Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Release: Performance, Bug Fixes and more…

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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