Balsamiq Blog

Hello World!

by val. July 28th, 2009 under Company / Business — 8 Comments

Hello world!

As a member of Team Balsamiq for just about 3 months now, I have been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and welcoming good wishes from the Mockups community. We are onto something pretty groovy here. Being employee #2 at a startup is a little like being a kid’s first-ever babysitter, too. Peldi and I still step on each other’s feet now and again, like both of us answering a customer’s email within seconds of each other. We enjoy that, though, and each time it happens, we raise a toast and drink to our shared zealous customer care.

I love that our growing customer base comes from a wide variety of industries. Before I got into software, I had a bunch of different jobs, so it’s fun to relate my own life experiences to businesses I encounter at Balsamiq. For example, my undergraduate degree is in International Politics with a minor in Early Child Development. (Studying diplomacy and child psychology is fantastic preparation to be an executive assistant.)  It also allows me to understand that helping an assistant get a team’s software ordered and installed quickly makes us both heroes.

I lived in France and worked at a bilingual school, so language acquisition is fascinating to me. Hearing from  teachers who are using Mockups to prepare classroom projects is always uplifting. If you use Mockups in education, I would love to hear more about it! Also, as we are looking to localize Mockups some day, I look forward to working with our international community.

It’s great to hear from customers who work in the non-profit market. For about 5 years, I worked at an enormous Synagogue right on Lake Michigan in Chicago. I held a number of jobs there: teaching in the pre-school; secretary to the clergy; doing all the desktop publishing for the congregation. It was hilarious to be on tight deadlines, counting on Rabbis who were more concerned with a life-long time-line. It was fun and we eventually learned how to deal with the rhythms. Spending so many years limping along on out-dated office supplies and equipment made me appreciate frugal non-profiteers. Those lean years gave me the background to later found Project Bubbles at Adobe: I got a big suitcase so business travelers could drop hotel soaps and shampoos off. They are the perfect size to bring to the local homeless shelter. Try it at your company! It was super-easy and still remains hugely successful. Don’t hesitate to ping us for a free license (free@balsamiq.com) if you work for a charity.

When I joined Macromedia, one of my big passions was crafting. I made paper and loved to knit. Working for the President of Products, I had fluid communication with the execs from various teams, but found a fantastic way to network “where the rubber hits the road” was to help form a lunchtime knitting group called Needle Exchange. Members of all teams met once a week at lunch where we taught newbies the basics, worked on our projects, and shared news about work. After time passed, this morphed into a formal company-sponsored group where we adopted the Prenatal Homeless Shelter located in the neighborhood, making baby gear and hosting a quarterly baby shower for the neediest of San Francisco’s babies.

This is my first time working in such a small company, so I really cherish communicating with customers, whether on Skype (“balsamiq”), email or Twitter. Most of my day is spent while it’s night in Italy, so if you are near my time zone and have a question, ping me. If I don’t know the answer, we can learn together.

Val and Peldi (putting his “Like a Boss”-face on) getting new gear at the SF Apple Store back in May

I plan on sharing which tools we love and which we don’t, as well as customer success stories and anything special that happens around here that could be useful for other startups like ours.

I love my job!

— 8 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: 30-day trial for JIRA and more

by Peldi Guilizzoni. July 24th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 3 Comments

Hello all. We’ve been very busy in the last couple of weeks, releasing our first public beta of Mockups for FogBugz and opening up the hosted app’s private beta to a few selected “friends and family” members (more on both soon).

Even with all that, we were able to make some improvements here and there which we hope you’ll like.

New Mockups for JIRA trial policy

The biggest change is the way the Mockups for JIRA trial period works. We received a wonderful email from a perspective customer saying that the big ugly watermark on the generated mockups prevented his company from properly testing the plugin, which really opened my eyes about it. Thanks so much Michi Y., you rock!

I had resorted to the watermark option out of lazyness, it was just so much quicker to code at the time. Once again, the lazy approach proved itself to require more total time than the “do it once and do it right” approach I usually go for. So this week I completely rewrote the license manager for Mockups for JIRA. It now gives you a fully-functional 30-day trial, just like Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for XWiki (and soon Mockups for FogBugz). Ugly watermarks are a thing of the past.

On a personal note, this new license manager is the first one I wrote using the agile “Test Driven Development” methodology, and I have to say, I’m a total convert! I finally “get it”. I have seen the light, how could I have not been doing this until now? I’m so embarrassed. I want to publicly thank my friend Stefano Masini (@stefanomasini) for showing me the way to enlightenment, as he has done so many times before.

Other Changes

Here’s what else is new this week:

• all versions: if you save a mockup or switch to another mockup while editing text, the text you typed is saved for you. No more lost text! Thanks so much to Travis Jensen, Kevin Stevens and Theresa Neal for reporting it!
• all versions: double-clicking on an Icon control opens the Icon Library. For “Icon and Label” controls, you need to CTRL+double-click, as a simple double-click is used for editing text. Don’t worry about memorizing this, the tooltip will tell you. Thanks so much Michael Bourque and sergeySafonov for asking for this handy little feature!
• desktop version: a file opened via double-clicking or by dragging now gets properly selected. Thanks Rolf for reporting this!
• desktop version: fixed a big bad bug on “Save All” on quit. It only happened if you have multiple new files opened and dirty, then go to quit, select to save all and quit. The bug was that only the first of the new files was saved. It’s a rare workflow but it results in data loss (which is horrible), so make sure you update this time! Thanks so much Damon Van V. for reporting this and once again, so sorry I lost some of your work.
• all versions: lots of other little “polish” things here and there, like for instance in the Icon Library the selected icon stays selected if you change the icon size. Or the new little squares in the corner of the Property Inspector which hopefully scream “I’m draggable!”:
  

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

Other News

There’s lots going on. In fact, a little too much for my taste. We like to only bite off what we can chew, but the (sudden to us) FogBugz 7.0 release stuffed a bunch more stuff in our mouths unexpectedly. Sorry for the imagery, but it’s a pretty accurate depiction of how I feel right now. Don’t worry we’ll pull through, give us a couple of weeks.

The big news of the week – which will certainly help – is that Valerie switched from being a half-time to a full-time employee, and she promised to get over her shyness and introduce herself on this blog soon.

I also met with lawyers a few times to talk about protecting the Balsamiq brand and different contracts that I need them to write. Lots going on there, exciting stuff (if a bit dry).

We have lots more news coming up in the near future, so stay tuned!

Onward, this is so much fun!

Peldi

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

Convert Mockups to HTML+Image Maps Prototypes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. July 23rd, 2009 under Mockups Extensions — 6 Comments

Hi there. We at Balsamiq are terribly excited about the wonderful community-contributed tools and Mockups extensions that are being developed these days. To introduce the latest one we have asked its main developer, Vitorio Miliano, to write a short post for this blog – our first ever guest post!

Hi, I’m Vitorio Miliano, and I’m guest blogging here on the Balsamiq Blog to show you a little script I worked up that lets you turn Balsamiq Mockups wireframes into clickable HTML image maps.

I’m a Senior User Experience Consultant for a company called Optaros, and annotated wireframes are a significant deliverable of our design process. We’ve previously used OmniGraffle, Photoshop or straight HTML for these, but some teams have been using Balsamiq Mockups on projects since the beginning of the year, and it’s been working out really well.

It was working well enough that I wanted to be able to do more of the things we can do with HTML wireframes:

• I wanted to be able to use the mockups for user testing. (The first time I wanted to do this, presentation mode didn’t have the option to turn off the big cursor and hints yet.)
• I wanted to be able to distribute the mockups in a clickable series.
• I wanted to be able to demonstrate complicated interactions, like hover changes and preserving state across multiple wireframes.

This script is the start of those things. It generates an HTML file from each BMML+PNG you provide, giving you an image map with each object from the wireframe defined in it, along with boilerplate JavaScript (using jQuery) for reacting to the click and hover events for each area on the image. There are two samples on the page: the first shows the default output, using the jQuery “maphilight” plugin to see each area of the wireframe defined in the image map; the second shows changing the image on hover, and responding to a click.

Right now, that’s about all it gives you, but I’m using it here at Optaros and will be continuing to update it. Questions are already coming up. Should I be generating binaries instead of requiring Python? Should it automatically hook up the links you’ve already defined in the wireframe? What’s the right way to handle grouped or locked items?

We just finished a rich prototype in HTML for a film studio, and I’ll be replicating that in Balsamiq as a test case for more complicated effects, but I’m just one person in one design group. I’d really like to know what you think. I’d love to hear about how you’re using Balsamiq, and what you’ve wished you could do with the wireframe once it’s built, ways you’ve wanted to show them off, interactions you’ve wanted to demonstrate. Send me your BMML files and we’ll talk about it. Bug reports and patches are helpful, too (the script is open source, MIT licensed), and there’s a TODO.txt included, in case you want to poke at the code.

I hope you find this useful. My email address is vito underscore bmml at perilith dot com, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks,
Vitorio Miliano

Thank you Vitorio for providing this extension! We think it will be useful to lots of Mockups users and that some of them will want to contribute to it!

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

A New Plugin: Mockups for FogBugz!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. July 20th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 5 Comments

Synopsis:

• Balsamiq Mockups is now also a FogBugz 7 plugin
• public beta: not for sale but good enough to play with
• it will go on sale in a couple of weeks
• per user price: 1/3 of FogBugz
• product home page
• we’re stoked about it

Now for the full announcement…

Introducing Mockups for FogBugz

It is with great pleasure that we would like to introduce to you Mockups for FogBugz, the newest member of the Mockups family of plugins.

If you’re not familiar with FogBugz, you’ve been missing out. Also, I’d like to visit your planet one day.

FogBugz is a bug-tracking, project management, wiki tool built by Fog Creek software, and it fulfills all of the requirements we have for platforms we like to integrate with:

• it’s incredibly simple to use (usability FTW!)
• has clean, powerful APIs for us to use, and the company behind it is committed to their “extensibility story”
• it’s proven and it’s extremely successful (15,000 customers and counting)
• it’s made by people we look up to.

This last point is critical for us. Just like we look up to Atlassian for their values, transparency and killer products, we have learned SO MUCH over the years from Joel, via his books (a required reading for any Balsamiq employee) and his uber-famous Joel on Software blog, and follow many of the practices he teaches in our daily work.

So in other words, linking Balsamiq to FogCreek fits nicely in our  “be excellent and surround yourself with excellence” plan.

It’s a public beta

Mockups for FogBugz is not finished, but we decided to ship a demo of it today so that we can start gathering your feedback and get your help to make it as good as it can be.

We hope the beta period will be “short and sweet”, with new builds out almost daily. We are aiming to be able to remove the beta label by the end of August at the latest.

Here’s what’s currently missing:

• finish the licensing code (both for on-premise and on-demand customers)
• wiki integration
• filling in the gaps in the documentation
• support for image upload and linking mockups together

The current Integration

At the moment we integrate with the bug tracker. You edit a case, click on the “Add UI Mockup” link and are taken to the Mockups editor.

You can then create a new mockup or import one you worked on in the Desktop version (via the Import… command).

When you’re happy with it, you just select Mockup / Save and Close and see this dialog:

Any text you had written in the case before clicking on the link is already there for you, and you can add some more as well as giving the mockup a name.

Hitting save will take you back to the case, where you’ll notice both the mockup image and the .bmml file for you to download. This is useful if you want to edit your mockup on the Desktop while you’re offline, for instance.

That’s about it! Nice and simple.

The only other thing is that if you add a mockup to a case that already has some on it, you’ll be able to select one to start from.

Here’s what you’ll see when you get to the Mockups editor:

This is useful to create new iteration of the same mockup, or to add your two cents to someone else’s idea.

Plugin Pricing

We are going to sell two versions of the plugin, one for FogBugz on Your Server customers and one for FogBugz onDemand customers.

Both will cost roughly a third of FogBugz’s price, per user.

A small 3-User Pack of the on-premise license costs only $237, and it gets cheaper per user if you buy more licenses.

FogBugz onDemand customers pay only $8/user per month, and we only plan on charging for the number of mockup editors you selected that month (see our pseudo-code algorithm here). This means that if your team is heads down coding and not wireframing at all for a month or two, you can simply uncheck all editors and not get charged for that month. Pretty fair huh? We like that.

Here’s our full pricing details.

As always with our plugin versions you install on your server you will get an equal number of Mockups for Desktop licenses so that your designers, programmers and other stake-holders will be able to work on their wireframes while they’re offline.

If you purchased Mockups for Desktop in the last 30 days and would like to upgrade to a Mockups for FogBugz installation we’ll be happy to offer you a discount equivalent to your current purchase, just email us and we’ll set it up.

Why is this more expensive than your other plugins?

The main reason is because this is really two products in one: there’s the integration with the bug tracker (similar to our Mockups for JIRA integration) and the one with the wiki (similar to our Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for XWiki integrations).

The other reason is that we believe that 1/3 of the platform is a very good deal for our plugin, as it adds a very powerful feature to FogBugz. Also don’t forget that all of our plugin versions come with free licenses for Mockups for Desktop…so really you’ll be getting 3 products for the price of one.

Marco’s First Product

This plugin was coded entirely by Marco Botton, who as you might remember joined our company a couple of months ago.

I have thrown all sorts of challenges at him since day one, and he seems to be able to take it all. The FogBugz plugin, for instance, was a big one. I bought him a Vista license for his MBP, we had a 10 minute chat about the plugin, and off he went. He had never done any C# programming, client-server programming or plugin programming, but that didn’t stop him from developing this plugin FAST and with basically no supervision on my part.

He is, of course, modest and says that part of the credit goes to the FogCreek guys for being so responsive whenever he had a question, while being flexible enough to add APIs for our plugin when we needed them. And I’m sure that was part of it, still…I am impressed.

What next?

• Check out the Mockups for FogBugz home page
• Download the plugin to your FogBugz installation.
• Read the FogCreek announcement about FogBugz 7 or Joel Spolsky’s post about it.
• Send us all the feedback you have on it via our GetSatisfaction forums

If you’d like to keep updated on new releases you can follow us on Twitter or subscribe to this blog. We post every update here.

Onward!

— 5 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: New Font Sizes, Backgrounds and Bug Fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. July 14th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

Hi there, this week’s release is a small one but important nonetheless.

Here’s what’s in it:

• Added 24 and 28 font sizes, thanks @Florian_ and @saraonstine for tweeting about it!
• Added background color (and opacity) to the FieldSet, Tabs Bar and Vertical Tabs controls. The fact that they are no longer “empty” should also help with z-Ordering issues some users were having.
  
• Bug Fix: using Mockups for Desktop from the command line works again! So sorry for breaking it and thanks to Michael Matti and Aaron Ault for reporting it (here and here)!
• Bug Fix: link icons started showing up in exported PNGs again. I killed them again. Thanks Susan for reporting the bug!
• Bug Fix: the List header text didn’t update properly after my changes from last week. Thanks Crink for reporting it!
• Bug Fix: the Links property inspector wasn’t really working right. Many thanks to BG for reporting it and even sending me screencasts of how to make the bug happen!
• Bug Fix: the mouse disappeared after using Full Screen Presentation mode. Investigating this seemigly little bug uncovered a pretty bad memory leak as well. Both are fixed now. Thanks so much Rolf for reporting it and helping me reproduce it!

That’s it!

As you can see from above, we continue to implement changes and fix bugs based primarely on your feedback, so keep it coming!

This is our product, together we can make it as good as it can be!

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

Onward!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Little Improvements All Over

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

Hi there. Hard to give a good title to this blog post since the improvements and bug fixes we did this week really span the breadth of the application.

So let’s get right to it!

New features

• You can double-click on an image control to bring up the Image Import panel: I call this ‘the Megara feature’ because it came out of a quick usability session we did in which my friend Megara tried repeatedly to double-click on an image in order to load her photo into it. Genius! – BTW, this also works for CoverFlow.
  
• Desktop version: you can now drag image files from on to the application to add them to your mockup. Thanks Jaanus for the great idea!
• The List control now supports text size! Sorry this took a while but it required a full rewrite of the List control’s code…it was one of the first ones I wrote so it didn’t use the tricks used by Menus, Trees etc.
  
• the linking inspectors now have a “Show Link Inspector” and “Hide” toggle, so that they stay out of the way when you’re not in the “stiching a prototype together” phase of your work. Thanks so much Leon Barnard for the awesome idea, I really like it.

Bug Fixes

• property inspectors are now sorted alphabetically for a more consistent experience
• the icon inspector now resizes better (no more empty space when no icon is selected for instance)
• Mockups for XWiki: now works with both 1.0 and 2.0 Syntax! This was a big one for sure. Thanks so much Luis for helping with the implementation. You rock my friend.
• plugin versions: the name field of the save mockup dialog is now focused on open
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed another couple of bugs related to the contextPath (when will I learn?)

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

Other News

I made some changes to the Balsamiq Mockups home page to reflect a few recent changes and clean up the navigation structure:

• I added a “Web App” page, which I plan on populating with real content soon
• I moved the Mockups for Confluence, Mockups for JIRA and Mockups for XWiki pages down a level by adding the new “Plugin Versions” page, since we are planning on adding new versions and needed more room for them (more on that soon)
• I added a “Community” page, which I am super-excited about. It contains links to websites and tools that should help you make the most of your Balsamiq installation. I just love the community that has formed (and is growing) around our little tool…it’s a beautiful thing.

I hope you’ll like the new structure as much as we do.

As for the web app, we are going to start inviting some friends and family to the beta this week…right after we run a “restore data from backup” test…better to do it now while the data is not that important…

Onward!

— 3 Comments