Balsamiq Blog

ANOTHER release! HUGE Performance boost, Smart Lorem Ipsum, z-Ordering shortcuts…

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 28th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 8 Comments

I know, releasing three new versions in five days is a bit excessive, but we’re so excited about this one that we didn’t want to sit on it, so we’re shipping our weekly update early this time.

Here’s what’s new:

• a HUGE performance boost when dragging controls around. Spurred by this tweet by Jeff Clark, I decided to take another look to see how we could improve the app’s performance dramatically. A couple of tweets and emails later, Jeff and I narrowed it down to the sluggishness being caused by our attempts to help you snap controls as you move them. Holding down the CTRL key (which temporarely disables snapping) made Jeff happy, so we just had to figure out how to disable snapping automatically when it wasn’t needed. The answer came to me out of nowhere: why not turn off snapping while you move your mouse quickly? You’ll slow down when you “reach your destination”, i.e. when you need help with snapping the most. Marco and I pair-programmed this (it took maybe 7 lines of code and 5 minutes), and it makes a world of difference. Try it out! This little clever trick smells like a patentable idea…but since I’m no huge fan of patents (a topic for another post), instead of filing for a patent I’m blogging about the idea, thus turning it into a “prior art” example for when someone does try to patent it one day. Consumers win!
• lorem ipsum with character count! You might not know this, but if you type “lorem” in a Text Area or Paragraph of Text control, Mockups automagically adds a bunch of lorem ipsum text for you. Well just the other day I stumbled on this very clever idea from Vinicius Krause: he interspersed the lorem ipsum text with character counts, so that you can easily insert “250 chars of jibberish” instead of just “some jibberish”. Nifty! We now do the same: thanks so much for sharing Vinicius!
  
• finally added keyboard shortcuts for layering (z-Ordering) operations: You can now CTRL+SHIFT+UP to bring to front, CTRL+UP to bring forward, CTRL+DOWN to send backward and CTRL+SHIFT+DOWN to send all the way to the back. A cool trick is that you can use a variation of those while dragging as well: SHIFT+UP brings to front, UP brings forward, DOWN sends backwards and SHIFT+DOWN sends to back. In other words, you can substitute the CTRL with a drag operation. Try it out!
• Mockups for Desktop: as part of a bigger long-term effort that has to do with custom controls and re-using assets, we added a little semi-invisible feature for this week: if you create a folder called “assets” next to your BMML file and copy images to it, you will see those images listed in the image pull-down menu automatically. We’re calling this the “Project Assets folder“:
  
  It gets better: you can also save images in a central location to share them amongst ALL of your mockups. This is useful for logos and other images you use all the time. We’re calling this the “Global Assets Folder“, and it’s located here:
  • On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.EDE15…\Local Store\assets
  • On Mac OS X: <your user home>/Library/Preferences/BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.EDE15…/Local Store/assets
  • On Windows Vista: C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.EDE15…\Local Store\assets
  • On Linux: ~/.appdata/BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.EDE15…/Local Store/assets

  We know, not the easiest location to find, but we’ll make it easier to get to in a future release. Like we said, this is step one in a long-term project. Treat it as an advanced (and handy!) feature for now.

• Bug Fix: image names now get properly “unescaped” in the image pulldown list.
• Bug Fix: Tree controls created with an old version of Mockups now have a border again when opened with the newest version (which has an option to turn off the border)
• Mockups for FogBugz (onDemand): improved wording of the plugin’s configuration page to make it clear that the first month is always free (this should go live in the next few days)

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
• Mockups for FogBugz: here (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
• Web Demo: here

We’re very happy with this release. Mockups is really “getting there!”

We are about to tackle some BIG features so you might see the release schedule slow down a bit for a little while, but we’ll try to deliver bits and pieces as we go along.

We also want to focus on bug-fixing for a little bit, so if there’s something that’s annoying you please LET US KNOW! We can only fix what we know is broken!

Onward!

— 8 Comments

 

 

 

Mockups for FogBugz, now shipping!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 26th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you all know that Mockups for FogBugz is now officially out of beta and available for immediate purchase, both for your installed FogBugz server or for your FogBugz onDemand account.

A few links:

• Mockups for FogBugz product page
• The Mockups for FogBugz Online Documentation (with lots of screenshots!)
• Both versions of the plugin come with a 30-day free trial, so why not give it a try today? Here are the easy installation instructions, both for FogBugz on-premise and on-demand.

That’s it for the announcement. We already sold 5 copies of the on-premise version (before we even officially launched), so we’re excited about this integration. I have to say that it came out really well….if we hadn’t built it ourselves I’d definitely buy it for our team!

I want to write a separate post in the near future about a few things we’re doing with this plugin that are new to us and might be interesting for others, like the fact that the on-premise version can have multiple licenses at the same time, or the fact that the on-demand version is a “SaaS-on-someone-else’s-servers” version. I also want to talk about a decision made during development that almost gave me a panic attack. Fun!

Many many thanks go out to Marco Botton, our rockstar developer here who became a .NET programmer overnight, and of course to the FogCreek crew (especially David Fullerton) for their invaluable help and support.

Alright, check out Mockups for FogBugz now!

Onward!

— No Comment

 

 

 

BAM! Geometric Shapes, Multi-Line support, Oh my!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 24th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 9 Comments

Hello friends! We’ve got a great show for you today!

Let’s get right to it.

Multi-line Support in the Data Grid and iPhone Menu!

You read it right: you can now FINALLY type multi-line cells within a Data Grid. Just enter “\r” to insert a “carriage Return” in your table’s cell. Here’s a sample screenshot:

It’s that simple. I am SO thankful for all of those who’ve asked for this feature and stuck with us for so long without it. And also to Marco for whipping this out in about 4 hours!

For the iPhone menu, the syntax is the same:

Notice also that Marco also added support for escaping commas in this control, something you couldn’t do before.

New “Geometric Shape” control

You’ve asked for it over and over…and we resisted adding it for a long time. The other day I had an epiphany, I figured out how to add this without affecting the focus of the app (or at least I hope so), so here it is: a tiny little control with a hidden power: the Geometric Shape control (formerly in the app as the “Round Button” control):

This little and purposely unassuming control packs a powerful punch. Add one to the stage and look at its property inspector:

You can choose one of six different shapes, and for each you can specify a border color, a fill color and fill opacity. Oh, and the control also supports icons and text on it, and is linking-enabled.

We hope it will enable you to really unleash your creativity when using Mockups, without hindering your productivity – that’s why all this stuff is so hidden in a property inspector. We are NOT building a generalized diagramming / flow-charting tool, OK? This is more or less as much as you’ll get when it comes to generic shapes, please don’t ask for the ability to rotate shapes, connectors and things of that nature. Mockups is a wireframing application. There are plenty of awesome other apps out there for diagramming.

Labels on Arrows and Images

Another improvement many of you have asked for is the ability to add labels to Arrow controls, which helps when specifying application flow between different screens.

While we were at it we also added text support to the Image control. Text is optional on both control types of course (and the default text is blank).

To edit text in an image control, use ENTER, F2 or CTRL+double-click (a simple double-click will launch the image import dialog). Don’t worry about memorizing this, it’s in the tooltip.

Other enhancements

• You can now remove the border around a Tree control. Thanks so much Martin and Joes for asking for it. And to Brian Topping too!
• On the Desktop, CTRL+ALT+S now maps to “Save As…”. Hurray! Thanks Veddermatic for asking for it!
• On the Desktop, you now get a nice and friendly “Thank you for registering!” message when registering, so that you know your key was accepted.
• On the Desktop, the little file tabs at the bottom now have tooltips, so when you have a lot of them open you’ll be able to tell which is which more easliy!

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed a permission issue with Mockups for Confluence where read-only users could add/edit mockups if they knew the (long and complex) URL to go to.
• The color picker in the Color property inspector now shows the correct color when a shape is selected.
• Same issue with the font size of the selected controls. Titles will no longer show “13″, so to speak. Finally!
• Made a couple of performance improvements here and there.
• The text of the Sticky Note control no longer spills over sometimes. Thanks Berl for bringing up this very important issue.
• The red dot in the Line Chart control is gone. Thanks essepi and others for noticing!
• The Desktop application now uses its last window size and position even when you launch it by double-clicking on a BMML file
• If the Desktop version is not registered it will no longer load BMML files loaded via a double-click or drag+drop operation. Sorry guys, those are features for paying customers only.
• Fixed an issue when sometimes data was lost when saving while quitting! Please update now before it happens to you!
• Fixed an issue where Mockups would quit if you did this: have some dirty mockups. Then quit, then hit cancel if prompted, then hit save again. The app would quit. I know, weird. Well it’s fixed now.
• I didn’t mention this last time, but you now get prompted when trying to overwrite an existing file on Save As… Many thanks to Claudia for reporting it!

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
• Mockups for FogBugz: here
• Web Demo: here

What’s next on the list?

We have stopped accepting new members to the web app beta.

Mockups for Fogbugz is shipping this week-end! Head over to the product page to see the final pricing details and look at this extensive documentation we are putting together for it! We’ve already sold 5 copies of the On-Premise version, so we’re really excited about finally “unleashing” this plugin onto the FogBugz community!

I have also posted a photo of our fall/winter roadmap on Twitter a few days ago. Here it is again:

Notice how Multiline support is already done, check!

Speaking of Twitter, check out our new Twitter background. We’re so thankful you guys!

Having so much fun it’s almost unfair,

Peldi and the Balsamiq team

— 9 Comments

 

 

 

A little market-y post

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 14th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 2 Comments

Hi there, a quick market-y post to let you know about a few things that happened today:

• We are sponsoring LessConference, a one-day conference happening in Jacksonville, Florida, on Oct 17th. We love the speakers, we liked the other sponsors, we like what the organizers stand for. In other words, we wanted to be part of that club, so when the guys at LessEverything approached us about the sponsorship, we jumped at the chance. What’s in it for you? We’re giving away TWO tickets for the conference! All you have to do to win one is head over to our Facebook page, become a fan (in case you still haven’t), and “like” Valerie’s post about the raffle. We’ll pick two names out of the pool randomly in 48 hours. Go!



• I was interviewed by Jason Cohen of “A Smart Bear” fame, one of my favorite blogs in the world wide internet webs. It’s a long and deep interview, which might be interesting to you. Here’s the link.



• There’s a Twitter Poll (a twtpoll?) going on titled “What’s your favorite wireframing tool?”, and we have a big lead. Thanks so much! Head over there if you’d like to vote (please only vote once) or click here to see the results.

OK this concludes this quick “tooting our own horn” interruption, we’re going back to work now.

— 2 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Linking in Confluence, Gray Charts and more!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 14th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 2 Comments

Hi everyone. Here we are again with our weekly update. This one is so big it took us 2 weeks to complete it!

We’re releasing it a day early because we have some other big changes we want to get started on right away (namely integrating Mockups for FogBugz hosted with Spreedly and adding linking functionality to Mockups for JIRA).

The biggest feature this week is the anticipated ability to link mockups together in Confluence. Full announcement here. Thanks to all of you who tested it. Here’s the video again if you need a refresher on how it works.

As part of the change above, the behavior of the linking feature has changed in Mockups for Desktop as well: now if you click around your prototype while in full-screen presentation mode Mockups will no longer be opening all the mockups for editing. If you want to “follow a link for editing” you can do so by ALT+clicking on the little arrow icon while in edit mode.

I also had to change the BMML file format a bit to accomodate this new feature. The good news is that creating image maps for links from BMML files is now extremely easy. Details are in the BMML docs already.

While we’re on Mockups for Confluence: I also fixed a bug in which Confluence “broke” the {mockup:id|version} macro by adding a \ before the | we need between the mockup name and the mockup version. Now sure why Confluence decides to escape the pipe, but we now deal with it properly.

Charts are now gray! The red and blue colors grabbed too much attention and looked somewhat childish. Here’s a before-after picture:

I also fixed a few memory leaks and performance bugs here and there, I hope you’ll notice the difference after using the app for long periods of time.

Mockups for Desktop now deals with read-only files much better. See this thread for the full description. Thanks so much Stephan Friedrick for your help designing and testing this little but important feature!

I also removed the annoying “file not found” alert which you saw on launch if you moved a file that was in the current “session”. Thanks to Alex X B. for reporting this (via email) and helping me test it.

Update on the Mockups Hosted private beta: we’ve made significant progress on the application this past week, and I think we’re almost screencast-ready, so stay tuned for an announcement here very soon. I have added about 25 people to the beta, and have over 100 people to choose from for the next (and maybe final?) batch. So I’ve decided to stop accepting requests to be on the beta, at least for now. If you’d like to get notified when it goes live I suggest subscribing to our (somewhat dormant) newsletter here.

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
• Mockups for FogBugz: here
• Web Demo: here

On Our TODO

Here’s what we’re going to be working on this week:

• Marco is almost done integrating Mockups for FogBugz with Spreedly (for FogBugz hosted customers), which means that we’ll start selling the plugin very soon! Exciting!
• more work on the web app beta
• I’ll start the work of porting the linking feature to Mockups for JIRA

Onward!

— 2 Comments

 

 

 

Let’s meet in person for a change!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 13th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 2 Comments

Hello friends!

Some members of team Balsamiq are going to be attending the following conferences and events this fall:

• October 4th-7th: Valerie will be in Los Angeles for Adobe MAX
• October 16th-18th: Peldi will be in Prague at WebExpo 2009 giving a talk on “Lessons learned building a successful microISV“. We also reserved a booth at a pub for Sat the 17th at 9pm. Come join us, we’re buying!
• October 21st-23th: Valerie will be in Half Moon Bay representing Balsamiq at AtlasCamp
• November 8th-11th: Marco will be in San Francisco attending The Business of Software conference
• November 20th: Marco will be in Bologna for Agile Day (about 1Km from our office!)
• November 21st: Peldi will be in Cambridge England for Cambridge Geek Day, giving a talk temporarily titled “My Story, Useful Quotes and Q&A”

If you’re attending any of these events, we’d love to meet you there. You know what we look like, so just come up and say hi, we’ll give you a little Balsamiq sticker for your laptops!

— 2 Comments

 

 

 

No weekly release this week, but we’ve been busy!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 9th, 2009 under Company / Business, Mockups — No Comment

Hi there, just a quick note to let you know that we’re not going to do a weekly release this week. We’ve been working on some big features so we want to give you guys a little more time to test them before we merge them into the 1.6 branch.

Here’s what we’ve been working on – as you’ll see, we’re still in “finish up what we started” mode, fixing bugs and finishing old features (or product versions) before we add new and exciting features.

• We started porting the linking feature to the plugin versions of Mockups. The first is Mockups for Confluence, here’s the announcement and here’s a little video of the new feature in action:
  
  We plan on releasing this next week. We’re working on porting the linking feature to Mockups for JIRA and XWiki as well, stay tuned.
• As part of the above effort, we have changed how Mockups for Desktop behaves when in full-screen presentation mode: when you navigate from one mockup to the next we no longer open each file for editing, so that when you ESCape out of full-screen you’ll be taken back to where you started and won’t have a million tabs open. If you want to follow a link for editing, simply ALT+click on the little arrow icon and Mockups will load the file for you to edit. This change is not in 1.6 yet but we’d love it if you could try it out on our prerelease build here. Let us know what you think! We plan on releasing this next week.
• Added a few new FAQs to the Mockups Support Page: “How do I update to the latest version of Mockups for Desktop?“, “How can I use non-latin text in Mockups?“, “What’s the difference between version X and Y of Mockups?”, “How do I transfer a Mockups for Desktop license from a user to another?” and “Do you offer educational discounts?“
• Made more progress on the web app beta, we’re adding more users tomorrow.
• You can now purchase maintenance licenses for Mockups for Confluence, Mockups for JIRA and Mockups for XWiki directly from the website. I can’t believe it’s been a year since we started selling those already!
• Marco finished the integration of Mockups for FogBugz with the FogBugz wiki. We published a new version for you to test (download it from here), and we’ll put out a proper for-sale version up very soon.

I think that’s it for now. Thank you in advance for the testing help and the feedback!

Onward!

— No Comment

 

 

 

“Weekly” Release: FogBugz Wiki integration and more!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. September 2nd, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Hello everyone! We hope you’re having a fantastic first week of September!

We know, we just did a weekly release this past Sunday…so this is not really a “weekly” release. Still, we couldn’t wait to share these new exciting updates with you, so we’re releasing them now.

Here’s what’s new in today’s release:

• Mockups for FogBugz: WIKI integration! Marco’s been really busy, and now you can add UI Mockups to your FogBugz wiki pages as well as your bugs and other cases. We’re really excited about this, it was the big missing piece of the integration. If everything checks out we might even start selling the plugin in the next few days, hurray! Here’s a screencast we quickly threw together.

  Apologies for the lack of audio and the length, we didn’t have time to make it shorter! We’ll do a better screencast soon, but in the meantime we’d love for you to test out the plugin!

• all versions: the Quick Add list now properly disappears when you click outside of it
• all versions: you can now use CTRL+, CTRL- and CTRL+0 (or APPLE+, APPLE- and APPLE+0 on OS X) to change the text size quickly. Thanks so much Val for asking for it! It’s really a big speed boost, you should try it!
• all versions: the little link icons no longer show up in exported PNGs (they were still there if controls were grouped)
• Mockups for Desktop: cancelling out of a print operation no longer “breaks everything”
• Mockups for Desktop: in the Help menu the “Register…” menu item turns into “Unregister from this Computer…” after you register (click on the image to enlarge):
  
  This is useful if your company bought a volume pack and you want to transfer someone’s license to a different person…you could do this via the command-line interface already but that was way too hard for non-technical users. This should make your life (and ours) easier.
• Mockups for Desktop (linux): using the arrow keys for navigating through linked mockups while in presentation mode now works on linux as well (sorry about that!)

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
• Mockups for FogBugz: here
• Web Demo: here

We are continuing to make progress on the hosted application, and I have started work on porting the linking feature to all of the other for-sale versions of Mockups.

One more thing: there’s this poll going on at InsideRIA which asks people to vote for the best RIA of 2009…we don’t like to ask for favors and we don’t really need more attention at the moment so we haven’t spammed our customers asking them to vote, but since I’m posting this I thought I’d mention it. So if you have a few seconds go and vote for us if you’d like!

Onward!

— No Comment