Balsamiq Blog

First release of 2010: Draggable Tabs and bug fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 19th, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 4 Comments

Hello friends!

Welcome to our first release of 2010.

Let’s get right to it!

New, Draggable Tabs!

The ability to drag the mockup tabs at the bottom of Mockups for Desktop is something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Michael first asked for this over a year ago! I had tried to code it before but gave up after a frustrating 3 days of digging inside the innards of the Flex framework. The best part about doing so well in 2009 is that we now have money to hire some of the best Flex developers out there who can get features like these done in a short week-long contract. It took a little while to integrate the new tab bar in our code, but lucky for us Marco was on it.

The feature is simple: the tabs now look like tabs instead of a row of buttons, disconnected from the content.

Before:

After:

Tabs shrink “a-la Google Chrome” when there are too many of them to fit:

When you hover over a tab, you’ll see a little (x) icon to close it, for all tabs (not just the selected one). The “reveal on hover” is taken from Safari, and the “(x) on all tabs” is taken from Firefox. This takes care of this old request from Paul Cormier.

The most important part of the feature, of course, is the ability to reorder tabs by dragging them around. You’ll see a little indicator letting you know where the tab will end up as you drag, “a la Firefox”.

You can also drag tabs that are not selected, of course:

Another change we made is to have the “New Mockup” tabs show up at the end, like every other tool does. This takes care of Jaanus’ old request.

Also note how hovering on the tab bar reveals a [+] button at the end for creating a new tab.

But wait, there’s more! You can drag a tab to the [+] button to clone it. Fancy!

A nice side-effect of this feature is that when you export your mockups to PDF, we will now follow the order you have them in when exporting the PDF pages. Thanks to Michael Bourque for working with us on this.

There’s still work to do on tabs, like adding a “Close Other Mockups” menu item in the right-click menu and having cloned mockups show up next to the original one, but we believe this is a huge step in the right direction. We’re eager to hear what you think of this feature. We’ve done our best to test it, but if you see something wrong or unexpected, please let us know and we’ll fix it right away.

Other Changes and fixes

• All versions: we now show multiple snap lines, all the ones that match. Try it out, we think it’s an improvement.
  
• All versions: fixed a bug when using the “space out” alignment commands when you had a lot of controls selected. Thanks @grandovskis for bringing this up!
• All versions: the Formatting Toobar control is now called “Formatting Toolbar / Rich Text Editor”, for easier Quick Add searching. Thanks to Kip Hughes for the request (via IM).
• All versions: fixed a small cosmetic issue with the List control, thanks Jeff Stewart for submitting the bug!
• All versions: you can now type *** again to make a row of stars. Thanks John Virgolino for bringing this up!
• All versions: fixed a bug with importing images from web when you hit the ENTER key instead of clicking on the button with the mouse.
• Mockups for Desktop: Pasting controls into a new mockup acts as a “paste in place”. Thanks to all the people who asked for this, it was a simple one-line fix!
• Mockups for Desktop: exporting to PDF or going full-screen marked mockups as dirty. That’s fixed now. Thanks Vitorio Miliano for bringing this up (via email)
• Mockups for Desktop: doing a “Save All” used to save mockups that had been opened but not touched as well. Over-zealous! It’s now fixed, thanks to TheHollster for noticing!
• Mockups for Desktop: when exporting to PDF, we now properly remember the last folder you used. Thanks to Ben Catherall and others for bringing it up!
• Mockups for Confluence: fixed an issue with mockups that have spaces in their names. Thanks readparse for bringing this up!
• Mockups for JIRA: importing images from the web works again!
• Mockups for JIRA: now supports scandinavian characters in mockup IDs!
• Mockups for FogBugz: you can now add mockups to wiki pages that have never been saved yet. Thanks to Jan Fabry for reporting it and helping us fix this!
• Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a bunch of little possible security issues. Thanks so much to Jude Allred at FogCreek for spotting those!
• Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a small issue with IE8.

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 we’re working on

Even though you cannot tell because we haven’t shared all of the good news yet, we start 2010 as a very different company than what we closed 2009 with. More people means more fun stuff we can do but also more internal work to do: setting up health-care benefits and 401k, setting up new blogs for everyone, automating more tasks, improving the website, all that good stuff…. We’ll share it all with you in the weeks to come, so stay tuned!

We are also pushing hard on the web app, with a new and much improved build going out to our beta participants this week. If the new build is well received, we’ll invite more people to the beta (thanks to all of those who have expressed interest so far!).

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

— 4 Comments

4 Responses to “First release of 2010: Draggable Tabs and bug fixes”

1. Magnus Johansson Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 12:57 am

   “First release of 2008″ ?

   Maybe you should check your clock?

   /M

   [Peldi: whoops! How did that happen? It's fixed, thanks! ]

2. Michael Bourque Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 9:31 am

   Great changes. The tab order and the Pasting controls into a new mockup acts as a “paste in place” were high on my list. Thanks for recognizing it. Now off to test the new build.

3. Brent Fisher Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 10:34 am

   Wow. All these fixes! These are exactly the fixes I would/should have asked for. Thanks guys!

4. László Bővíz Says:
   January 20th, 2010 at 2:10 am

   Multiple snap lines looks cool. Had a feeling I’m using an engineering tool.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website