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• Plugin versions: the special character # is no longer valid in mockup names.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

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Mid-Week Release: finishing up Zoom

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 17th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 12 Comments

New Update (5:49pm CET): we have fixed the bug and issued an apology you might be interested in (there’s a little surprise for you there)

Update (5:16pm CET): the new build was seriously broken. We have posted the previous version here if you need to roll back. A new build with the fix is coming right up. Also writing a blog post apology.

Hey. We just posted a new version of Mockups that “finishes” the zoom feature we released two days ago.

Here’s what’s new:

• in Mockups on Desktop: the zoom and scroll position is remembered for each tab. Thanks so much Ben Gillbanks for starting the discussion on this and to everyone else who chimed in! As a side effect, this took care of this year-old bug report by Michael Bourque! It might take us a little while, but we get to things!
• we added the ability to pan! Just hold down space and drag around to navigate your mockup easily
• we also added the ability to zoom in and out with CTRL+scrollwheel: up to zoom in, down to zoom out. Thanks to those who asked for it!

Who do we think we are, Photoshop?

There might still some bugs, so keep reporting them and we’ll fix them all up, yay!

How do I upgrade?

• 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

Onward!

— 12 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Zoom Zoom!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 15th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 5 Comments

I forget who told me that you should always hire people who are smarter than you, but boy am I thankful for the advice!

I knew Marco was smarter than me pretty soon after I met him. His work on the Zoom feature, which we’re releasing today, proved it once again.

So let’s get to it!

Zoom, or how did we ever live without it for so long?

As all good UIs should be, zoom is nearly invisible. There are a few new menu items in the View menu, there’s a new zoom icon on the toolbar (with a special hover effect we came up with – try it!) and most importantly there are new keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out.

Other than that, the feature should “just work”, allowing you to work at “the right zoom level to get the job done”.

The keyboard shortcuts to remember are (as always, substitute CTRL with APPLE on the mac):

• CTRL + +, zoom in
• CTRL + -, zoom out
• CTRL + 0, zoom to fit (this is good to get a bird’s-eye view of your mockup)
• CTRL + 1, zoom to Actual size (100%, 1:1)

We are VERY pleased with the feature, and would love to hear your thoughts on it. As with all new features, there is room for improvement and some rough edges, but with your help we’ll make it better every week. Stay with us!

For example, we’ll add the “pan” feature soon, as the two go hand-in-hand.

One thing we had to do was to change the keyboard shortcuts for growing and shrinking text because they were conflicting (and zoom is more important). You now have to also hold ALT down together with the shortcuts above to change the font size. We don’t like to change things like this but we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it in this case.

Many many thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the GetSatisfaction thread about the feature and helped us test it: tomr, Michael, Laszlo, Adam, Gareth, Justin, Luke, Jeff, Rob, Dan, Milhaus, Regis, Jim, Jenni, Chris, Steve, Andi, lewen7er9, Jon, Luc, Ben, Aaron, this one’s for you.

Canvas Border Styles and Color

We added two more border styles to the Canvas / Rectangle control, as well as support for border color.

Many thanks to Jenni Merrifield for the eloquent and very convincing feature request, and to Duke and Laurent for pushing us to make it as good as it could be.

Other Improvements

Added linking support for Trees, Menus and List controls. One link per line, simple as that.

UI Library Filters: Thanks to feedback from Justin Vincent of TechZing and now TweetMiner fame, and to fschaap, we realized that the way we had changed the behavior of the UI Library filters last week was not optimal. We made a change to fix it: now clicking on a button will switch the filter to that button, but holding SHIFT while clicking will add to the current filter. It’s easier to try than explain, and don’t worry about remembering this since it’s in the tooltip as well.

PDF Export: Fixed a bug in PDF export that had to do with BMML files with dots in their names. Sorry it took a while, this was a 5-minute fix! Thanks to Chris Mears and others for reporting it.

During the week we also fixed a bug with going full-screen when the inspector was docked, which would pretty much break everything. Thanks to essepi and others for reporting it, we fixed it in 1.6.50.

Improved the looks of the Geometric Shape controls and of the Image placeholder a bit more. Sorry it’s taking me so many iterations to get it right, it’s not that hard but I guess I was going too fast before.

How do I upgrade?

• 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

On a personal note, I’m starting to really like the app, it’s getting there…

What’s next?

Here’s what’s cooking right now:

• sortable tabs for the Desktop version
• a way to take a snapshot of a web page from within the app (only in the Desktop version for now)
• a new cleaner but still sketchy skin: designer friends, we’ll need your help with this one, it’s gotta be GOOD, “Andy-Budd good“.
• web app private beta members: we plan to push a new build with RTC and tons of other improvements before Christmas.

Onward!

— 5 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Big UI Library Improvements

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 9th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 6 Comments

Hello everyone!

We finally had some time to tackle one of the big features that many of you have been asking for, the “UI Library Position” feature.

As usual, it was a true group effort, just look at all the great ideas that were shared on this long GetSatisfaction thread about it! Rainwebs, Gaving Jolly, Tobias Tappel, Troy King, Lalomi, Thomas Schaaf, RedMike, A.J.Kandy, Sue Anderson, DJ EJ, Regis, Alanc, jrseney, Ben Kopf, Paul Muston, applennevaux, Cristian Pascu and Andi, we thank thee!

We truly are blessed to be part of the user community that has formed around Mockups, you guys are the best, we’re so glad to be helping YOU make this app better and better.

OK so I recorded a little 4-minute screencast of the new features:

In short:

• You can now place the UI Library on the right or on the left of your screen (not just on top like before). The position you choose will be remembered across restarts.
• You can now dock the Property Inspector (only when the UI Library is on the left or the right).
• You can now combine filters for the UI Library controls that are shown in the UI Library.
• The filters are remembered across restarts.

We are happy with the changes, and hope you will be too!

Let us know what you think, especially after using it for a while.

This feature is available on all versions of Mockups.

What else is new?

• We improved how some of the geometric shape controls look when you stretch them out. Thanks Andi for bringing this up!

• We improved the look of the app’s scrollbars a little (they look less flex-like)
• We increased the size of the font size combobox pulldown so that you no longer have to scroll. Thank you Tobias for reporting it
  
  Also don’t forget that you can use CTRL+= and CTRL+- (or APPLE+= and APPLE+-) to resize the text incrementally without using the mouse at all. Also CTRL+0 to get back to the default size.
• You can now disable text throughout the app by using -this notation-, just like *this* will make something bold, [this] will make it a link and _this_ will make it underlined. Thanks to Mark Henderson for requesting it and to Erika Cooper, Andi  and applennevaux for convincing me to do it!

How do I upgrade?

• 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 else is cooking?

Well, we continue to be focused on improving the web app, which I’d say is almost screencast-ready. Please do not email us asking to be in the beta, we are not accepting new members at the moment. Just stay tuned here for when we decide to open it up again or go live with it!

Aside from the web app and customer support, we are working on 3 exciting and highly-requested features:

• Zoom. Yes, zoom!
• in Mockups for Desktop, the ability to rearrange the order of the tabs at the bottom via drag and drop!
• a new, cleaner and a touch more serious, but still sketch-like skin

These are not easy features, so don’t expect them all next week, but know that we’re actively working on them. I’m sure we’ll need your help in order to make them as good as they can be, so stay tuned here and on Twitter!

Our little app is maturing, yay!

Onward!

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: lots of little fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 26th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 1 Comment

Hi all, sorry we got a bit off-schedule with our weekly releases, but we sure have been busy. Our company is growing and we’re growing with it. Lots to share, in time.

For now, enjoy this week’s bag full of little changes here and there:

• Mockups for Confluence: you can now use UTF-8 characters (Danish ones, for instance) in your mockup names
• Mockups for Confluence: image attachments you attach via the editor are no longer uploaded as “anonymous”. Thanks to Paul, Francis and Brian for their patience on this one.
• Fixed an issue with loading images from Flickr in the live demo.
• Changed the look of the Tab bars one more time. The last two changes were a step backward, I apologize. This one looks clear, both in our humble opinion and in the opinion of some very vocal customers (thank you for that). Let us know what you think!
  
• Fixed an issue with the contrast of the font color of the text in Text Input and Text Area (if the background color is semi-transparent, we now stick to black for the font color instead of going to white)
• Mockups for FogBugz OnDemand: fixed an issue where some accounts saw our pricing as starting from $240/month instead of the real $24.00/month price This build will be live on your FogBugz accounts in a few days
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed a security issue that happened in a pretty non-standard set up (with users who can log in but cannot see any projects)
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed an issue with export to PDF for people who cannot access their Documents folder for some reason
• Fixed a long-standing bug with copy/paste of text on Windows: Mockups would always insert an empty line between two lines. Frustrating! Thanks so much Mark for reporting this!

How do I upgrade?

• 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 time to get back to work. Have a great thanksgiving everyone!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

Next Page »