We are all heads down making a TON of progress on all areas of our business: the website, the product, the web app, our internal processes…it’s awesome. Now that Mike is on board we seem to have all the skills we need to really go as fast as we want to, with the quality we want. I gotta tell you, it’s exhilarating.

You’ll start seeing the fruits of our recent labor here soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you our Spring 2010 travel schedule.

March 12th – 16th: Peldi will be at SXSW Interactive, in Austin, Texas (here’s my tentative schedule, also in SitBy.us form)

April 9th – 11th: Mike will be at the IA Summit in Phoenix, Arizona.

May 5th – 6th: Marco and Peldi will be at Better Software in Florence, Italy. Peldi is giving a talk there.

May 19th – 20th: Luis will be at the GR8 Conference Europe, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

May 21st – 22nd: Peldi will be speaking at LessConference 2010, in Atlanta, Georgia (the 2010 website isn’t up yet).

June 9th – 11th: Valerie will be at the Atlassian Summit in San Francisco, California.

We hope to organize a local last-minute meetup at each of these events (think “Beers on Balsamiq tonight“), so stay tuned here, on our Facebook page and our Twitter stream for updates as the events draw near.

Hope to see you there and meet in person for a change!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

In this post we’d like to give you a little glimpse of what Mike joining will mean for you, in the short and medium term.

In the last two months, as Mike gave notice and wrapped up work at his previous job, we’ve been chatting about what he will do at Balsamiq, and have pretty much settled on the following responsibilities, to start with.

None of this is set in stone of course, and everyone does a little bit of everything here so it doesn’t mean that Mike will be the only one taking care of these things, far from it. He’s just taking on the responsibility to help us make sure we continuously make progress in these areas, that’s all.

Job #1: UX Educator

This is basically what Mike already does with Konigi, just more of it.

Part of it is reading hundreds of UX related blogs, highlighting the best content for the rest of us.

Another part is teaching us about good UI. Usability is one of our two main things we like to compete on (the other being customer service), so I want good UX sensibility to be pervasive throughout the company.

That’s why I’ve asked Mike to do a monthly lesson on some aspect of usability for us. Since we love to share and your success is our success, he’s going to do it in the open, in our brand new Balsamiq UX Blog, which we are launching today.

Another aspect of this job is for Mike to represent us at some of our favorite conferences, teaching people about UX topics (not necessarily Balsamiq-related), and meeting and listening to our customers in person.

In other words, to continue to do what he does best, just more of it. I can’t wait to sit back and enjoy the show.

Job #2: Product Manager

Another job I’d like to get Mike’s help with is to be a product manager for Mockups.

A product manager, at least from what I know from Adobe, is someone who:

• has a clear vision for where the product is going
• has deep insight of what customers are asking for
• is responsible for driving the product development’s agenda

Translated to our little startup reality, I’d like Mike to:

• help me get the vision for the app crystallized and “out of my head”, so that we can share it with you as well
• take the lead in replying to feature requests on GetSatisfaction and via email (improving our support response times in the process)
• help us prioritize our big TODO list in Pivotal Tracker so that we work on the most pressing features and bugs first

One of the first things Mike wants to do is interview some of our customers, to learn how they have been using Mockups so far. What it’s good at, what its most frustrating limitations are. Again, he’ll share these interviews with you in the open, on the UX blog.

Job #3: UX Guru

From now on, Mike has the last say in the design of every new feature we ship. I’m sure we’ll have some heated discussions about how to best solve a particular UX challenge, but I’m totally looking forward to having those and I trust him enough to say that the final word should be his.

Aside from new features, Mike is going to help us improve the features we already have or are now working on. For instance, one of his first priorities is to help us solve some of the pieces of myBalsamiq we’re not totally in love with.

I believe UX encompasses more than just a website or software, but rather every interaction point people have with us. So Mike is going to review our support processes, the text of the automated email messages we send out and even help us work on our Typinator shortcuts to make sure they’re nice and to the point.

Last but not least, Mike will take the lead in designing our next products, when the time is right.

Job #4: Webmaster

Our website is one of our weakest assets right now. It’s not easy to navigate, not updated frequently enough and as let’s face it, pretty ugly (hey, I did it all myself, remember?)

In fact, I am surprised we were able to achieve this much success so far despite our website.

Mike is going to be in charge of cleaning it all up, improving the navigation, making sure the documentation gets updated (and stays updated), all that good stuff…

We also now have 5 different blogs, which means 5 Wordpress installations to manage, a theme to share, etc.

Mike says he loves to do this kind of stuff, and we love him for it!

Job #5: Graphic Designer

I really like Mike’s minimalist design style and attention to detail, and can’t wait for it to rub off in our product and website.

The first thing Mike is going to do in this area is to create a new set of components for Mockups, a new skin to complement Mariah’s current hand-drawings.

Many of you have asked for a skin with cleaner lines, and we understand you. Sometimes our current look can be a little too rough, especially when showing your work to some clients.

I love Mike’s set of Omnigraffle Sketch Stencils, for instance. They are clearly still a sketch, but much cleaner than what we have.

Mike has already started thinking about what the ideal new skin would look like, and I’ve asked him to document his progress on this project on the UX blog, from start to finish.

This will be good, and I have a feeling it will have a big impact on sales as well – that’s why I told him to take his time, we’re not quite ready to have twice as many customers right now, we must automate Val’s job a bit more first!

I hope you’ll join the conversation and help us create “the ideal sketchy wireframing skin“.

Do not fear, Mariah’s skin will still be there – it’s one of the main reasons behind our success! – but once Mike is done you’ll be able to choose his new skin from the View menu as well. I can’t wait!

Aside from the new skin, Mike will also tidy up our look any time it’s needed. We still have some programmer-art scattered around Mockups and myBalsamiq, so he’ll swap that out with pretty pretty assets soon. What a relief!

So, lots to do. Better get to it!

Onward!

Michael Angeles, the man behind Konigi and one of the people I look up to the most in our industry, has agreed to join Balsamiq.

His job title is Director of User Experience, but we just call him UX Guru, for short.

Michael is a very well-known figure in the Information Architecture, UX and usability industry. He is one of the co-founders and a current advisory board member of the IA Institute, he regularly speaks at conferences and writes about wireframing, IA, UX and web design, and he’s the man behind Konigi, one of the premiere UX sites on the web.

Mike with other IA Institute founders

Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

If you’ve been reading this blog you know that the Steve Martin quote above is one of the mantras we try to live by. Well, Mike is a prime example of someone so good, we couldn’t ignore him.

Let me explain, by telling the story of how we met.

As I mentioned in my post about the value of blogging, one of the first things I did when I started writing PatataMonkey, my daddy blog, was to look for other blogs just like the one I wanted to write.

The very first ones I found, and my favorite overall, was called “UrlGreyHot and Lorenzo“, a daddy blog I found a very intimate, private and soft-spoken blog (full review, a funny post). It immediately inspired me, not just to write a better blog, but to be a better father.

Guess who was behind that blog? That’s right, Michael Angeles. But that was 2005 and I didn’t think much of it. I was just getting into UX back then and didn’t recognize his name.

My memory is a bit blurry about this, but as the months and years passed, Michael’s name kept popping up in the blogs and websites I visited. It was on Boxes and Arrows, IA Slash…all over the place!

It was hard to make the connection at first, since Mike uses several nicknames online (jibbajabba, urlgreyhot, konigi), but I remember the day I put it all together in my head and thought “wow, this guy’s everywhere! And everything he does, I like!”

Ever since that day, I’ve been following his work more closely, you could say he’s one of my online heroes.

Excellence attracts excellence

Fast-forward to more recent times, and it now seems obvious to me that our paths were on a “merging course”.

Last year I received an email from Mike asking me if I’d be interested in making a special version of Mockups to use on Konigi.com. The idea is for people to have a place to post their wireframes (maybe anonymously) and get a critique done by their peers and UX experts.

This was just around the time we were starting to develop myBalsamiq, so I thought that “public myBalsamiq projects” would be perfect for it. In fact, Mike’s the reason public projects are in v.1 of myBalsamiq, and I can’t wait for him to start hosting these critique sessions!

Anyways, we had a Skype chat about this idea, and I was immediately struck at how easy and exciting working with Mike was. We immediately clicked, it felt like we had known each other forever (well I’d been reading everything he wrote for the last 4 years, so maybe that had something to do with it…).

And then Rackspace hired Scoble

Do you know who Robert Scoble is? I bet you do, but in short, he’s the definition of the “digerati“, one of those people who truly “gets” the current state of technology and how it affects society, because he lives and breathes it every day, with enormous dedication and passion.

Now, did you know Rackspace hired Scoble last year? Many people who know who Scoble is don’t know this fact, which it’s telling!

I remember thinking how smart it was for Rackspace to “snatch him”. They basically hired Scoble to “BE Scoble”, they give him what I imagine is a very good salary so that he can have the freedom to do whatever he wants, every day.

In return Rackspace gets to put a tiny little Rackspace logo on Scoble’s avatar, and most importantly gets first access to someone who’s a thought leader, years ahead of most everyone else.

Because of this simple move, I now think that Rackspace “gets it” more than its competitors, and I am more inclined to do business with them. They also acquired Slicehost, whose success was based on providing outstanding customer support. So they get it in more ways than one…but I digress…

Back to our story. One thing I learned during my Skype chat with Mike is that Konigi was just his hobby, his nights-and-weekends job.

This news came as a bit of a shock. Given the quality and quantity of material on Konigi, I had assumed there had to be a whole team of people working full time on it.

So last fall, as business was booming, I started thinking: what if Mike had the freedom to work on his passion FULL TIME? What other amazing things would come out of it? Could WE pull our own mini-Rackspace move?

The Proposal

At first it was a dream, a secret. I tried to push it away because I didn’t want to get my hopes up in vain, but it kept popping into my head, more and more often. Sales going so well and work piling up didn’t help either.

So one day in December I mustered the courage and called Mike on Skype. Shaking, with a trepidation level not much lower than when I proposed to my wife, I asked Mike to start thinking about what it would take for me to convince him to leave his job and join Balsamiq one day.

Well, amazingly, it didn’t take too long! We had a long chat that day, and the next day, and again a week later.

Then, on December 29th, we sealed the deal with a high-five over Skype.

Unbelievable. I hate to brag but I gotta say, I felt so proud, I guess we’re doing SOME things right!

Rounding out the roster

Mike nicely rounds out our Balsamiq roster, bringing with him a set of skills we were sorely lacking (more on this in the next post).

On top of that, his reputation and “IA DNA” brings us a step closer to some of the most important people in our community, the thought leaders in the User Experience field.

You already knew we think life is too short for bad software. Supporting Mike’s work is another way for us to show everyone we’re in this for the long haul and are dead serious about doing our part to help rid the world of frustrating digital experiences.

Tomorrow we will publish a blog post detailing what Mike’s set of initial responsibilities will be, but to give you a sneak peek, his first priorities are:

• clean up myBalsamiq, getting it ready for launch
• create a new sketch skin for Mockups
• update our website

In the last few weeks Mike has already been reading support emails and GetSatisfaction threads, has met everyone here on Skype or over the phone, and has been active on our internal Yammer stream. We are all super-excited to have him join our Balsamiq family, and can’t wait to do great things together in the future.

So please join us in welcoming Mike by leaving a comment here, or on his announcement at Konigi, or on Twitter at his old @konigi account (which he’ll continue to use), or his new @balsamiqMike account. They guy does a lot huh?

Onward!
Peldi

P.S.Today also marks the day Balsamiq Studios LLC (our American company) offers health-insurance plans to all of our employees. We are very proud of this, and Valerie will share everything we’ve learned about the process of setting that up on her blog soon. Yes!

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

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!

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

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

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!

I started in 2003 with Peldi’s Little Blog in which I shared sample applications and things that I learned at work about Flash Communication Server, and ran it for about 3 years.

In 2004 I started PatataMonkey, a pregnancy/daddy blog, which also ran for about 3 years.

In september 2007, long before telling anyone about my startup idea, I started this blog.

Each blog is different, but the motivation to start each of them was the same: I was entering a new phase of my life, jumping into the unknown, “having a new baby” if you will.

It was a stressful time, a time when I felt the need to process my thoughts by writing them down. I needed a diary.

Looking for advice on each new phase of my life, I googled and googled for a blog just like the one I wanted to read, one of someone who had gone through my same path before me or who was going through it at the same time as I was.

Each time I was looking for an established community, a support group: one about FCS development, one about “parenting in San Francisco in 2005″ or one about a “programmer-turned-entrepreneur launching a bootstrapped micro-ISV in 2007″.

After many years of using the World Wide Internet Webs I know now that no matter how small, the community you’re looking for is already out there, hanging out in some corner of the Internet somewhere. You just have to find it.

Problem is, the Internet is a vast place, small communities are really hard to find. Each time I tried, my googling fell short.

Getting found

So I decided to try and “get found” instead. Each time I decided to pinch my nose, jump in and publish my rants, in the hope that someone would google for my same kind of content one day and find me.

For PatataMonkey, I was desperate to find a new group of friends quickly: none of our “offline friends” at the time were even married, let alone expecting a child at that time. So as soon as I started the blog, I immediately put Google Adsense ads on it. The hope was that Google’s all-powerful algorithms would be able to index and understand my content, returning me advertisements that would lead me to the people I was looking for. Oh mighty Google Spiders, what stores should I be going to? Which sites should I be reading? Is there a blog or forum I should look at?

Well, my nerdy scheme didn’t really work out, but the blogging was a very effective therapy for me, so I kept at it.

Then, with time, as if by magic, a community started to emerge, organically, on its own. Someone would post a comment pointing me to a blog I should read, someone else would suggest a book.

All of a sudden blogging wasn’t a lonely endeavor any more, I wasn’t just speaking to the wind like a crazy person…I had…friends! People just like me, going through the same issues as I was! Slowly but surely, a little community gathered around my blog, and I started hanging out at other blogs as well, starting to recognize the names of frequent commenters like me.

I realized then that the Internet is a galaxy of warm little communities held together by blogs, mailing lists and now Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Ning networks, Twitter cliques and StackExchange-powered sites.

I guess people call it social media…I call it life in 2010 and beyond.

I read maybe a dozen different blog posts every day, and most of them teach me something new. My favorite posts to read are those written from the heart, those where you can clearly see that the authors needed to get something off their chest.

That’s how I want to write as well: it’s therapy that helps me and helps others in the process. Talk about a win-win!

At this point I cannot imagine my life without blogging.

On Business Blogs

Blogs are essential for business. Largely because of this blog we got written up in the New York Times and Inc. Magazine (twice!), I get to travel the world speaking at conferences and our software went from zero to leader in just 18 months.

As Paul Hawken says in his awesome “Growing a Business” – one of my all-time favorite business books – in order to be successful you need to get permission of the market first.

I define “the market” as the community of people who are passionate about the problem your company or product is trying to solve. It includes customers, competitors, complementary products, free-loaders. Asking for permission means earning their respect…ideally you need to become a thought-leader in your community.

As you start your blog, ask yourself: which community do I want to try and become a leader of?

Choosing your target should be easy because it should be “people just like me”, or rather “people just like the one I hope to become”. If you succeed in your quest, great things will happen. If you don’t, the high goal you set for yourself will have pushed you to do your best work, teaching you a ton and making you a better person in the process.

It doesn’t have to be related to your product, you’re not doing this to generate more sales. You’re doing this for yourself: to vent, to grow as a person and to be a good citizen.

Sure, if you do a good job your company will benefit from the higher exposure and stuff…but that’s a side-effect, not the end-goal!

Becoming a leader in an online community is done by providing value to its members, continuously, over time. It means listening carefully and genuinely caring for the success of your fellow community members, without ever talking down to them – you’re no better than them, you’re just trying to help. It’s hard work, but very fulfilling work. Share what’s relevant, but don’t spam. Try to keep it short, everyone’s busy. Retweet! Make a Twitter list! Make two! Help others find your community, help it grow! Support it by sponsoring the best blogs and events!

Just the simple act of being yourself, but “in public”, can make a big difference in someone else’s life. You’ll be surprised.

At Balsamiq, Everyone Blogs

One of my goals for the year is to encourage everyone at Balsamiq to blog, to try to become a leader of their chosen niche.

My dream is for each Balsamiq employee to be better known within their community for their blog rather than the company they work for.

I want Balsamiq to benefit from the “halo effect” of these blogs, not the other way around.

All of us are first-time members of a tech startup. We are all going through a new phase of our lives, learning a ton every day. What better time than this to share what we learn and find our communities in the process?

Starting today, everyone at Balsamiq blogs:

• we made a nice little landing page
• we updated each of our blog’s sidebar to point to it and
• we will regularly post a “blog roundup” summary (just like Atlassian does), both here and via our currently-dormant monthly newsletter
• we will each be tweeting about our blog posts, so you can follow our Team’s Twitter list if you’d like

This will be challenging at first, this is a new experience for both Val and Marco. I am thrilled at how enthusiastically they both accepted the challenge, and wish them luck. You can read Val’s first post here and Marco’s first post here (in Italian).

This will also be a significant time-commitment for our little team. Blogging takes time. For instance, it’s incredibly 2:15am already as I write this.

I believe the benefits of us all blogging are more than worth it: if you’re hesitant, just consider each blog post to be like a product release, only one that doesn’t involve coding. It’s that important.

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team

P.S. Two questions!

I bet there are great resources out there by now to help people find communities online. I’ve sent people to this old Marshall Kirkpatrick post before, but I’d love to collect a few more links like it. Which do you recommend?

Another question: I am tempted to splinter off my posts into a new blog (/blogs/peldi perhaps), so that this blog could focus only on product-related news. What do you think? I like the idea of giving people more focused RSS feeds, but I fear that it would effectively mean “starting over” a bit. I don’t know. What are your thoughts?

Thanks for reading this far!

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