Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Release: Lots and Lots of Bug Fixes

by Marco Botton. March 16th, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 3 Comments

Hello friends!

Marco here doing the release this week, as Peldi is in Austin for SXSWi, a.k.a. geek sleep-away-camp. I can’t wait to hear his report!

And while Peldi is “working” in the US, is bug-squashing time here in Bologna. The list of fixes is pretty long, but there are also some new little features here and there.

Bugs Fixed

• All versions: Property Inspectors now show correct values in some long-standing open cases (border, bold text style, Slider value, Button color, Callout transparency, selected item of List and Accordion). Thanks to everyone who reported a problem and waited so long for the fix!
• All versions: fixed an annoying problem in text selection, thanks to Gyuri J. for reporting.
• All versions: removed the little arrow icons from presentation mode (they had snuck in at some point, but shouldn’t be there).
• All versions: fixed a bad bug in Radio Button Group and Checkbox Group. Thanks to Josh for reporting it!
• All versions: Text Fields now respect the font size even when they are empty.
• All versions: fixed a ugly bug in List controls which displayed the link arrows in wrong position.
• All versions: the Scroll Bar, Tab Bar and Vertical Tab Bar controls now are properly drawn even at small sizes. Thanks Gyuri J. for reporting this via email.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with copying/pasting into the activation dialog. Thanks to mwfallace for finally giving us steps to make it happen!
• Mockups for Desktop: now the Save As panel remembers the chosen folder, after the first time is invoked. We got a number of reports for this bug, thank you all!
• Mockups for FogBugz: unlimited-user licenses work properly (finally!). Although we don’t sell unlimited licenses, we give them as free licenses for Community & Open Source projects.
• Plugin versions: the special character # is no longer valid in mockup names.

Other changes

• All versions: you can FINALLY drag controls past the edge to make the page grow.
• All versions: In BMML, controls are now sorted by ID and control properties are sorted alphabetically. This should make it easier to diff BMML files if you check them in.
• Mockups for Deskop: added CTRL+LEFT and CTRL+RIGHT shortcuts to switch between open tabs, in addition to the already existing CTRL+TAB and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB.
• All versions: Property Inspector are faster to create. It speeds up slightly the whole application.
• Mockups for Desktop: added a “Check for Updates” menu item. For now it simply opens a browser window pointing to our new unified download page. It’s a first step towards our final design.

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’s next?

Next week’s release will also be all about bug fixes. The plan is to bring the app quality to a good level before we start actively developing the components feature, which is a big one and might take a few weeks.

As always, if you hit any issues with today’s release let us know and we’ll fix it right away.

Ciao!

Marco

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

Help us design the “Components” feature

by Peldi Guilizzoni. February 26th, 2010 under Development / Technical, Mockups — 10 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

— 10 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

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Balsamiq Roadmap for 2010

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2010 under Company / Business, Mockups — 10 Comments

This is part two of a two-part post about what happened in 2009 and our plans for 2010. We did this last year as well, it’s becoming somewhat of a tradition!

By the way, thanks so much for all the support and nice words you sent us after yesterday’s post. All this attention is a little overwhelming but it’s a great motivator to continue to give it all we’ve got, so thank you!

I am beyond excited about 2010, I think it will definitely be a key year for us.

First of all, let’s talk about the features we KNOW we MUST deliver in 2010.

Re-using Controls

The ability to re-use pieces of mockups across your wireframes is our current #1 shortcoming, and our top requested feature on GetSatisfaction.

I have put it off in 2009 (here’s our FAQ about it) because I considered it an advanced feature and needed to get some basic features done first, but the more I use Mockups, the more I feel the need to support it.

Some people call it templates, others call it “master pages”. We are calling them “external controls” for now, which is a much more flexible way to do it.

Basically the idea is that you’ll be able to take a group and convert it into an external control, saved on its own file (in your “project assets” or “account assets” folder). When you make a change to that file, each mockup that uses it will (optionally) get the updates.

You’ll be able to drag and drop these kind of controls straight from the UI library, resize them and set some of their properties, just like any of the built-in controls.

You’ll be able to create libraries of these controls to share with your team and others.

The wireframes on MockupsToGo will also be converted into this kind of reusable, external control.

Very exciting stuff. We’ll start work on it in early February.

The Web App

We’re putting the finishing touches on version 1.0 of the web app, which is called myBalsamiq. It will have projects, commenting, super-easy sharing, real-time-collaboration, RSS feeds, the goods!

Here’s a couple of screenshots to whet your appetite:

The beta is still closed at the moment, so please don’t ask us for access quite yet. We’ll post here when we have anything to share.

Switching to Player 10, Air 1.5

Flash Player 10 is now on more than 90% of computers worldwide, so we can finally switch to requiring it.

Aside from being a lot faster than player 9, it will enable us to add the following cool features:

* properly embedding a font! Bye bye Comic Sans!
* upping the maximum mockup size from 2800×2800 to 4095×4095 pixels
* vertical text! (for labels and tabs)
* Right-To-Left language support
* better printing
* spell check!

We’re going to spend the next couple of weeks thoroughly testing Mockups on Flash Player 10 and Air 1.5, to make sure there are no surprises. Once the switch is made, we’ll start going through the list above. Yay!

Also, Air 2.0 is coming, and it’s FAST! Mockups will feel A LOT snappier…you can try out the beta of it already if you like.

A new skin

Mariah’s hand-drawings have served us really well this far, and I still love them. They do have a strong character though, they’re instantly recognizable and are a bit too playful for some people.

We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to have a cleaner, more professional skin to show your wireframes to your more “old-school” clients.

In 2010 we’ll add such a skin…it will still be “sketch-like”, but much much cleaner. We’re very excited about it and hope you’ll like it too!

The plan is to let you choose your favorite skin from a menu item.

I have the feeling that this seemingly little feature will really take Mockups to a new level.

Other features

Other important features are the abilty to rearrange tabs via drag+drop (this is pretty much ready, try it now in the pre-release version!), the “Toggle Markup” feature, the ability to only export the selected controls to PNG, the in-product “check for updates” feature, and others.

Longer term, we want to publish a set of APIs so that others can integrate myBalsamiq with their own back-end system. Aside from the technical challenge, there are some licensing issues to think about…this will be challenging but also very cool, I can’t wait. I suspect we’ll start to really think about this in the 2nd half of the year (gotta give the web app some time to mature first!)

We might also add another wiki integration ourselves this year…Jive Clearspace and Mindtouch are the front-runners in my mind, the ones that seem to have a community of commercial plugin vendors starting to form around them. We shall see. Let us know what you think!

Other than that, we have tons and tons of little- and medium-sized improvements to do, our TODO list in Pivotal is ENORMOUS! Fun stuff, we’ll be busy this year!

I hesitate to even write this, but towards the end of the year we might start thinking about our next product…we have lots of ideas and one clear front-runner…but I don’t really want to think about it quite yet, Mockups needs our full attention right now!

Company Changes

The best part of doing so well in 2009 is that we can now afford to expand our team a bit, filling out the roster, so to speak.

We have TWO AWESOME hires lined up, we’ll announce each very soon. I’m SO thrilled at the thought of working with them every day and all that we’ll be able to accomplish together! I don’t want to say more yet even if I’m dying to!

As we grow in staff, we’ll also grow as a company. We just set up our 401k contribution plan and are looking into providing health insurance for our US employees. We’ll also start having some internal company policies (sounds more formal than it will be), which we’ll definitely share with you on this blog to get your feedback on.

I would also love for everyone at Balsamiq to blog more…we are learning so much, it would be a shame not to share it all with you.

Financially, my goal is to reach $2M in revenue, with a stretch goal of $2.5M. That seems like an enormous number right now, we’ll see.

Challenges

I feel that Mockups (the product) and Balsamiq (the company) are both going through their teens right now. No longer little kids, but not yet mature adults.

In other words, these are turbulent, transformative months, when we decide what kind of adults we want to become.

I hope to be up to the task of steering this ship in the right direction…luckily I am surrounded by great advisers, staff and blogs to help along the way. If you see us make a bad move, tell us! OK? Thanks.

My job will have to change once again, delegating more and spending more time communicating internally (making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing) and externally (talking to partners etc)…more of a managerial role than I’ve been doing so far. I will continue to make an effort to keep my hands in the code, as that’s really my passion and what I’m best at.

As a company we’ll have to start acting a bit more grown-up, meaning a better website (more updated, easier to navigate, cleaner-looking), as well as standardizing how we deal with partners, resellers and also optimizing our internal processes more.

As the product matures a bit, I suspect we’ll have time to look at metrics a bit more…I’ve been heads down in features right now, totally ignoring anything other than what I KNEW had to be done. Do it first, optimize it later, know what I mean?

Community

The community that formed around Mockups fills us with pride and joy, so we want to help it grow and help its members be successful even more.

For instance, that means giving them ways to make money off of us, by selling external control packs, or simply by us starting an affiliate program.

We’ll also continue to share everything we learn through this blog and by speaking at conferences. As I mentioned in the previous post, we’ll also want to support some more blogs, events, groups and podcasts this year, via sponsorships or discounts.

Last but not least, we will continue to support the efforts of non-profits and do-gooders around the world. Our goal is to give away as much as we take in, we’ll see how we do on that front.

Parting thoughts

I think the recipe for 2010 is the same we’ve had from the start: work hard, stay true to our values, be proud of what we do every day, provide as much value as we can, and have fun!

Onward!
Peldi

— 10 Comments

 

 

 

An apology

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 17th, 2009 under Company / Business, Mockups — 13 Comments

Hi friends.

So I made a big mistake today. No, I made a few. I was so excited about the new pan feature that I decided to release it without testing it properly.

Not only, I also ran out the door right after the build was live to run some errands (I already hated Christmas shopping before, now I REALLY hate it).

Anyways, I ran back as soon as I saw your emails, comments and GetSatisfaction posts on the iPhone, but it took a while because of…you guessed it…Christmas shopping traffic.

As soon as I got home, here’s what I did to fight the fire I set under my own butt:

• rolled back the bad build
• Val helped me tell everyone about the rollback, while I found and fixed the build (it was something really stupid)
• I’m writing this blog post while eating humble pie (tasty!)

Anyways, the new build with the fix will be live by the time I finish writing this, I’ll update the post when it’s ready.

In the meantime, I’d like to apologize to all of you who were affected by this bug. You’re our early adopters, our best customers, we NEED you, and upsetting you like this hurts me in the stomach. I truly am sorry for this 2-hour mess-up.

I will also apologize to Valerie, Marco and Mariah for putting them in this little mess.

It might be a small consolation, but I’d like to offer any of you who installed 1.6.55 a free license of Mockups for Desktop to give away to someone for Christmas (I hear it makes for a great present for the in-laws).

Just send me an email venting about how I messed up your day today (I deserve it), and I’ll send you a Mockups for Desktop key, no questions asked. peldi@balsamiq.com

Ok, let me go check on the new build…

Peldi

UPDATE: 1.6.56 is live and looks good.

— 13 Comments

 

 

 

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