Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Release: lots of little fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 26th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

Hi all, sorry we got a bit off-schedule with our weekly releases, but we sure have been busy. Our company is growing and we’re growing with it. Lots to share, in time.

For now, enjoy this week’s bag full of little changes here and there:

• Mockups for Confluence: you can now use UTF-8 characters (Danish ones, for instance) in your mockup names
• Mockups for Confluence: image attachments you attach via the editor are no longer uploaded as “anonymous”. Thanks to Paul, Francis and Brian for their patience on this one.
• Fixed an issue with loading images from Flickr in the live demo.
• Changed the look of the Tab bars one more time. The last two changes were a step backward, I apologize. This one looks clear, both in our humble opinion and in the opinion of some very vocal customers (thank you for that). Let us know what you think!
  
• Fixed an issue with the contrast of the font color of the text in Text Input and Text Area (if the background color is semi-transparent, we now stick to black for the font color instead of going to white)
• Mockups for FogBugz OnDemand: fixed an issue where some accounts saw our pricing as starting from $240/month instead of the real $24.00/month price This build will be live on your FogBugz accounts in a few days
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed a security issue that happened in a pretty non-standard set up (with users who can log in but cannot see any projects)
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed an issue with export to PDF for people who cannot access their Documents folder for some reason
• Fixed a long-standing bug with copy/paste of text on Windows: Mockups would always insert an empty line between two lines. Frustrating! Thanks so much Mark for reporting this!

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

Ok time to get back to work. Have a great thanksgiving everyone!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

Back from San Francisco

by Marco Botton. November 18th, 2009 under Company / Business, Trip Reports — 5 Comments

Hi all, this is Marco writing. I just got back from the Business of Software conference in San Francisco. This is my trip report.

Valerie

While Valerie and I have been colleagues for 8 months already, we had never met in person. Coming to the Business of Software conference in San Francisco gave us our first chance to spend few days together. Guys, what a crazy week in San Francisco with Valerie!

We traipsed around The City, mile after mile, on foot and by car, and I soon felt like a San Franciscan. I saw so many interesting, unforgettable things. In addition to traditional sightseeing, like walking across the Golden Gate Bridge or buying underpants in the Castro, we also attended exceptional events, like Reverend Cecil Williams’ 45th Anniversary Celebration at Glide Memorial Church, led by Joseph Lowery. (He delivered the benediction at Obama’s inauguration.)

And we talked. Oh yes, we talked, for I don’t know how many hours, about everything: our families, Balsamiq, religions, and politics… We made up for months of remote teaming in four days of spending time together.

I spent the last night of my trip at their home, where her husband enjoyed Bologna’s delicious chocolate and the kids now do their homework in the blue Snuggy, courtesy of Business of Software. Valerie, I will see you soon in Italy!

The city

The incredible mix of different ethnicities, religions, and customs makes San Francisco a dynamic community. If ever a conflict-free society is possible, San Francisco has good chances to be the place.

I stayed in Hotel Monaco, a charming hotel in the downtown. Having a short walk to go to the conference was nice. I saw more strange sporty cars in the center of the city than in the rest of my life. The Americans love everything is big, comfortable, automatic, powerful, and has wheels, of course.

San Francisco looks like a movie set and people are exactly like in the serials I used to watch in Italy. I could not resist the temptation to enter a fast food restaurant and ask for a cheeseburger. The ten minutes of waiting for it were pure joy of observing the other customers and listening to their matters. Then the cheeseburger: it came with a generous portion of french fries and it is simply wonderful to eat, a true explosion of taste. Perhaps, it was not so easy to digest… my liver was still asking clemency after 12 hours.

The conference

The value of the Business of Software conference is so great that every boss of every software company should begin making plans for next year’s conference in Boston. Pick one (or even two!) of your best developers. Choose people who are really open-minded, who aggravate their managers, saying “we should do that instead of this”, who are able to change the way they work, who really love to write software, and send them to Boston next October. It’s the most rewarding investment in R&D you can do. And then, when they come back, just LISTEN TO THEM. I’m giving an imaginary high-five to all the developers hoping to make big changes in their companies, I am with all of you!

If you just started your own company or it is in your plans to start one, then you will find a lot of help going to Business of Software. You will meet people in your same situation and learn from their stories. Neil Davidson was right when he said that great speakers are only half of the conference, the other half is sharing real experiences with the other attendees in similar start-up situations.

The organization of the conference is well balanced between talks and unstructured “mingling” breaks. It will be surprisingly easy to discover relevant companies, shake famous hands, and even to talk with the speakers and ask questions.

Our meet-up

We love to meet people, especially our fans. Peldi had the good idea to organize a meet-up Tuesday night after the second day of the conference. Valerie and I were excited about it, and we spent two hours Saturday night with Martin, Valerie’s brother, walking from a restaurant to a pub, from a pub to a café, to find the right place. The requisites were: 20-30 people, beer, some food, wireless internet is a plus. This walk was fantastic: I realized that you can enter everywhere with the excuse of organizing a private party, even places where they are actually having a private party and a couple of men in black at the door would kick your ass in normal conditions! Well, we opted for the underground room at Café Bastille, a nice French Café.

So Valerie set up a page on Facebook and I started to spread the word. The nice folks at Atlassian ended up co-hosting the party and Dave O’Flynn mentioned it in the last slide of his Pecha Kucha talk. “Oh, great!” I said. Maybe we will have 50 people. But then even Joel Spolsky from the stage of the conference gave the announce of the party, and Dave said “oh, f**k!”

The party has been a great success, 150-200 people filled every corner of the room, and there was food and drinks for everyone! We want to thank all the fans and the curious who joined us at the party, we are so grateful for your sincere enthusiasm and supportive spirit!

How Balsamiq Fares

The presentation of Ryan Carson, one of the best talks, is a true challenge for Balsamiq. He explains in 8 points how to make your company remarkable. I think that Balsamiq is already good in 6 of them, and this is really awesome!

But, as Ryan says, if you miss one, then you miss them all: we can’t stop and wait. We have to “invest in good design.” Mockups just got a new, nice looking application icon, so we are moving in the right direction. What to do next? We will try to figure it out.

I believe that we should not simply hire a designer and pass him every piece of UI for a cute touch. The risk is that the distinctive traits of Balsamiq will be diluted in a well-designed but anonymous UI. Our passion must be evident in all the things we do!

For sure I will stress to Peldi a lot about the talk of Ryan Carson, because Balsamiq will express its full potential only by taking and winning this big challenge.

Another interesting talk for Balsamiq was “10 Lessons about Venture Capitalists” by Heidi Rozen. At the moment we don’t need (and don’t want) VC funds. Heidi recalls that “we often turn down good companies,” what a good advice to stick with our current decision.

Lots of valuable hints come from the talks of Geoffrey Moore, Dharmesh Shah, Joel Spolsky. It would be nice for the whole Balsamiq team to spend some time to compare our strategy with the suggestions of those talks. But before of doing that we have to ship our web-based service, so now I’ll stop with the fun and get back to the work!!

Ciao!
Marco

— 5 Comments

 

 

 

Mockups for JIRA 3.x, Now with User-Based Pricing!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 16th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 3 Comments

Hi there. So when Atlassian changed the pricing structure for JIRA 4.0 last month we rushed to match it, and sales of the JIRA 4.0 version have been very good already.

The demand for it has been so high that we decided to go back and implement user-based pricing for Mockups for JIRA when you run it on a JIRA 3.x server as well!

That’s right, you can now purchase a 10-editor, 25-editor, 50-editor or 100-editor license of Mockups for JIRA and run it on your JIRA 3.7-3.13 server.

If your Mockups for JIRA license level is lower than your JIRA license level, all you have to do is create a user group called “balsamiq-mockups-editors” and manage its members it normally. These are people who will be able to create and edit mockups, everyone else will only be able to see them. Just like in Mockups for JIRA 4.0 and Mockups for Confluence.

The only thing you have to watch out for is to not go over your license limit, or Mockups will complain with a not-so-subtle “EULA Violation” message.

The nice side-effect of this change is that even if you purchase an unlimited license of Mockups for JIRA, you can still create a user group if you’d like to limit who can see the “Add/Edit UI Mockup” link on issues. This was requested by a few users in the past: if you’re one of them, just update to today’s version and give it a try!

We already updated the Mockups for JIRA page and the JIRA 4.0 licensing changes FAQ, but if you run into any issues or have any questions don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll do our best to clear things up.

And of course if you purchased Mockups for JIRA Unlimited in the last month and would like to downgrade to a smaller license, let us know and we’ll be happy to refund you the difference (we’ll email you about in the next few days if we don’t hear from you).

Alright, go download Mockups for JIRA here!

Onward!

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Export to PDF, a fresh coat of paint!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 13th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 15 Comments

Hi everyone. Man am I ever excited about this week’s release!

A fresh coat of paint!

First of all, we’d like to unveil…our new application icon!

Isn’t she gorgeous?

Here it is again “in action” (click to enlarge):

We are absolutely THRILLED with it, we cannot stop looking at it.

We think it really captures the essence of Mockups: it’s about brainstorming, quick iteration, and the same ease of use as a marker on paper.

The new icon was created by The IconFactory: I’m going to write a whole blog post about all the iterations it took us to get to the final version, but let me just tell you that there’s a reason these guys are considered the best icon-makers out there. They are GOOD. Very professional, very accommodating, very talented! Many thanks especially to Cheryl Culling, a.k.a. “she of infinite patience”.

Another thing that The IconFactory did for us is to completely redo all of the icons in the application! There were 78 of them, so it was quite an effort. And while we were at it , we took the time to rationalize the icon sizes and colors throughout the application, reskinning some of the standard Flex UI components in the process. We are really pleased with the results, let us know what you think!

We now have the monumental task ahead of us to update all the screenshots and most of the screencasts on the website…but it was long overdue anyways so it will be good.

As a personal note, I feel a mixture of pride and incredulity about the new icon. I have always had great admiration for other people’s gorgeously crafted icons and never even dreamed of building an app that could “stand its ground” on someone’s OS dock. I can’t believe this is happening to me now, that’s just SO RAD! Our little app is growing up…awww…organic growth FTW! Ok, back to work <slaps_himself/>

Next up, we added one of the most highly requested features to Mockups for Desktop:

Export to PDF!

That’s right. You can now export all of the mockups you have loaded in Mockups for Desktop into a single PDF file, for even easier sharing.

The PDF will have one mockup per page, and INTERNAL LINKS!

So if you need to send a full-blown multi-page prototype you built with Mockups to someone who doesn’t have the app, just open all the files, link them all together and export to PDF!

Here’s a quick example PDF I threw together: exportToPDFmockups.pdf and the BMML sources for it: exportToPDFmockups.zip

This feature was the result of a great group effort. The Actionscript PDF generation library we’re using is the excellent AlivePDF, by Thibault Imbert, who added the inter-PDF linking feature to it just for us! Thanks so much Thibault!

The code to take a group of images and image maps from Mockups and create a PDF out of it was written by a very talented Flex developer we know, who we contracted for this quick 3-day project. If you need a Flex coder for a short-term contract, this guy is one the best out there. Email me for details if you’re interested.

And of course I cannot forget to thank all the people who have asked us for this feature, both on GetSatisfaction and via email! Our customers are the best, how did we get to be so lucky!?!

We have also updated our FAQ here with the new info.

Let us know if you run into any issue with this feature and we’ll do our best to fix it right away! Thanks so much to Michael Bourque and Bruno Hofstetter for helping us find and fix a sneaky little bug with it already!

Other changes

• Added “Export to PDF” to the demo version here. Why not right?
• Made it so that the 5-minute timer only starts when the demo is fully loaded, so that you don’t run on the same issue as @elangogovind
• In Mockups for Confluence, the HTML generated by our macro now sprinkles class=”balsamiq_mockup” everywhere, so that you can style it with CSS if you want! Thanks so much Bryan Crotaz for the feature request!
• As suggested by Samson, we have made the current tab stand out more, with thicker lines and by moving the label a little bit – now that the green highlight is gone, it was a bit trickier to see which tab was selected. I think the new look is a definite improvement, let us know what you think
• Made a ton of progress towards enabling real-time-collaboration in the web app…screencast coming soon I promise. It’s SO cool, can’t wait to ship it already.
• You can now resize the iPhone and iPhoneKeyboard controls. They will maintain aspect ratio, and both have an “AutoSize” button now so that you can go back to their “natural” size easily. Thanks to Charles Du and others for the feature request.
• Fixed a crazy little bug in the Browser control, thanks Andi for the bug report!
• Radio Buttons and Check Boxes are now a little taller by default, which takes care of this bug reported by Jaanus.
• The icon in disabled buttons is gray again, thanks Jon Boardman for the bug report, sorry about the injection!
• The font color in the Text Input and Text Area controls now changes automatically based on the background color (white or black, just like for Buttons and other controls that do the same)
• The font size of the pull-down elements in the Combo Box now reflects the size of the first line. Thanks to “Mark Two Thousand Two Belgium” for reporting it!
• fixed a bug that allowed you to open files while in presentation mode. Thanks to Simon Tetu for reporting it!

I think that’s it! Not a bad little release!

How do I upgrade?

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while). If you still see the old icon after installing, try rebooting!
• 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

Onward!

— 15 Comments

 

 

 

Free Balsamiq Mockups for UX Training

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

Hello everyone!
Did you know that today is World Usability Day 2009? It’s a global initiative now in its 4th year, aimed at raising the awareness of the importance of good usability in our daily lives. Head over to worldusabilityday.org for all the details, or follow them on Twitter here.

Also, why not take this opportunity to talk to your in-laws about usability today? They’ll be impressed by it, we promise!

Clearly, with our core belief that “life is too short for bad software“, we care about usability a great deal.

We didn’t have time to plan an event for WUD this year, but we still wanted to contribute somehow…that’s why we are proud to introduce our brand new “Free Balsamiq Mockups for UX Training” program!

The idea is simple: we have great admiration and are very thankful to those of you whose job is to teach other professionals the importance of usability / user experience / good information architecture.

In a way, it’s the same admiration I have for surgeons and the like: I could never do your job, but I am SO thankful that you’re doing it, making the world a better place in the process.

So if you’re that kind of person, we’d like to offer you a new version of Mockups to use in your UX workshops, free of charge. It’s very much like the demo version on this site, but without the annoying nagging every 5 minutes.

We’re not doing this for money or exposure, really. We just want to help you in our shared quest to rid the World of bad software, if you’d like us to. If you don’t like this idea, that’s totally cool, no hard feelings!

Alright, all the details are here, see for yourself.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Theresa Neil of Designing Web Interfaces fame for giving me this idea. She has already used this version of Mockups in two of her UX workshops and was very supportive of this idea from the start. Thanks so much Theresa!

Onward!

— No Comment

 

 

 

YouTube-ing Up a Storm!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 11th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 1 Comment

Hi all. So we’ve been travelling quite a bit in the last few months for conferences and such.

Aside from learning a lot and sharing what we know, conferences turned out to be the perfect way to meet some of our customers face to face (so rare for us!).

The result is a new piece of our website, at the top of the Testimonials page. Here’s a little taste:

You can also see all of the videos by heading to our new and improved Balsamiq YouTube Channel, which is where we’re migrating all of our videos to (we had to say goodbye to Vimeo due to their unexplicable Terms of Service. I’m actually glad we did: YouTube is the standard and its playlist-related features are still unmatched out there IMHO).

Click below to visit our YouTube Channel:

These videos were shot using a cool little Flip Video Camera, which has great usability.

We will be posting more video testimonials in the future as we meet with more customers.I have added the YouTube feed to our OPML so if you want to follow that way, you can.

If you have a webcam, a YouTube account and you would like to create your own home-made testimonials, don’t be shy! We’ll be happy to add it to our playlist – hey, it might bring you some traffic, right?

Thanks SO much for those who agreed to be interviewed by Valerie and Marco and for sharing their success stories using our tool, we simply love to hear we’re helping you out, even if it’s just a little bit.

Together we can rid the world of bad software!

Onward!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

Weekly Release: a nice basket of low-hanging fruit

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 3rd, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 8 Comments

Hi everyone! I know I said we wouldn’t have an update this week, but we ended up being able to carve out some time to dedicate to adding a few of those long-requested-but-not-so-high-priority features that have been sitting in our GetSatisfaction forums for a while.

So without further ado, here’s what’s new this week:

• A new “Subtitle” control. Halfway between a Label and a Title, handy to have sometimes. Obviously you could build a subtitle by changing the font properties of the Label control, but having its own control makes it faster and a bit more standardized. Thanks so much to Roland for asking for it!
  
• Added border support to the Icon, “Icon and Label” and Image controls. Very useful, sorry it took me so long to get to it. Thanks Michael Matti for requesting it!
  
• You can now remove the frame around the Tab Bar and Vertical Tab controls, and just keep the line. Thanks to Brian Jamieson for requesting it! I also removed the green from the selected tab, which was distracting to some. The selected tab is now white and bold (and looks connected to the main area, of course). A great idea by Nathaniel Flick (via email) and Stephen (on GetSatisfaction).
  
• You can now specify a 2nd level of items in an Accordion control. This turns an Accordion into a quick 2-level navigator easily. This was a highly requested feature, thanks to Bi-Roller Disorder and the others who helped me design the feature!
  
• Added background color support to the Button and Text Input controls. Thanks to adrienne, olofweb and Erika for their requests!
  
• Fixed a bug in the new Custom ID feature: you can now give Groups IDs as well. Thanks to sebastian.vorlaender for bringing this up!
• Fixed an issue with the demo version: if the nagging screen comes up while you’re dragging things around (or editing text), things no longer go south. Thanks to Santi for reporting the issue!
• Images in the image selection pulldown are now sorted properly (case-insensitive)
• You can now disable items in the Menu control, by wrapping them -like this-. Thanks so much Robert Sholtz for asking for this!
  
• You can now use &this notation& to underline text throughout the app. This is very useful for specifying Windows accelerator keys for instance. Thanks so much to Ilya Ryzhenkov, Andi and Oli for their help designing this feature.
  
• [], **, __ (and the new &&) notations now work after a \r as well. I forgot who pointed this out, but thank you!
• The Image control now shows the “little arrow icon” properly when needed (it was hidden by the image before)
• Mockups for Desktop: We removed an option we had recently added (I doubt any of you used it yet) to keep your BalsamiqMockups.cfg file in your Documents and Settings folder. We are back at looking only at the old locations. The good news is that we have added support for a new configuration tag: <documentsPath>C:\something\something</documentsPath>, which tells Mockups where you want to keep your account assets (we create a “Balsamiq Mockups\assets” folder there). So if you want to keep your account assets on a thumb drive, now you can! This also provides a workaround for those of you who keep their Documents folder on a network drive and want to use Mockups even when that drive is not connected (hello Laurent!)
• Mockups for Desktop: Fixed a bug with pasting text in the “create new image from clipboard” dialog. Thanks to Martin N. for reporting the bug (via email)
• Mockups for Desktop: You can now double-click on the empty area to the right of the mockups tabs at the bottom to create a new mockup, Firefox-style!

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

What’s next?

We’re making great progress on the web app, with real-time-collaboration being very close to being usable.

I also plan on picking some other low-hanging-fruits this week, like adding link support to Menus, List and Trees for instance.

We are also doing a long-overdue round of reskinning of the app (it won’t be very different, just a bit cleaner and more professional-looking. We had all of our icons made professionally, and they look very nice!). Come back next week for updates, or check the pre-release version in the next few days if you’re curious.

Onward!

— 8 Comments