Balsamiq Blog

Tools we use for running our startup

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 30th, 2009 under Company / Business — 39 Comments

Hi there. I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time, but things were still evolving too much for me to come up with a definite list.

Now that we’ve been in business for a whole 15 months, the dust has settled a bit on the tools we use in our day-to-day operations.

We’re pretty happy with our tool set so I thought we’d share it in hope it will be useful to some, and hopefully to get your feedback on it!

We are NOT affiliated with any of the companies that make the tools below, just happy customers.

I do know some of the companies below are Mockups users, which makes me SO proud. Come out in the comments if you are, it will be a big lovefest!

Also, apologies for the OS X-heavy list…perhaps someone has a Windows-heavy list of equivalent tools to share?

Internal tools

Apple laptops – our hardware of choice. Mariah and Valerie work off of their MacBook Air laptops and Marco and I each use a 17-inch Macbook Pro (with external 24-inch LED Cinema Displays). We also have a mac mini (our “cash register”), and we’ll probably get Valerie a new 27-inch iMac soon (the Air is awesome for traveling, but not the most powerful machine for work.)

The iPhone – the first thing you get when you join Balsamiq as an employee. Aside from being a great perk, it’s so useful in so many ways that I can’t imagine life without one. Also most of the tools mentioned below have an iPhone client, so it’s great for us to “carry the whole office” with us at all times with no extra effort. Last but not least, I find it a great source for UX inspiration.

Typinator – I cannot count how many hours this has saved Mariah, Valerie and me. If you use email for work, you need this. It’s a tiny little tool that listens to your keystrokes and expands what you type if it matches a certain shortcut you previously specified. Just like typing “lorem” in Mockups expands it to a full “lorem ipsum” paragraph. We have A TON of shortcuts (email replies, URLs…) saved up and we share our shortcuts via DropBox. I found this tool via a Guy Kawasaki tweet, and we now each have a license. Awesome.

DropBox – If you don’t use DropBox, I will shake my head at you in disapproval. It’s “shared network drives” taken into this millennium. Nothing to set up, works across firewalls, brilliantly easy to use, insanely cheap. If they go public one day, I’ll be buying stock. We use it for ALL of our internal files, from graphic assets to contracts, invoices, UI mockups, screenshots, and accounting data (we’re totally transparent internally, even more than externally). We even built a feature of Mockups that enables near-real-time collaboration by using DropBox!

Confluence Hosted – the other place where we keep our documents is an instance of Atlassian Confluence (hosted by Atlassian). It comes with Mockups for Confluence pre-installed, which is killer. It’s basically our Intranet (and our browsers’ home page). It has a list of links that we share, an RSS feeds for all the mentions of Balsamiq on the Internet, and most importantly meeting notes, documents we want to collaborate on (like drafts of new pages for the site or blog posts). Confluence is the best wiki software I know of, and every time I use it I wish I needed to use it more…I used to live in it when I was back at Adobe and I miss it! I’m serious. Good software has that effect on people.

Yammer – Yammer is like a “Twitter intranet”. We use it to share links and to help each other with internal issues. We also use it to tell everyone else what we’re working on, and to share an occasional viral Youtube video. Since our team is distributed, this is our water-cooler. Very effective and took no time to get adopted (even faster than Twitter itself). To give you an idea, if we didn’t have it we’d be looking for a replacement or try to build our own. We use the Gabble client (it’s native OSX, uses a ton less ram than their AIR client) and their own client on our iPhones.

Microsoft Excel – we use this for our “beans”, i.e. our big spreadsheet where we record all sales and expenses. We keep the file on Dropbox and update it daily (Val updates it with the help of a script Marco wrote and I double-check it). Excel has its quirks (1904 date format anyone?) but overall there’s no better tool to manage thousands of rows of data and make pretty charts out of it.

PivotalTracker – you probably heard me rave about it before. PivotalTracker is as simple as a TODO list you might write on paper, but online, shared and collaborative (try the real-time collaboration and be amazed). Every bug or feature request we get ends up on our pivotal list. Once in a while we go through and prioritize the next few weeks, but we’re not religious about following it (customer issues always take precedence for instance). We have 3 projects in Pivotal right now: one for Mockups as a whole, one for the web app and one for Valerie and mine’s shared TODO list, so that we always know what we’re working on. The only problem with PivotalTracker is that it’s free. I’d feel MUCH better if I was paying for it, I need them to stay in business forever!

Apple Preview (for PDFs) – I find that I use the Mac’s native PDF-handling abilities quite a bit. We print stuff ot PDF for our records, sometimes remove pages, sometimes merge two PDF files together (a simple drag and drop!)…it’s nice. If we were on Windows we’d probably be buying Acrobat Professional to do most of the same things.

Parallels – we use Parallels mostly for testing Mockups on different flavors of Windows and Linux (I have an Ubuntu Hardy image as well as an XP, Win 2000 Server and a Vista one, while Marco can run Vista , 2 flavors of XP, Ubuntu and soon Windows 7). The other reason is to run QuickBooks, but hopefully that will soon be a thing of the past (see below).

Writeroom – Writeroom is what I’m writing this post in and what I use any time I have anything to write (I usually end up copying and pasting the text into Confluence or Wordpress). It’s a wonderful piece of ZenWare and it inspired me to keep Mockups as clutter-free as possible. If you need to focus on your writing (and you should!), I highly recommend it.

Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop – Fireworks is my “go-to” graphics editor, I use it almost daily. It’s just fast and easy to use. Illustrator is what I use when I need to design something, though thankfully I am now able to outsource as much design work as possible (it’s better for everyone). Photoshop I can barely use any more, I learned it maybe 10 years ago and haven’t touched it much since, but that’s what designers use so I’m using it to interact with them, plus there are a few things that Fireworks just can’t do.

Skitch – if you need to put an annotated screenshot online, Skitch is the fastest, easiest and most fun way to do it. I just love tools like this: it doesn’t try to boil the ocean, it does one thing, does it well and makes it fun. Killer. Marco says he likes LittleSnapper as well.

Screenflow and Screenr – I use Screenflow to record all the screencast for the website. It’s very well done, very mac-like. Great UX. I usually record the video first, then record the audio and add it to the video track. Screenflow lets me do that easily without having to launch GarageBand or other audio-editing software (which is a software category that generally makes me queasy .) I also use Screenr if I need something quick to show a customer for instance. Also great UX, and cross-platform (it’s a Java applet). Awesome. Some people also use Jing for this stuff but somehow it never stuck with me (it used to crash quite a bit plus that little non-standard “yellow ball UI” never really sat well with me).

QuickSilver – I use this over the built-in Spotlight because I find it faster. It also has a ton of plugins and cool features. Thanks to Elliot Winard for showing this to me back in the day!

Last.fm – I used to be a Pandora enthusiast when I lived in the US, but alas, that’s not available here in Italy. Last.fm has proven itself to be even better, with the “social discovery” features helping me not get totally bored with my music all the time. It’s worth paying for an account just for the “only play my loved tracks” feature.

Tweetie and TweetDeck are the Twitter clients we use. I like how little memory Tweetie uses but it’s been a bit flaky lately (the search column doesn’t update any more?), so I’m back to Tweetdeck for now.

Google Reader – is what we use to read (and share internally) RSS feeds. I follow quite a bit of blogs (here’s an OPML file with a subset of them about startups), and Reader has the best UI. I used to use it as part of iGoogle but I have now come to love the full-screen UI of it.

Coding Tools: Adobe Flash Builder, Flash Authoring, Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio Express. Mockups is a Flex app, so Flash Builder (I still call it Flex Builder, sorry) is our IDE. The UI controls in Mockups are hand-drawn by my wife Mariah, and taken into Adobe Flash authoring (via Fireworks) to turn them into something that Flex can use.

For our server-side coding, we use eclipse for java development (Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki), NetBeans for the web app (the back-end is in grails) and Visual Studio Express for C# development (Mockups for FogBugz). We also use Firebug to help us with jQuery development.

Charles – Charles is essential if you do anything client-server. It inspects requests/responses like nobody’s business. The problem with Charles is that I’ve been able to use the free demo for years, their limitations are too loose! I know tons of people that use it, but don’t know anyone who’s paid for it. I think I’ll go pay for it right now, it’s a really good piece of software.

Deployment tools: for source-code-repository, I used to use Perforce when I was alone but it’s too expensive for a small business like ours, so we switched to Subversion, mostly because it’s mature and has lots of 3rd party tools that support it (before you have a fit, we’ll be using git for sharing some open-source scripts soon). One such tool is Versions, an OS X native client for it with great usability. I still use the command-line interface for merging and other complex stuff, but for day-to-day coding Versions is quite nice.

For building our products we use a combination of Ant and Maven scripts, all continuously built (and deployed!) via CruiseControl. I know that CC is like living in the dark ages when it comes to CI servers, but I’m pretty happy with it, it’s very reliable. Plus it’s free. We might invest in something that lets us run parallel builds sometimes soon, as we have 8 different builds going off after every check-in right now, which takes about 10 minutes. We’ll be sharing some of our build scripts soon (see below).

We also just installed Atlassian FishEye. I was REALLY excited about it for about two days, but haven’t really looked at it since. I suspect that for a team of 2.5 developers like ours it might be overkill, but maybe I’m not using it right. I thought I’d mention it because it really seems like a very well-made and powerful product.

Slicehost – we chose to host our web app on Slicehost for 3 reasons: reasonable price, outstanding customer support and the best technical documentation I’ve ever seen (I might write a blog post about it one day..it’s concise, to the point, funny and makes you feel like a super-human). I hope Slicehost realizes how important PickledOnion’s articles are to their overall success and compensate him (her?) accordingly. A word of caution, Slicehost can get pretty pricey if you install memory-hogging apps like Tomcat on it. Still reasonable, but their cheapest option won’t make it.

Apple Keynote – I only just recently started using, for my WebExpo talk in Prague last week. All I gotta say is WOW. Keynote’s usability kicks the pants off of Powerpoint…it’s really a wonderfully designed piece of software. I was especially impressed with their progressively disclosed snap lines, which are SO MUCH BETTER than the ones we have in Mockups. It must be nice to be Apple and have tons of brilliant engineers and designers to help you, I’m jealous!

QuickBooks – oh, man. We use QuickBooks Assisted Payroll for Valerie’s payroll. It’s nice and automated, but still requires Val to launch Parallels in order to launch their Windows-only application, which is NOT the pinnacle of usability…we just asked our accountants if we could pay them a monthly fee to take this painful part of Valerie’s job away from us. There’s plenty of great software to replace QuickBooks (our friends at LessAccounting know a thing or two about it), but IMHO the best software to use for certain things is one that you don’t even use yourself! Much better to have professionals use whatever they like best.

Our own scripts – we wrote a bunch of little scripts to automate some of the most tedious tasks. We plan on sharing those as open-source soon, and we’re going to be hosting them on GitHub because that’s where all the cool kids are these days , and actually looks REALLY nice for open-source projects.

Customer Facing Tools

GMail – we use Google Apps for your Domain so all of our mail is handled by GMail. I actually end up forwarding all of my email (personal and for business) to balsamiq@gmail.com because the “consumer” version of GMail gets Google Labs features earlier than the other one. GMail’s search, threaded view and filters are absolute must-have for us, we couldn’t run our business without them. Also, the “Default to Reply All” feature in Labs is effectively replacing our need for a CRM tool (even though we looked into ZenDesk and it looked nice, especially since it integrates with GetSatisfaction).

Marco wanted me to mention that he’s a mac purist and uses Mail.app instead. Oh well. We also use Mail.app on our mac-mini to run the cash register…but that’s a subject for another post.

Skype – where to begin. Our phone number +1 (415) 367-3531 is a SykpeIn number, meaning that if you call it both Valerie’s computer in Foster City and mine in Italy will ring. When one of us answers, the other laptop will stop ringing. How cool is that? Valerie and I use Skype internally for our daily catch-up meetings…we use it as an instant messenger, we use Skype chats as “war room” for development, we use the new screen sharing feature all the time (which is a bit flaky but nicely integrated). I have been interviewed for a number of podcasts via Skype as well. If there was one piece of installed software in the last 7 years that changed the World we live in forever, Skype might be it. Can you believe Skype is only 7 years old? Can you remember life before it? I can’t.

Adium – for instant messaging. This stuff is boring by now, but Adium connects to everything and just works.

Freshbooks – when I first started Balsamiq I dealt with invoices and estimates by hand, I used one of the default templates that came with Microsoft Word. I am SO glad that we make enough money to be able to afford the (very affordable) Freshbooks. It has great usability, it’s very fast to use, it’s a web app so Val and I can access the account at any time, and most importantly it has APIs! I just spent a couple of days last week cooking up some PHP scripts that allow our customers to generate estimates (quotes) and invoices by themselves when they need them. This freed up an hour of Valerie’s time EVERY DAY, just like that. Better living through scripting! Freshbooks also has GREAT customer service, plus they seem to be really nice people overall. We’re happy to support them.

GetSatisfaction – you’ve probably heard me rave about GS before. I was lucky enough to be one of their first paying customers so I’ve seen it get better and better. I REALLY love what they stand for and how they put the customer and the company on the same level. They win on UX as well, with the smiley faces and the “gardening tools” being right there where you expect them to be. I hope they do well, I really do.

Payment Processors: Paypal, Google Checkout, E-Junkie and Spreedly – We use E-Junkie as a shopping cart. Their name is terrible, but their admin UI is pretty good and flexible enough for all the different things we need to do (generate keys based on the names, etc). It integrates nicely with both Paypal and Google Checkout, and I recommend using both since Paypal won’t accept as many credit cards in as many countries as Google Checkout does. We also decided to pay $30/month for Paypal’s Virtual Terminal (I think that’s what it’s called), which lets us take credit-card orders over the phone. Best $30/mo ever spent, I wish we had done it earlier. Pays for itself immediately.

We just recently started using Spreedly as a payment processor for our hosted offerings, and we’re very happy with them. The APIs are super-easy to pick up, they have good docs, accessible support and overall seem like good, trustworthy people. I like their administration’s UI as well. Thanks to Ryan Carson for recommending them in this talk.

Delicious – I think I’ll write a separate blog post about this, but I use delicious extensively. Want a few examples? Look at the balsamiq_press tag, or the balsamiq_reviews tag, or the balsamiq_love one. It’s SUPER useful, I’ll write more about it I promise.

Twitter – I wrote about Twitter before, and can’t wait to buy as much stock as I can afford in it when they go public.

Facebook – I admit that I never “got” Facebook much before Mariah and Valerie showed me the way. If Yammer is our internal water cooler, our Facebook page is our “community water cooler”. Valerie, who has effectively taken over our page there, says that it’s like this blog, but less formal (I know, can you be less formal than this? I didn’t think so either). I love it! The best part about it is that we can see actual FACES of our fans and customers, it’s so magical. We are not a company selling software to customers: we are people helping other people ridding the World of bad software, one wireframe at the time. Social media really brings this point home, I love it. I wouldn’t want to live in any other time in history actually.

For this website, we use Drupal for every page except for the blog section, for which we use Wordpress instead. I think I use about 10% of what Drupal can do, but it works well enough for me. Wordpress is Wordpress, there’s a reason it’s the standard.

Posterous – ah, another one of my favorite tools. SO simple. No, you don’t understand, it’s SO simple. We use it for MockupsToGo, our community site. Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal are awesome and always put my own customer support response-times to shame. I swear they respond INSTANTLY! They also implemented a feature “just for me“, which makes me feel all nice and special. I heart them!

That’s it for now!

Ok so first of all, I have made a Twitter list of all the tools I mentioned above that I could find: http://twitter.com/balsamiq/essential-startup-tools.

Then, are you using these tools? Do you think we should swap out any of them for a better one? Note that what we care the most about are usability, customer service and the people behind the tool. Features come a distant 4th.

Note: I plan on deleting comments that are too “sales-y” or “pitch-y”. If you want to pimp your product, get someone else to do it. If it doesn’t strike me as a truthful endorsement, I’ll delete the comment for everyone’s sake. You have been warned.

Peldi

P.S.There are some interesting comments over at Hacker News about this post.

— 39 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: OS X Extras and more!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 28th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 4 Comments

Update (6:09pm GMT): we have posted 1.6.42 which fixes the a bad issue with the 1.6.41 release. Give it a try!

Hi there! I hope this finds you well.

Things are crazy busy around here these days (no, really, you don’t understand, it’s REALLY crazy right now).

Nevertheless, we wanted to share a little update with you guys.

Here’s what’s new this week:

The Balsamiq Mockups OS X QuickLook and Spotlight Plugins

We’re heavy mac users here at Balsamiq, and Marco’s not-so-secret passion is native Cocoa development. So when a few of you asked us for a QuickLook plugin, we thought it was a great idea. This past week-end we realized that we could leverage the command-line interface of Mockups for Desktop to generate previews on the fly, so Marco whipped up a wrapper for it as a QuickLook plugin!

That’s right. You can now hit “space” in the finder on a bmml file and see a preview of it!

While he at it, Marco also built a Spotlight plugin for Mockups, which indexes all the text contained in your BMML files, so now you can look “inside” your wireframes when you search with Spotlight. Brilliant!

The two plugins are a bit rough around the edges at the moment, but we plan on releasing them open-source along with a bunch of other scripts sometimes soon.

Installation instructions:

1. Install today’s Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop build (1.6.41) from here.
2. Download the extras from here: Balsamiq_Mockups_OS_X_Extras.zip
3. Unzip the zip, launch the installer and wait until you see an “Installation complete” dialog appear.
4. Done!

If there are issues with these extras, let us know on GetSatisfaction and we’ll try to fix it…be aware that this is not super-high priority right now but we’ll try our best.

Other improvements in today’s build:

• added support for CTRL+B, CTRL+I and CTRL+U to toggle the bold, italic and underline state of the selected controls. Tell me why did we wait so long for this again?
• added more keyboard shortcuts to the tooltips around the app so that you don’t have to keep a printed copy of this page by your desk all the time.
• on the Mac, the tooltips now say COMMAND, instead of saying CTRL, which makes it feel a bit more native (CTRL will still work if that’s what you’re used to).
• Mockups for JIRA now warns you when you try to install the plugin on a JIRA installation that has attachment disabled.
• Mockups for Desktop no longer “flashes” when you use it from the command-line. (we had to temporarely revert this improvement in 1.6.42, but we’ll fix it properly tomorrow).
  
• If you have both Mockups for JIRA and Mockups for Confluence and use Crowd or LDAP to authenticate your users, you can now differentiate your plugin users by using the following two user group names: balsamiq-mockups-editors-confluence and balsamiq-mockups-editors-jira. The old “balsamiq-mockups-editors” group still works, so this shouldn’t affect the vast majority of you.

And some bug fixes:

• selecting “No Link” properly removes the link again!
• if your documents folder is in a non-standard location (like a disconnected network drive for instance), Mockups will fail more gracefully (instead of hanging on launch)
• you can now enter links right after a “(” character again, like ([this]).
• we had to rename our internal fileType’s name from com.balsamiq.MockupFile to com.balsamiq.mockupfile (all lowercase). This shouldn’t affect any of you, but let us know if it does!

How do I upgrade?

• 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

I’m pretty sure we won’t do a weekly release next week, and probably not the week after that either. We’re working on adding real-time-collaboration to the app (the web-app first, the desktop app will come later), which is an awesome feature. Unfortunately it’s a very big change, we have to effectively break everything and put it back together again. Don’t worry we’ve done similar things before. Still, wish us luck!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

— 4 Comments

 

 

 

Listen to this blog

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 23rd, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business, Links — No Comment

Hi there, just a quick post to let you know that you can now listen to the most popular posts on this blog via the new blog-to-podcast service from the guys at HearABlog.

I like their idea because it’s so focused and useful at the same time: they take a blog and have an actor read it aloud, that’s it! It’s great for accessibility and I have found it a great way to keep up with some of my favorite blogs like A Smart Bear and Seth Godin’s blog.

Here’s a link: http://www.hearablog.com/site/21/Balsamiq-Blog

The link is also at the top of the sidebar on the right, which I cleaned up for the occasion (notice the new “subscribe via email” link as well).

Thanks so much Daniel and Pablo for providing us with this service!

Peldi

— No Comment

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Custom Properties and Bug Fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 21st, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 8 Comments

Hi there, just a small release this week since we’re focused on the web app.

New “Custom Properties” feature

This feature is especially useful if you’re using one of the 3rd party tools that extend Mockups, such as Napkee for instance.

You can now right-click on any control of your mockup and select “Custom Properties…” from the little context menu:

This will open a dialogue like this one:

Like the dialog says, you can enter a custom ID for the selected control and some custom data to go with it. Mockups will not use these properties directly, but it will save them in the BMML file along with the rest of your mockup.

Other tools can use this data to do some fancy stuff like allowing you to specify some javascript to run when the control is clicked or even just simply using the custom ID you specified in the HTML exported.

Here’s a quick video that Enrico from Napkee put together:

BTW, if you are building an extension to Mockups and would like to be notified of these changes before anyone else, email me and I’ll add you to the bmmldev@balsamiq.com mailing list!

By the way, this feature is available on all versions of Mockups.

Bug Fixes

We made some pretty important bug fixes in this release as well:

• the demo version on the site saves everything you do again! So sorry about that, it got broken a little while ago. Thanks to @chuchuva for pointing it out!
• fixed a bug with presentation mode sometimes overriding data (when going back and forth between mockups), and not using the latest data (if you entered presentation mode before saving all your mockups). Both are fixed now.
• tuned the “automatically suspend snapping when the mouse moves fast” feature, so that it will be even faster
• fixed a bug with loading and saving images that had spaces or % characters in their file names. It should all work now. Thanks to Steven A. and Eva for reporting the issue!
• changed how we interpret the *, [ and _ special characters, so that they are ignored if they’re in the middle of a word. So now you can type USER_ID without having to write USER\_ID any more.
• tweaked a couple of tooltip wordings to make them more clear, and fixed a typo in the menus.

How do I upgrade?

• 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

Other Updates

There’s a lot going on in Balsamiq-land.

Mariah and I spent a few days in Prague where I gave a speech at the WebExpo conference called “Lessons Learned from Running a Successful MicroISV“. I was really nervous but I think the talk was well received. I think the WebExpo organizers will post the video of it on YouTube soon, so I’ll post it here, along with a full trip report.

We spent some time working on internal scripts to help us run more efficiently. The scripts behind the “make your own quote” or the “get a formal invoice” pages, for instance, are in PHP and talking to FreshBooks APIs.

We have collected quite a few of these little useful scripts, and we’ll be sharing them soon for you to use. Here’s a tentative list of what we’re planning on releasing as open-source, and here’s the github project page for it (nothing there yet).

Valerie is going to AtlasCamp today, where she’ll be speaking on the “Commercial Plugin Vendor” panel. Walk up and say hi if you’re there!

Onward!

— 8 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Image Improvements, Bug Fixes…

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 12th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — No Comment

Hi all.

Another week, another release.

Here’s what’s new:

• all the good stuff we announced last week is now live in 1.6: account and project assets folders, pasting images directly to the Desktop, pasting text…good stuff. Thanks to all of those who helped us test it!
• we now show the image name in the “unlock” right-click menu
• the primary location of the optional BalsamiqMockups.cfg file is now <your documents folder>/Balsamiq Mockups/BalsamiqMockups.cfg – if we can’t find the .cfg file there we’ll look for it in the old obscure location, so there’s no need to move it if you don’t want to.

We also made a number of important bug fixes:

• we reworked how all of our dialogs work so that when you hit ENTER you no longer get a run-time exception if you’re using Flash Player 10. This was causing some data loss, especially for Mockups for FogBugz customers. Our apologies, it’s fixed now.
• In Mockups for FogBugz onDemand, fixed an exception some customers were getting when starting the sign-up process without actually signing up.
• In Mockups for Confluence, some users were getting a “Stream Error” on load when editing some mockups. It’s fixed.
• ALT+Click now follow links even if the control is locked
• \r works in the iPhone menu on Windows as well
• The default row height for the DataGrid is now back to 20 pixels (not 23).
• Fixed a bug that was causing some Mockups not to render properly

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

What’s next?

Aside from fixing any bugs or urgent customer issues, we are going to focus our coding efforts on the mockups web app for the next few weeks. We’re no longer accepting people to the beta and we really want to do this final push before going live with it, somewhere around Dec 1st.

— No Comment

 

 

 

[pre-release] Better Image Handling, Assets Folders…

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 8th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 7 Comments

Hi all. I hope this finds you well.

We have decided to not do an official release this week because we made some pretty big changes we need your feedback on before releasing them.

The changes have to do with how we handle images in Mockups for Desktop, but they are steps in the direction of bringing the concepts of “Projects” and “re-using of UI Controls / Custom Controls” which so many of you have asked for.

Let’s go through what’s new this week in detail first:

The Account Assets Folder

We moved the “global” assets folder from its obscure location we announced last week to the more discoverable (and more standard) <user home>/Documents/Balsamiq Mockups/assets folder. We are calling this folder the “Account Assets Folder”, since there’s one for each user account on the computer.

Any image you place in this folder (manually) will be visible in your Image pulldown in the property inspector:

This folder is great for images which you re-use all the time, like your company logo or social media avatar for instance.

BMML file format change warning: when an account asset is used, its path will be saved in the BMML as $ACCOUNT/filename, a new shortcut we added.

The Project Assets Folder

A best practice which emerged from how most people use Mockups is to keep all related files in a “project directory” on your hard disk. We also work that way, and usually also keep all images, PDFs, PSDs and other assets related to the project in an “assets” subfolder next to our BMML files.

With this release we have added a couple of little features which support this best practice, introducing the concept of a “Project Assets Folder”.

This is simply a folder called “assets” that sits next to the BMML file you’re editing.

If you place an image in that folder (manually), it will show up in the Image pulldown in the property inspector for you to use. Similar to how the Account Assets Folder described above works.

Copying files manually is a bit cumbersome though, so we have enhanced the Import Image dialog with a new “Copy to Project Assets Folder” checkbox:

If you uncheck the checkbox, the image will be linked in (with relative path) and left alone, just like today.

If instead you check the checkbox, a copy of the image will be saved in the current Project Assets folder, and linked in as “./assets/filename”. All nice and clean, for easy zipping, moving and sharing of whole projects.

The dialog’s button changes from Load to Import depending on what you’re doing, and you’ll also be able to (optionally) rename the image file if you want – useful for those crazy Flickr image names!

The state of the checkbox is remembered across sessions, so if you like to always import, you won’t have to do check it each time.

But wait, there is more!

Introducing a standard place to keep assets lets us add some fancy new features that take advantage of it.

The first one is…

Paste Image into Mockups!

Say you have an image in your clipboard (maybe a screenshot?), or want to use an image from the web. You can now simply right-click on it and copy it to the clipboard:

Then go to Mockups and hit CTRL+V or Paste using the menu or the toolbar icon:

Mockups will notice that your clipboard contains an image, and will ask you to give it a name:

Hit “Paste” and voila’, 3 things happen:

1. the image is saved in your Project Assets Folder with the name you gave it
   
2. an image control is added to your mockup
3. the new image file is chosen to fill the new image control
   

Bingo!

Try it out, it’s really powerful, especially for screenshots (on OS X, use CTRL+COMMAND+SHIFT+4 to select a region of your screen and place it in the clipboard). It’s awesome.

But wait, there’s one last little feature to talk about!

Pasting text into Mockups

Since we reworked how we treat the clipboard because of the feature above, we thought we’d make it easier to also paste text into Mockups.

It works just as you’d expect: select some text:

Switch to Mockups, hit Paste and voila’, a new Paragraph of text control is created for you, with the text in it:

Nice huh?

So what’s next?

A few things: we’re going to add a “Consolidate Assets” command in the File menu, which will look at all the images in the current mockup, copy them into your Project Assets folder if needed and update the references in your BMML file. Think of this as the “Consolidate Library” feature of iTunes.

Another thing we’re contemplating is to add a tab to the UI Library for the Project Assets and Account Assets folders, so that you’ll be able to drag and drop images from there directly.

As to where we’re headed…

…go back and re-read this whole post swapping out every mention of the word “Image” with the words “External Custom BMML Control”. That’s right. We’re excited too.

Also, the concepts of Projects, Account Assets and Project Assets folders are already present in the web app’s beta. Can anyone say “Sync this project to the web”?

How can you help?

This was a deep change in how we handle images. We’d love it if you could try to break it, ehm, take it for a spin this week so that we can publish it into the main 1.6 branch next Tuesday.

The build is already live here. Let us know what you think!

Onward!

The Balsamiq Team

P.S. On to other news, Mockups took 2nd place at the O’Reilly “Best Rich Internet Application of 2009″ contest. Thanks to all of you who voted for us!

— 7 Comments

 

 

 

Mockups for JIRA: now with user-based pricing!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 6th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

So Atlassian released JIRA 4.0 today. It is HUGE: killer usability coupled with awesome powers, the way very few companies know how to do.

Beyond the new features, we are excited about JIRA 4’s new user-based licensing model. No more editions (Standard, Professional, Enterprise). Now all of JIRA’s great features are available to everyone.

So we had to do a bit of a mad scramble, but we decided to offer user-based licensing on Mockups for JIRA as well!

There are now two versions of Mockups for JIRA, one that runs on JIRA 3.7-3.13 and one for JIRA 4.0.

The JIRA 4 version can now be bought for 3, 10, 25, 50 or 100 mockup editors, as well as for everyone on your JIRA server just like before.

The new plugin’s tiered pricing is more fair and matches GreenHopper’s pricing exactly. It’s also very similar to our own Mockups for Confluence pricing. Standardization = efficiency = Better support!

We have updated the Mockups for JIRA page with the new packages, which are available for immediate purchase.

I also wrote a Mockups for JIRA 4 Licensing Changes FAQ for any questions you may have about the changes. It answers questions like “Does my Mockups for JIRA license have to match my JIRA license?” or “Why don’t you offer a 10-Editor license level for $10 like Atlassian does?”

Last but not least, I’d like to thank Jonathan Nolen, Richard Wallace and Ben Speakmon from Atlassian for helping us with the implementation of these changes. You guys truly rock.

Onward!

— 1 Comment