Balsamiq Blog

Bootstrapping a Micro-ISV, Exposed

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.

webexpo1

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

8 Responses to “Weekly Release: Custom Properties and Bug Fixes”

Custom IDs and Data - Napkee - make your mockups come alive Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 8:57 am
[...] a whole new level of interactivity to the generated prototypes and that's possible because of the latest release of Balsamiq Mockups which includes a whole new "Custom Properties" [...]
Adam Wride Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:02 am
Looking forward to watching the video Peldi.

What I want to know is… how does your small team do so much? Awesome stuff!

[Thanks so much for that comment Adam, I'm glad it looks that way from your end. Sometimes I wish we went faster, we have so many cool things we want to do! But no-one's running after us, which is nice. As long as we go at a good pace and maintain a healthy work-life balance, I'm happy. Thanks again for the comment, I appreciate it!]
RG Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:01 am
I don’t seem to be able to nest text modifiers anymore. I.e. “_*widget*_” ends up being an italicized version of “*widget*”, instead of a bold-italic version of “widget”.

[Crap RG, I totally broke that with this change, how could I not think of that! I'll fix it ASAP, stay tuned]

[Update: this is now fixed, the new build is already up]
RG Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:58 am
Great! Now if only you could build a module to do my work for me…
RG Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Ah, noticed one more thing. I can’t seem to put a link inside parenthesis. E.g. “([linked text])” is rendered just like that, vs. “(linked text)” where “linked text” looks like a hyperlink. Is this a related nesting issue?

[Good catch. Fixed, new build is in the oven and will be available here http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop/next in a few minutes. I'll merge it in 1.6 next week. Thanks!]
Darius Says:
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:05 am
Nice Threadless t-shirt;)

[Thanks! It was a gift from a friend, but I think it came from here: http://www.zazzle.co.uk/failwhale ]
Jan Says:
October 25th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Saw your talk in prague. Was really cool. Your experience is very valuable!
Jenni Merrifield Says:
October 26th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Oh thank you soooooo much for this release! The ability to apply a custom control ID and other custom values is an awesome addition for those of us working with or on third party tools. I’m so happy – this is going to make it so much easier for me to automate some of the stuff I’ve been doing manually up to now.

Peldi – You (and your team) Rock!

:-j(enni)