Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Release: Flash Player 10 and more

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

6 Responses to “Weekly Release: Flash Player 10 and more”

1. Hu Says:
   February 16th, 2010 at 9:15 am

   Thank you so much for the hard work Peldi. I dig the vertically resizable button.

2. Mark Mandel Says:
   February 16th, 2010 at 11:33 am

   This is very cool stuff! Thanks for the additions!

   The only note I will make, is that a lot of the new text annotations / enhancements that have been developed over the last few months aren’t documented in the online help: (http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/help).

   There is aspects like _bold_ and [link], but \r is not, and neither is the newer checkbox enhancements and grid enhancements.

   I’m sure you will get to that stuff eventually, but I just wanted to point it out in case it got overlooked.

   Thanks for all the hard work!

   [Peldi: thanks Mark, you're right updating the help is something that's long overdue. A very gracious customer volunteered to look through it next week and report all that's missing, isn't that super-nice? I'll update it with everything as soon as I get her report]

3. brandon Says:
   February 16th, 2010 at 12:04 pm

   I like to +1 what mark said. I was looking through the help for a summary of these new keyboard features around creating checkboxes etc. and they appear to be strewn through the blogs. My mockups I make at my company are VERY data/tree oriented and I’m betting I could save hours if I knew all the shortcuts.

   Also, I can’t WAIT to be able to change the default font & size, and preferably the default font weight away from being Bold. First thing I do with a new mockup with create a few boxes with comic sans non-bold 10 or 12 point and then I duplicate those for everything I need. I do this every time.

4. Matt Kaufman Says:
   February 16th, 2010 at 5:35 pm

   WOW this project is getting INSANELY more and more PERFECT…. Each time I see it.!!!

5. Rui Says:
   February 18th, 2010 at 7:55 am

   Great work Peldi, thank you very much.

6. Release: Button and ButtonBar improvements - Napkee - make your mockups come alive Says:
   February 19th, 2010 at 3:09 am

   [...] you install the last release of Balsamiq Mockups you can change the height of a Button as shown in this [...]

Leave a Reply