Balsamiq Blog

I cut another feature, yay!

My new thing is cutting features. I love it, it gives me a great sense of accomplishment. The product becomes leaner and more clear, more focused and more usable each time. And I save on time, bugs, worry…it’s great. Of course it’s easy not that I haven’t shipped yet…

Today it was the use of “lorem ipsum” in the text controls. It just doesn’t matter, and I read this whole article on how lorem ipsum results in worse designs – I wouldn’t want my software to help you build bad software, quite the opposite!

I also fixed some bugs (thanks Seth!) and made some other small improvements here and there.

I also moved the demo to its new, hopefully more permanent home (URL below). Don’t pay too much attention to the site, I suspect it will change a lot.

Coming up on my TODO list, roughly in this order:

• improve the “blank slate” experience by addin a sample mock-up with instructions. This is actually a bit hard since it relies on the import/export feature, which I need to do anyways
• fix the drag-and-drop experience
• finish groups (man it’s hard)
• add some more controls like tabs, menus, links, datagrid, and about 25 more I have on my list
• and of course see if I can cut any more features: right now the “search ui library” search-box is next on the chopping block. If you  have strong opinions on why I SHOULDN’T cut it, speak now.

One note: my wonderful wife Mariah has agreed to re-draw all of my UI controls. It will still be hand-drawn (it’s a feature!), but it will look a little cleaner, with a little thinner lines, maybe a little more colorful and it will definitely have that woman’s touch, which I think is awesome and very important for any piece of good software.

Ok back to the grindstone, stay tuned and keep that feedback coming

New URL: http://www.balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html

— 2 Comments

2 Responses to “I cut another feature, yay!”

1. tom Says:
   February 15th, 2008 at 1:17 am

   I love the design process where you almost “add everything you can”, get in a wonderful mess, then start about “removing everything you don’t need”…

   I love your Balsamiq tool btw. How about being able to draw your own thingy to add to the screen?

2. Guy Fraser Says:
   August 14th, 2008 at 3:01 am

   Here’s what I type in due to not having the latin (or similar) text:

   sdfkjhdsfkj asdfkjh asdkj hasdkljf hadsfklj hasdkljfh asdfkjlh asdfkljh asdfkljhsadfklja shdfkljhasd fkjlsd hfkljasd hfkj hfo82ehro82 e8ory8934t93842 2ekr lhfhwiurfrbeiru hf2iul 2efilu 2efiul w2bfiulsdbflkjsq dfklqsudgf iwqduf weibfu fdkusl fbieu b2ekur bwkulf bweklu f#b lufbew2kluf 2eklufb 2erkufbefr

   Please revive the latin text feature

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