Balsamiq Blog

Bootstrapping a Micro-ISV, Exposed

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

One Response to “New Release: a Mockups Viewer and Bug Fixes”

Riccardo Giraldi Says:
February 5th, 2010 at 9:22 am
The desktop viewer version is great and is just what I needed. thanks!

Hi this is Peldi from Balsamiq. This blog is a mixture of product updates, company updates and posts about my experiences as a programmer-turned-entrepreneur. If you're into 37Signals and A Smart Bear, this blog is for you.