Balsamiq Blog

Help us design the “Components” feature

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 26th, 2010 under Development / Technical, Mockups — 9 Comments

The ability to create components and re-use them across different mockups is one of our most highly requested features.

Some people call this “master templates”, others call it “reusable widgets”. We’re going to call it “Components“.

It all started with Michale Bourque’s request a year ago…we wrote two FAQ answers about it showing a workaround to achieve part of it using images, but those approaches don’t quite cut it.

We are finally ready to tackle this problem head-on, and we’d like to ask for your help.

We created a public myBalsamiq project containing our ideas for a possible implementation of the features that we think will collectively solve all the different use-cases related to reusing objects.

If you could take a few minutes to look around and give us feedback on it (by leaving comments under each mockup), we’d appreciate it.

We also included a draft of an implementation roadmap, with releases along the way. That’s the mockup I would start from.

Here’s the link to the project: https://our.mybalsamiq.com/project/143

Send it to your UX-savvy friends!

We are eager to get started on the implementation, so if you have some feedback, don’t be shy!

Incidentally, this will also help us test myBalsamiq, so if you hit any snags in the process of reviewing and commenting on the mockups above, let us know!

Together we can make this very important feature as good as it can be. We hope you’ll want to pitch in with your ideas!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

— 9 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Updated Certificate, Bug Fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 24th, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 7 Comments

Hello friends.

This week’s release is pretty light-weight as we’ve been focusing on MyBalsamiq, our web app. Reactions to our first public screencast of the app were very kind, which is encouraging. I’m not yet totally in love with the app myself, so we have some more work to do. Stay tuned here for updates.

A renewed code-signing certificate

The main change in this week’s release of Mockups is a renewed security code-signing certificate for the Desktop application. This is how we make sure you know that what you’re installing comes from us and is not a virus or something. Boring stuff but important. This is a delicate change so if you hit any issues upgrading let us know and we’ll get right on it. We tested all cases we could think of, but you never know with these things.

Other changes

• Mockups for Desktop: “Save As…” now defaults to the same folder of the original mockup. Thanks eeichinger for this perfectly sensible suggestion.
• Mockups for Confluence: fixed a bug with mockups not showing up when exporting your wiki pages to PDF. Thanks Steve Enoch for the patience and the debugging help!
• Mockups for FogBugz OnDemand: the plugin comes with free Mockups for Desktop licenses, which we used to send you manually after we received your first payment. We forgot to send some in the past, so we decided to automate it and have the license key show up in the plugin’s configuration page instead, like this:
  
  Please wait a few days until FogCreek updates our plugin to the latest version on their servers.
• Mockups for Desktop: significantly sped up command-line operations.
• Mockups for Desktop: you can now specify an additional parameter to the command-line to tell Mockups to log to a specific path instead of the default.

Blog Post Roundup

Here’s a summary of our latest blog posts:

• From the Balsamiq Blog: I posted a screencast of MyBalsamiq here.
• From Val’s Balsamiq Blog: Val posted a darling video of herself singing happy birthday to Marco here.
• From Il Blog di BalsamiqMarco: Marco posted an awesome interview (in Italian) to one of the founders of ShinyFrog, an italian microISV (or rather “Indie developer shop” since they’re Mac people) here.
  
• From our Technical Blog: Luis posted a workaround to an Adobe Air 2.0 .dep package bug here. If you’re trying to install Air 2.0 on Ubuntu 64-bit, this one’s for you.

Onward!

— 7 Comments

 

 

 

A Sneak Peek at myBalsamiq, our Web App

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 22nd, 2010 under Mockups, myBalsamiq — 13 Comments

Hi there! Just a quick post to let you know that I finally got around to recording a quick tour of myBalsamiq, the upcoming Balsamiq Mockups Web App.

The tour is 13 minutes long and very “scruffy” as usual, but we’re all friends here right?

We suggest turning up the volume and going full-screen for a best viewing experience. If you’re on an iPhone, here’s a m4v version for you.

The video is now also available on the Mockups Web App page as well.

OK, back to work, there’s still LOTS to do before we can ship myBalsamiq.

The beta is still closed, so stay tuned here for release announcements or follow @myBalsamiq on Twitter for updates!

Let us know what you think of it so far!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

— 13 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Flash Player 10 and more

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 16th, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 6 Comments

Hi all! Once again, not a huge release since we’re working full-time on myBalsamiq, which is getting another beta refresh today.

Still, we were able to fix some bugs and add a few little features here and there.

Switching to Flash Player 10 / Air 1.5.3

The main change this week is that we have made the switch, Mockups will now require Flash Player 10 and above, and Adobe Air 1.5.3 and above.

This won’t really mean anything to the vast majority of you since you’re very likely to already be using an updated player and version of Air. The Adobe statistics say that Player 10 is already on over 90% of all computers connected to the Internet:

I also took a look at our own Google Analytics, which show that over 97% of you do (see chart below, data from the last 3 months):

Switching to Player 10 / Air 1.5.3 (and version 3.5a of the Flex framework) means better performance, taking advantage of a number of bug fixes in the Player, AIR and the Flex Framework, and most importantly we’ll be able to take advantage of the new features that these updated pieces provide:

• a better text engine. We need to do some testing, but it looks like we’ll be able to properly embed fonts (bye bye Comic Sans once and for all), as well as provide support for right-to-left languages, adding support for bullets and yes, even vertical text!
• printing support is much improved, so we’ll be able to take advantage of it as well
• there’s even a spell checker in the works which we could use one day

Stay tuned here for these enhancements coming in the future. The first step is to make sure everything still works as expected.

This is somewhat of a big risky change so if you notice anything not working as it used to let us know immediately and we’ll fix it, we’re going to be “all hands on deck” for the next couple of days in case something blows up (we tested it a bunch, but you never know).

Other changes

• you can now resize the Buttons control vertically. Thanks to Regis and Chris Bride for their good arguments in favor of this change.
• you can now resize the Button Bar control in both dimensions. Thanks to Janel, Andi and Luke for finally convincing me to do it.
  
• changed the shortcut for “reset font size to default” from CTRL+ALT+1 (which was already used for “Align Left”) to CTRL+ALT+0. Thanks to Georgi (via email) and Chris Bride (here) for reporting this!
• fixed some edge-case bugs with Pasting controls. Thanks so much to Luca Perugini for his help debugging this old bug!
• fixed a lot of little issues with Duplicate: undo now works (thanks Michael Bourque and DanM), it doesn’t stop at the edge of the visible area (thanks teevee), and made it so that Duplicating now does not affect the clipboard (thanks Bronius for the idea). This is sweet.
• fixed an issue with the List control and links that had to do with the header row. Again thanks to Luca Perugini for reporting it!
• Enhanced RadioButtonGroup and CheckboxGroup: now all of these: (x), (v), (*), (o), (X), (V), (O) mean “selected radio button” and all of these: [x], [v], [*], [0], [X], [V], [O] mean “selected checkbox”
  
• Added support for ^ and v (or V) in the first row of the Data Grid to denote column sorting. Try it out! Thanks to all who asked for this handy little shortcut.
  

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

OK, moving on to the myBalsamiq beta refresh release.

I love release-day (a.k.a. Tuesday)!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Fixed the “jump” bug, Improved Performance, Fancy Duplicate, 2 New Control Types

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 12th, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 4 Comments

Hello friends!

Once again we’ve been mostly focused on myBalsamiq this past week but we were able to fix a few bugs here and there, as well as sneaking in two new little features:

Radio Button Group and CheckBox Group controls

Nice and easy to use, we bet it will save you a few clicks.

Both control types support multi-line (with \r), autosize, bold, italic, underline, text size and each line can be made into a link.

Let us know if you find any issues with these young controls and we’ll fix them up!

Fancy New Duplicate Algorithm!

This is a good one. DanM posted a thread on GetSatisfaction that got me so excited I had to code this on a Sunday morning.

Basically when you use the duplicate feature it no longer works just as a simple shortcut for a Copy + Paste operation. Instead, it has some smarts on where the new control is positioned.

It’s easier to try it than to describe it, but I’ll try: after your first Duplicate operation we look at where you position the new control, in respect to the original control. Now, if you duplicate again, we use that same offset to decide where to put the new duplicate. This makes it EXTREMELY fast to create a row or a column of buttons or icons. Check it out:

Pretty cool huh? Thanks so much DanM for asking about this, you’re the man!

Bugs Fixes and Other Improvements

• we’re pretty sure we fixed the “objects sometimes jump when selected” bug (or at least we made it a lot less common). This was a really elusive one, but thanks to all your help we narrowed it down and squashed it, or at least relegated it to a very dark little corner of the code-base). Thanks so much for all the help guys, and sorry it took so long, we needed Marco’s eagle eye and quick mind to find and fix this one.
• we improved the application performance when dragging by cleaning up the snap line code. We think it’s noticeable, especially when working on complex Mockups. Performance tuning is never done, but please let us know if you agree that things are better for you with this new build. Thanks to Chris Emerson, Andi and others for reporting this and to Brandon W. for sending us his mockups to test with.
• Along the same lines, we improved memory utilization and performance of other common operations.
• Opening a dialog box now gets you out of full-screen. Another great DanM report!
• The iPhone menu now has rounded background (fixed to make these pretty iPad controls)
• The background of the Rectangle / Canvas control now properly fills up the whole space when you turn off the border (how did no-one complain about this?)
• Vertical Curly Brace text is right-aligned when the brace points to the right. I could have sworn that’s how it behaved from day one, thanks amcclain for reporting this!
• Changed 2009 to 2010 in about box. Thanks Georgi M. for spotting that (via email)
• Improved how the selection of words works (we select less punctuation). Thanks so much to Gyuri J. who reported it via email, along with a number of other great bits of feedback.
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed a bug with people not seeing the “add/edit mockup” link when the plugin and JIRA’s licenses levels matched (but were not both unlimited)
• Mockups for JIRA: now properly shows you which version of JIRA the plugin is designed for (we ship two versions of the JAR, one for 3.x and one for 4.x). Now you’ll know if you installed the wrong one.
• Mockups for JIRA: removed a leftover $action.getDebugMessage() message which was showing some users RTEs in the logs
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with the + sign disappearing on drag on Windows. Thanks to our good friend Leon 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 (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
• Web Demo: here

From the Blogs

Our very first little blog roundup, yay!

On our Italian-language blog Marco blogged about Better Software e StartupBusiness.it, two great resources for italian tech startups. It turns out I’ll be speaking at the Better Software conference in Florence in May. We also decided to sponsor them as well because we want to see them do well.

On our Technical blog I posted a weird issue we ran into when trying to publish this release two days ago: all of a sudden our build machine couldn’t “BER decode our CLR“! Can you believe it? Do you know what it means? We didn’t either! Aren’t error messages great sometimes?

What’s coming next?

It feels like a lot of things that have been a long-time coming are finally all maturing at the same time.

Switching to Flash Player 10 and Air 1.5: this is huge because it will enable us to finally code all those features that require it: upping the maximum mockup size, vertical text, better printing, a much better text engine which will one day let us support right-t0-left text and who knows, maybe even get rid of Comic Sans…anyways, making sure nothing breaks from the switch alone is priority #1. We’d love your help testing the new pre-release build in the next few days. Follow us on Twitter if you’re interested.

Another new build of myBalsamiq for the beta group. This one will be good enough to share with you both via a screencast and via a public project (see below)

Starting the path to solving the “I want to reuse some controls” use-case. This is one of our top-requested features, definitely at the top of the GetSatisfaction list. We have some ideas on how to solve it and will want your feedback on them. We’re going to use a public myBalsamiq project to share our mockups, which will be a nice little test of the web app as well. We’ll post here and on Twitter when the mockups are ready to view.

Onward!

— 4 Comments

 

 

 

At Balsamiq, Everyone Blogs. Join Us.

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 3rd, 2010 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 5 Comments

The Balsamiq Blog is my third blog.

I started in 2003 with Peldi’s Little Blog in which I shared sample applications and things that I learned at work about Flash Communication Server, and ran it for about 3 years.

In 2004 I started PatataMonkey, a pregnancy/daddy blog, which also ran for about 3 years.

In september 2007, long before telling anyone about my startup idea, I started this blog.

Each blog is different, but the motivation to start each of them was the same: I was entering a new phase of my life, jumping into the unknown, “having a new baby” if you will.

It was a stressful time, a time when I felt the need to process my thoughts by writing them down. I needed a diary.

Looking for advice on each new phase of my life, I googled and googled for a blog just like the one I wanted to read, one of someone who had gone through my same path before me or who was going through it at the same time as I was.

Each time I was looking for an established community, a support group: one about FCS development, one about “parenting in San Francisco in 2005″ or one about a “programmer-turned-entrepreneur launching a bootstrapped micro-ISV in 2007″.

After many years of using the World Wide Internet Webs I know now that no matter how small, the community you’re looking for is already out there, hanging out in some corner of the Internet somewhere. You just have to find it.

Problem is, the Internet is a vast place, small communities are really hard to find. Each time I tried, my googling fell short.

Getting found

So I decided to try and “get found” instead. Each time I decided to pinch my nose, jump in and publish my rants, in the hope that someone would google for my same kind of content one day and find me.

For PatataMonkey, I was desperate to find a new group of friends quickly: none of our “offline friends” at the time were even married, let alone expecting a child at that time. So as soon as I started the blog, I immediately put Google Adsense ads on it. The hope was that Google’s all-powerful algorithms would be able to index and understand my content, returning me advertisements that would lead me to the people I was looking for. Oh mighty Google Spiders, what stores should I be going to? Which sites should I be reading? Is there a blog or forum I should look at?

Well, my nerdy scheme didn’t really work out, but the blogging was a very effective therapy for me, so I kept at it.

Then, with time, as if by magic, a community started to emerge, organically, on its own. Someone would post a comment pointing me to a blog I should read, someone else would suggest a book.

All of a sudden blogging wasn’t a lonely endeavor any more, I wasn’t just speaking to the wind like a crazy person…I had…friends! People just like me, going through the same issues as I was! Slowly but surely, a little community gathered around my blog, and I started hanging out at other blogs as well, starting to recognize the names of frequent commenters like me.

I realized then that the Internet is a galaxy of warm little communities held together by blogs, mailing lists and now Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Ning networks, Twitter cliques and StackExchange-powered sites.

I guess people call it social media…I call it life in 2010 and beyond.

I read maybe a dozen different blog posts every day, and most of them teach me something new. My favorite posts to read are those written from the heart, those where you can clearly see that the authors needed to get something off their chest.

That’s how I want to write as well: it’s therapy that helps me and helps others in the process. Talk about a win-win!

At this point I cannot imagine my life without blogging.

On Business Blogs

Blogs are essential for business. Largely because of this blog we got written up in the New York Times and Inc. Magazine (twice!), I get to travel the world speaking at conferences and our software went from zero to leader in just 18 months.

As Paul Hawken says in his awesome “Growing a Business” – one of my all-time favorite business books – in order to be successful you need to get permission of the market first.

I define “the market” as the community of people who are passionate about the problem your company or product is trying to solve. It includes customers, competitors, complementary products, free-loaders. Asking for permission means earning their respect…ideally you need to become a thought-leader in your community.

As you start your blog, ask yourself: which community do I want to try and become a leader of?

Choosing your target should be easy because it should be “people just like me”, or rather “people just like the one I hope to become”. If you succeed in your quest, great things will happen. If you don’t, the high goal you set for yourself will have pushed you to do your best work, teaching you a ton and making you a better person in the process.

It doesn’t have to be related to your product, you’re not doing this to generate more sales. You’re doing this for yourself: to vent, to grow as a person and to be a good citizen.

Sure, if you do a good job your company will benefit from the higher exposure and stuff…but that’s a side-effect, not the end-goal!

Becoming a leader in an online community is done by providing value to its members, continuously, over time. It means listening carefully and genuinely caring for the success of your fellow community members, without ever talking down to them – you’re no better than them, you’re just trying to help. It’s hard work, but very fulfilling work. Share what’s relevant, but don’t spam. Try to keep it short, everyone’s busy. Retweet! Make a Twitter list! Make two! Help others find your community, help it grow! Support it by sponsoring the best blogs and events!

Just the simple act of being yourself, but “in public”, can make a big difference in someone else’s life. You’ll be surprised.

At Balsamiq, Everyone Blogs

One of my goals for the year is to encourage everyone at Balsamiq to blog, to try to become a leader of their chosen niche.

My dream is for each Balsamiq employee to be better known within their community for their blog rather than the company they work for.

I want Balsamiq to benefit from the “halo effect” of these blogs, not the other way around.

All of us are first-time members of a tech startup. We are all going through a new phase of our lives, learning a ton every day. What better time than this to share what we learn and find our communities in the process?

Starting today, everyone at Balsamiq blogs:

• we made a nice little landing page
• we updated each of our blog’s sidebar to point to it and
• we will regularly post a “blog roundup” summary (just like Atlassian does), both here and via our currently-dormant monthly newsletter
• we will each be tweeting about our blog posts, so you can follow our Team’s Twitter list if you’d like

This will be challenging at first, this is a new experience for both Val and Marco. I am thrilled at how enthusiastically they both accepted the challenge, and wish them luck. You can read Val’s first post here and Marco’s first post here (in Italian).

This will also be a significant time-commitment for our little team. Blogging takes time. For instance, it’s incredibly 2:15am already as I write this.

I believe the benefits of us all blogging are more than worth it: if you’re hesitant, just consider each blog post to be like a product release, only one that doesn’t involve coding. It’s that important.

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

P.S. Two questions!

I bet there are great resources out there by now to help people find communities online. I’ve sent people to this old Marshall Kirkpatrick post before, but I’d love to collect a few more links like it. Which do you recommend?

Another question: I am tempted to splinter off my posts into a new blog (/blogs/peldi perhaps), so that this blog could focus only on product-related news. What do you think? I like the idea of giving people more focused RSS feeds, but I fear that it would effectively mean “starting over” a bit. I don’t know. What are your thoughts?

Thanks for reading this far!

— 5 Comments

 

 

 

New Release: a Mockups Viewer and Bug Fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 2nd, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

Hello everyone! It’s only been two weeks since our last little release, but it feels much longer for some reason. We’ve been really busy.

How have you been? We missed you!

We have a nice little update for you today.

Mockups for Desktop (unregistered) becomes a Mockup Viewer

The biggest change of this release is that from now on, Mockups for Desktop will let you open files even when the app is not registered.

You’ll still get the nag screen every 5 minutes (easily dismissed with the ENTER key), but this effectively turns the unregistered/demo mode of Mockups for Desktop into a viewer for your prototypes.

You can now send a client a stack of BMMLs and image assets if you have them – just zip it all up! – a link to install the Mockups for Desktop (http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download or simply http://bit.ly/installbalsamiq) and the name of the BMML file they should open first. Without having to pay, they’ll be able to click zoom in and out, go full-screen, click around the linked mockups and fully experience the fruits of your wireframing genius!

If they want to save their changes, they can either use the “Export…” feature to save manually to a text file, or simply purchase Mockups for Desktop themselves!

I know this is not the ultimate “Mockup Viewer” some of you have been asking for, where you send people a single SWF file or even a self-installing application, but we think it’s a step in the right direction. The two are not mutually exclusive. Don’t forget that you can always export all of your mockups as a single PDF already.

As with most of what we do, this was not our idea. It came from Scott G., via email. Thank you Scott!

As a personal note, I’d like to share the fact that we paused for 30 seconds before making this change: will relaxing the limitations of our unregistered version mean that more people will just use the app without paying for it? Is this going to hurt our sales? Well, our answer is “we don’t know, but it feels like the right thing to do for our existing customers”. One of our mantras is to “work like you don’t need the money“, which comes in handy a lot more than you’d think! This time was no exception. Let us know what you think of this decision, leave a comment!

Other Changes and Bug Fixes

Since our last release we’ve been entirely focused on myBalsamiq, our web app. We have a release candidate for a big beta refresh ready to go and are setting up a staging environment so that we can test recovery from backup properly. Data-safety first! Fun times, can’t wait to share more.

So with all that going on, we were only able to fix small things here and there in this release.

Here’s what’s we did:

• Mockups for Desktop and for Confluence: Fixed a bug with ALT+click not working in grouped objects. Thanks Laszlo for reporting it!
• Mockups for Desktop: now when you use the “Export all to PDF” feature we remember your last location, independent of the location you used for “Export All as PNG” (it used to be the same). Thanks rberteig for nudging us in the right direction on this one.
• Mockups for Desktop: Added a config-file option to disable snapping entirely. Just add <snappingEnabled>false</snappingEnabled> to your cfg file and the app won’t ever try to snap. If you like this change, you can thank Alexandre F. for begging us to do it (via email), and to Charlie Cleveland for reinforcing it. Speaking of snapping, I want to spend some time working on performance issues soon. If the app were faster as a whole, fewer people will want to disable snapping!
• Mockups for Desktop: printing now requires registration, to be consistent with the rest of the export options. I doubt many of our non-paying users were doing this, and they can always take a screenshot and print that instead…
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug when closing a dirty tab that’s not the selected one. Thanks Marco A. for reporting it! (via email)
• Mockups for Desktop: you can now clone mockups that are not selected via the right-click menu
• Mockups for Desktop: the tab for cloned mockups now appears next to the mockup you cloned from. Thanks to Ilya Ryzhenkov for asking for it, it’s the little things that make the difference!
• Mockups for Desktop: if you double-click on a BMML file that’s already open, we select it instead of reloading it (so you won’t loose your changes!) Thanks so much to Aaron Trewern for reporting this!
• Mockups for JIRA: save and continue on a new mockup wasn’t working properly. Thanks Adam Wride for reporting it, and welcome back, we missed your feedback!
• Mockups for JIRA: I fixed a small thing with the default mockup name, which used “:”, a character we no longer allow in mockup IDs.

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. For real this time)
• Web Demo: here

What’s cooking right now in Balsamiq-land?

We have a “non-code-related release” scheduled for tomorrow (come back here to see what I mean with that), and we’re going to push the new build of myBalsamiq to the beta right after.

Once the new build is live I’ll do a screencast of it so that you can get a better taste for it, and if it’s well received by our beta testers we’ll open it up a bit more to a few more people (I have hundreds of names in a GMail folder to pick from).

For now, I’ll share with you two of our internal “working mockups” that have to do with myBalsamiq, just for fun! Click to enlarge.

We’ll let the new myBalsamiq build sit for a little while so that people can test it properly.

While that happens, we’re going to start focusing on solving our #1 most requested feature, re-using mockup pieces across your projects. We have some exciting plans about this and we’ll want your feedback on them before we start coding. Stay tuned!

Other than that, things are going great. January was our best month ever (by far!) and we’re working on laying the foundations of our new little company, which feels so much more mature than what we were in 2009.

Just 12 months ago we went from being “One guy with a laptop” to “a couple of guys in a studio”. Today I just updated our company page to reflect our new status: “small company, big ambitions”.

I just love it, this is exactly what I fantasized about before I started, I can’t believe it’s really happening.

Alright, I’d better get back to it, talk to you soon!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

— 1 Comment