick elevator-pitch ready to go and be able to repeat it over and over.

It was fun to meet current customers and potential new ones and to hear about their issues, I really recommend it.

The only issue I had was that I almost completely lost my voice on the first night, with 2 full days to go and two conference presentations to give. Sudafed, Emercen-C and Ricolas really saved me.

One of the busiest weeks of my life!

One last thing I wanted to share with you was my schedule while in San Francisco last week (click for a larger image):

I have to give huge props to Valerie and Marco who kept the company running while I was busy running around town – I only really was able to “work” (which means doing email these days) in little chunks of time in between things…all in all I made 3 visits to the bank, 3 visits to my accountants, spoke at two conference sessions, manned the booth 6 times and went to 8 social events with friends and former colleagues. I was happy to be able to squeeze in some quality father-son time with GJ in the end as well but MAN it was an exhausting week! I’m looking forward to my first vacation since Balsamiq started next week – we rented a big beach house near Charleston, SC with 17 of our best friends…lots of kids, beach…and relax!

Onward!

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Mockups for Confluence: new Small and Personal licenses!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. June 1st, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Hello everyone!

It is my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of two new Mockups for Confluence licensing options:

• the new Small license level:  10 mockup editors for just $400
• the new Personal license level: 3 mockup editors for just $149

The prices above get you a year of free support and upgrades, and an equal number of Mockups for Desktop licenses, so that your team will be able to work on your mockups even when offline – just like for all of our other Mockups for Confluence license levels.

The only difference is that support for these two new license levels is done exclusively via our GetSatisfaction forums, not via phone or email – you should know that we try to answer every question there as fast as we can, and we’ve never hung up the phone on anyone…

Why the new levels?

A good number of potential customers have emailed us in the past asking for smaller packages as a way to “get in the door” in their organizations.

A 10-editors pack is less intimidating than a 25-editors one, thus easier to justify for some.

I have wanted to offer these new packages for a while but I wanted to wait until we could support them adequately: now that Valerie’s on board, I am confident we’ll be able to continue to provide you with legendary support for the years to come.

Why is the Personal level not free?

I know that Atlassian offers a free Personal Confluence license for 2 users, which is great. I use it myself for my private documents.

Mockups for Confluence Personal is not free for three reasons:

• I want to offer support for it (Confluence Personal is unsupported)
• It comes with three Mockups for Desktop licenses (a $237 value)
• Confluence Personal + Mockups for Confluence Personal + 3 Mockups for Desktop licenses, all for $149. That’s a pretty good deal if you ask me!

Existing customers

Mockups for Confluence customers: want to downgrade? If you purchased the 25-editor Team edition in the last 30 days and would like to downgrade to a Small license, just email us at sales@balsamiq.com and we’ll refund you $200 and send you a new key for 10 editors.

Mockups for Desktop customers: want to upgrade? If want to switch to Mockups for Confluence and take advantage of these two new license levels we’d be happy to offer you a $79 discount so that you don’t have to pay for your Desktop version again: just email us at sales@balsamiq.com with your key info and we’ll send you a discount code.

Where do I start?

Head over to the Mockups for Confluence page for all the details!

Are you at Atlassian Summit?

If you are in San Francisco for the Atlassian Summit make sure to come meet us in the sponsor pavillion and say hi!

I am also giving a talk as part of the “10 Killer Confluence Plugins” session on Monday at 4:45pm and I will be participating in the “Building a Commercial Plugin Business” panel discussion on Tuesday at 9:00am.

Onward!

Peldi

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