Hello friends!

Today's big feature is the ability to extend our icon selection with your own icon image files.

Custom Icons!

Starting with today's version, you can now add your own icons to use in your wireframes.

If you want to share icons between your projects, set up your Account Assets folder first.

Adding via Icons dialog

There are two ways to add custom icons to Balsamiq Mockups. The easiest way is via the Icon Library. If you're working on a saved file, you'll see a  Project Assets folder as below.

Just select Project Assets or Account Assets, then click the little plus button, select an image file and voila', your image will be resized down to fit in a 48x48 pixels square and copied to either the project assets or account assets folder for you.

Adding to assets folder on file system

The second way is to place icon files manually inside your project assets or account assets folders. Just add the "icon_" prefix to each file name and they'll show up in the icon library.

The words you use in your filename after icon_ are used as the searchable keywords in the icon dialog. So the example below shows airplane because the filename is icon_airplane.png. You can string together a few labels to get synonyms in there, e.g. if the file is named icon_bag briefcase portfolio.png, all of those words after icon_ will be searchable.

Here's an example showing how we added custom icons to a Mac by downloading the free 32x32px Doodlekit icons, ran them through the free NameChanger app to prepend files with icon_, and moved them to the ~/Documents/Balsamiq Mockups/assets folder. They now appear in the icon dialog like this:

The Steedicons also look like a perfect complement to the rough, thick style of Mockups. This blog entry at tipsblogger lists some more hand drawn icon sets that might be useful for this feature.

Many many thanks go out to everyone who's asked for this feature in the past on GetSatisfaction and to those who helped us design it on this myBalsamiq mockup.

We also need to give mad props to our new friend and awesome Actionscript independent contractor Mims Wright who worked on the Custom Icons development. Thanks Mims! :)

Other bug fixes

• All versions: added smoothing to small images so that they look better.
• All versions: fixed size of checkmark icon in iPhone menu. Thanks halshura for reporting it!
• Mockups for FogBugz: updated a few links to our website.

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.7
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.6
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.6
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.6
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.6
• Web Demo: version 2.1.6 launch it

What else is going on?

• Michael exported our Balsamiq Mockups documentation in handy ebook formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI), and even wrote a blog post about the process. Check it out!
• Our website was hacked on October 5th. It was a wild ride, but now we're stronger for it.
• We migrated our build machine to a much more powerful server, cutting down our build times considerably. Thanks Luis!
• We improved our docs a bit more: here's a new article about running myBalsamiq behind your firewall, one about the custom properties feature and one about sharing images, symbols and icons between projects using account assets. We also improved the icons documentation with the new feature, and moved the projects best-practice to be front and center.
• Marco and I are off to Boston tomorrow for the Business of Software conference, where I'll interview one of my heroes on stage and run a workshop revealing how we're able to release so often. I can't wait to see my tech entrepreneur friends and meet new ones!If you're going to BoS, please come and say hi! If you're not, register for the live stream!
• We updated the myBalsamiq beta build a couple of times. This is still our main focus right now
• We have interviewed a number of people for the devops job and we're making great progress...stay tuned here for updates!

Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Hello friends of Balsamiq!

Today's release brings about a grab bag of little new features and bug fixes. Nothing earth-shattering, but some welcome additions I'm sure.

OK here we go:

New "Slanted Text" rotation option for Label control

We added a fourth rotation option to the Label control, in the property inspector. We're calling it "slanted", check it out:

We find it very useful to "stamp" or tag a mockup with a message to help the team understand where in the process the mockup is. I'm sure you'll find many more uses for it. :)

New "Dashed Rectangle" geometric shape

This was a good idea that came via a tweet by Matt Obee:

Basically it's a new geometric shape selection that draws a dashed rounded-corner rectangle. You could have already achieved this with a border option in the Canvas control, but this way you'll be able to have a text label in the center of the shape.

This is very useful if you're building high-level wireframes and need to designate an area as a place-holder for instance.

A ton of new icons!

We continued the work on cleaning up and adding new icons, we now have 226 of them!

Thanks to all those who asked for new icons, via this GetSatisfaction thread or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this tweet.

The rest of the cyrillic glyphs!

We added a few with the last release, and now we're adding the rest.

Thanks to Ross and Алексей Волков for helping us fix this.

New "toggle transparent background" option on the iPhone control

There's a new button in the iPhone property inspector:

Select it and the background will become transparent, so that you can easily mock up screens that go past the view-port of the iPhone.

Other changes and bug fixes

• All versions: Button fill is too short. Thanks László Bővíz for reporting it!!
• All versions: fixed double-scrollbar in Flickr image import panel. Thank you acuz for reporting it!
• All versions: fixed the link area of the Accordion control. Thanks to Florian Brauer for reporting it!
• All versions: fixed a bug that resulted in <map> tags not being saved in the BMML when doing a Save All
• All versions: made the icons in iPhone, Menu and Tree controls smoother. Thanks dfjones1981 for reporting it!
• Mockups for Desktop: The transparentBackground option now works on all PNG export variations. Thanks Prashant Deva for reporting it!
• Mockups for JIRA: JIRA 5 compatibility! You heard it right. JIRA 5 hasn't even shipped yet, but our plugin already works with it! If you have access to the early builds of JIRA 5, try it out!
• Mockups for Confluence: Make it so that renaming pages in Confluence won't break links between mockups. Thank you Dagmar for asking for this!

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.5
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.5
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.5
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.5
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.5
• Web Demo: version 2.1.5 launch it

What else is going on?

We are still interviewing for the devops job position. We received a few good applications already, so don't be shy! Send the link to all your friends! http://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2011/09/12/devops/

We are working on streamlining our myBalsamiq deployment procedures and on stabilizing the build to make it scale. The app is pretty much feature-complete at this point, we just need to make sure it's rock solid before we can launch it.

Oh, and Paolo got married last weekend! :)

Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq team

Sep 29 Update

I just did another micro-release today to fix 3 issues: a text clipping in the multiline button control, an issue with the geometric shape control, and removed the default text from Text Input and Text Area controls. Updated the build numbers above to 2.1.5 to reflect this.

Hello friends!

Today's little release brings a few little goodies:

Much prettier icons!

The work we did to optimize our application's loading time had the unwanted side-effect of making our icons a lot uglier. :(

Sure Mockups is about roughness, but those icons were a little too rough, even for our taste. So we went back to Mariah's original drawings and re-imported the icons, this time adding a middle step of tracing them into vectors in Illustrator.

Mike then did a pass to make the strokes consistent between the icons. The end result is gorgeous. Take a look at this comparison:

As an added bonus, removing the grays and the ugly dirty pixels here and there on all the icons resulted in an additional 257Kb savings in file size! :)

Thanks johanmiller for reporting it!

Marco says we're the only app he's ever known that gets smaller as it gets better. I love it! :)

We also added four new icons while we were at it:

We plan on adding more soon, Mariah just needs to buy a new sharpie and draw them up! :)

We might also use this same tracing technique to improve the look of the controls themselves, as some of them don't look so great when stretched big.

Cyrillic Glyphs and better diacritics

Mike did some more work on our font to fix some diacritics (that's all the glyphs with accents etc) and to add some Cyrillic glyphs.

We're trying to resist adding more and more glyphs to the font as it impacts the file size, but Алексей Волков convinced us that adding these few glyphs would get us 90% there in supporting russian and other eastern european languages. We hope this is enough for now, we're learning a lot here! :)

Confluence 4.0 support!

Today's release makes Mockups for Confluence compatible with Confluence 4.0, which should ship any day now.

Take a look at these cool screenshots:

Cool stuff huh? :)

With some effort Paolo was able to make the plugin backward-compatible, so it will work on Confluence 3.0 as well, and when you decide to upgrade, you'll still be able to see and edit your old mockups as well (of course).

Other fixes

• All versions: tweaked the text padding on some controls a little more.
• All versions: fixed a bug with jumping controls inside groups. Thanks Jim Jarret for reporting it!
• All versions: fixed the tooltip for the Opacity slider inspector (from Transparency to Opacity). Thanks Jack for reporting it!
• All versions: fixed SumbleUpon icon name. Thanks Briston Davige for reporting it!

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.3
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.3
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.3
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.3
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.3
• Web Demo: version 2.1.3 launch it

What else is going on?

We are working on a myBalsamiq beta update which will include the following features: project upload, export project to PDF and "renaming mockups without breaking links". We are stress-testing the build right now, hopefully to release the build to the beta group next week.

I forgot to mention this a while ago, but I was interviewed by Software Promotions. They are the fine folks who manage our Google AdWords account. If you know you need AdWords but can't be bothered learning about its ins and outs, take a look at the interview! :)

Another product that we use every day finally launched last week: it's called DigMyData and it's the perfect "CEO dashboard". If you're interested in how we use it at Balsamiq, read this post.

I have also been blogging a bit about our company policies:

• On the need of VERY FEW company policies
• Pace, not Deadlines
• Vacation Policy
• Salary Policy
• Profit Sharing Program

I certainly did not expect such a big reaction, but I'm glad to have shared our policies: the feedback has been useful and hopefully the posts will help other micro-multinationals like ours. :)

Last but not least, Marco and I are going to be at the Business of Software 2011 conference in Boston again. I am interviewing one of my heroes on stage, and running a workshop as well. There are still a few tickets left, hope to see you there! :)

Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Hello Balsamiq friends near and far! :)

We're back from summer vacation and eager to get back to work. We hope you all were able to take some time off, relax and recharge.

Today's release is fairly small and mainly focussed around the new font, which, we're happy to report, has been overwhelmingly well received.

Bug Fixes

• All versions: updated the font files to add some more glyphs and made a handy glyph viewer for reference. Thanks Eric for the request.
• All versions: fixed some accented characters to be consistent with the regular glyphs. Thanks Eduardo Villa for the bug report!
• All versions: the bold and bold italic fonts had a bigger baseline than the regular and italic versions. That's fixed now. Thanks so much to our old friend László Bővíz for the bug report. Good to see you again on the forums László! :)
• All versions: We also fixed the height and position of some of the glyphs in the font. It should be a lot more readable now, check it out! Thanks to rafa, Andi, Florian Brauer and Stephen for the great discussion and to Andreas Weder for this bug report.
• All versions: tweaked vertical positioning and text padding in Alert, Label, Radio Button Group, Tree, Vertical Tab Bar, Numeric Stepper, Data Grid, BreadCrumbs, Link, Geometric Shape, Text Area, Text Input, Tooltip (thanks Ben Fyvie for the bug report), Subtitle, iPhone and Checkbox Group controls.
• All versions: fixed label position in Data Grid header. Thanks Graeme for reporting it!
• All versions: fixed a bug that happened when you entered a group, selected all and did "Cut". It no longer explodes now. :)
• Mockups for Desktop: we no longer create a number of "New Mockup" tabs when you open Mockups for Desktop by double-clicking on some bmml files. Sorry about that small injection, my bad! Thank you Florian Bauer, Simone, Ben, Mark K, Richard, beathoven, Johan Strandell, zorg79 and chamberssr for the bug reports.
• Mockups for Desktop: the {mockup-name} macro now properly displays accented characters.
• Mockups for Desktop: in Windows, commas in Mockups names showed as %2C characters in the bottom tabs. This is now fixed.
• Mockups for Desktop: if you started Mockups without a project assets folder and created it later, you had to restart Mockups for it to notice. This is now fixed as well.
• Mockups for Desktop: renaming a Mockup would position it at the end of the list sometimes. Thanks James and Hal Shubin for the bug report. Fixed!

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.2
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.2
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.2
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.2
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.2
• Web Demo: version 2.1.2 launch it

What else is going on?

Our main priority is still finishing up myBalsamiq. We hit a hang-up with the new project upload feature, but we have identified the root cause of the bug and are testing a workaround. Beta participants, you should see a new build up sometimes next week.

While myBalsamiq is getting polished, and because Mockups is in pretty good shape, we have dedicated a bunch of time this summer to improving our internal processes to help us scale.

We migrated A LOT of our website's content over to our new Support Portal, and at the same time migrated from "reply all in GMail" to more robust Help Desk solution, which we've very happy with (it's Assistly, check them out).

It was an epic effort, it's not easy to make changes to a speeding bullet. But I'm glad we made the switch, I can already tell it's going to pay off.

We also found the time to write a few blog posts recently too. Here they are:

• Better Software 2011 by Marco, on the Italian blog.
• "I love to do business with other businesses my size" on Peldi's blog
• Mockups font takes it first steps by Mike on the UX blog
• Company Retreat Powers Balsamiq Quality Boost by Louanne on the Life @ Balsamiq blog
• Avoiding the Circumlocution Office by Natalie on the Life @ Balsamiq blog

Onward!
Peldi and the Balsamiq Team

Hello friends, we hope you're having a great summer!

Today's release marks the end of an era for us, as we introduce our very own font. It's a big enough change that we feel it warrants a new minor version update:

• 1.5 was importing images
• 1.6 was linking
• 1.8 was editable groups
• 2.0 was symbols
• 2.1 is the new font! :)

We also fixed a number of little issues and added a few little features since the last release. Let's take a look!

A new font!

As pre-announced last week, the main feature of Mockups 2.1 is the switch from Comic Sans / Chalkboard to our very own font, designed by Michael.

The main goals of the change were to get rid of a very frustrating clipping bug that affected lots and lots of users, as well as removing a part of Mockups that was distracting to some of our users.

The new font is still sketchy, playful and readable, but also a little less noticeable. As far as we know, it hasn't caused any allergic reactions in anyone who has seen it so far. ;)

We created a Balsamiq Mockups Font FAQ document that has more details on what changed and how it might impact your work. It's a quick one, worth a read! :)

New Triangle Shape!

We added a new geometric shape: a little triangle!

You can find it in the property inspector of the Geometric Shape control. Once you select it, you'll also see a "rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise" icon appear.

Thanks to Praveen, Meza and Rolias and for requesting this, as well as @benfurneaux.

Bye bye JIRA 3.

In line with Atlassian's Support end-of-life schedule, we now no longer support JIRA 3. This means that we will no longer create and sell a new version of Mockups for JIRA compatible with JIRA 3: the last version of Mockups for JIRA that supports it is mockupsJIRA3x-2.0.23.jar, from June 22nd 2011.

We updated the Mockups for JIRA 4 licensing FAQ to reflect this change.

Other improvements and bug fixes

• All versions: added bullet support to Text Area control. Thanks Richard Collins for the feature request.
• Mockups for Desktop: non-latin file names now properly show up as page names in exported PDFs. Thanks Joe H. and 雾都孤狗 for the bug report (via email).
• Mockups for Desktop: cloned mockups now remember where they came from better. This means that project assets will show up, symbols will still work and the default folder for saving will be the same as the original mockup. Thank you Maurice Svey for the request and to merle.corey for this related request.
• Mockups for Desktop: we no longer show lots of "New Mockups" tabs if you open Mockups after moving the files that were open last time you closed the app.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with files (with spaces in their names) getting moved to the end of the list when renamed. Thanks Hal Shubin for the bug report.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with project assets intermittently not appearing in the UI library
• Mockups for FogBugz: If a .bmml was attached to fogbugz case without the corresponding .png the "edit existing mockups" window was empty. Thanks Andri H. for the bug report.
• Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a bug with FogBugz OnDemand not being able to use images from web. Thanks again to Andri H. for the bug report.

What else is going on?

We had a bit of a rocky week with myBalsamiq: we updated the beta build with a version that added both clustering and project zip upload, the last two important features we wanted to have before our public launch. It turns out that uploading projects uncovered some issues with our clustering code, so we had to turn it off while we look for a fix. Stay tuned here for updates. After fixing these two bugs we plan on leaving the build up for a little while longer to make sure it's plenty stable and scalable for launch. Exciting times! :)

We are also gradually migrating our internal support processes from "always reply all in GMail" to Assistly, a much more powerful help desk web tool. We really like it so far, it came highly recommended and the UI is very intuitive...I wonder why? ;)

This change should be pretty invisible to you, other than possibly receiving faster, better answers, and not receiving the same answer from two of us at the same time. :)

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.1
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.1
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.1
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.1
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.1
• Web Demo: version 2.1.1 launch it

Onward!
Peldi and the Balsamiq team

Hi all!

Just a quick post to pre-announce that Mockups 2.1 is coming out in a week or two.

The main change of 2.1 is that we're changing the font used by Mockups, from Comic Sans (on Win/Linux) and Chalkboard (on Mac) to our own Balsamiq Mockups font, hand-crafted lovingly by our very own Michael Angeles.

Mike drew the glyphs on his iPad using iFontMaker, one by one. We then used TypeTool to adjust the baseline and other metrics. We learned a lot about typography in the process, it was fun! :)

We are doing this for three primary reasons:

1. To fix the "words sometimes disappear" bug that's been plaguing us since day one.
2. To have a consistent rendering across different OSs and Balsamiq Mockups versions.
3. To get rid of the allergy-provoking Comic Sans typeface.

We put together a short FAQ document with details about the change and how it might affect you: Balsamiq Mockups Font FAQ. Please take a look at it and give us feedback on it as well (just add a comment here).

We would love it if you could download the pre-release version and give it a spin for a few days. Remember, the initial shock at the change is natural, but it will wear off. Give the new font a chance. :)

There's still a little bit of work to do: some characters are a bit wide, some a bit heavy, all need better kerning. We'll be making these improvements daily until launch, so keep that feedback coming!

Here are the links once again:

• Balsamiq Mockups Font FAQ
• Try the pre-release version

Hi again friends!

Today's release main feature is a major optimization to our skin assets and icons, which results in dramatic improvement in loading times for the web and plugin versions of Balsamiq Mockups.

See for yourself in this before and after video:

The back story is that as part of the work to provide a cleaner skin for Mockups we moved our assets out of a .fla file into separate PNG files. This had a nice side-effect of reducing our skin file size from 3.2Mb to 1.1Mb, just like that!

Other changes and improvements in this build:

• All versions: improved the angle of rotation of the arrow points - it's the little things! ;)
• All versions: standardized our licensing language around "License Information", which includes a License Name and a License Key. We were using a combination of Your Full Name, Organization Name, Serial Key and other terms before, which was confusing. It's hard to come up with language that applies both to single individuals, companies and software resellers. I really didn't like the legalese term "Licensee Name"... we're optimistic that this License Info=Name+Key combination will work.
• All versions: Icons that don't belong to any bucket in the Icon Library now can be found in a new "Other" bucket (other than the "All" bucket of course).
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed our native .deb package to remove the Ubuntu 11.04 package is of bad quality issue. Thanks Roger W. and Hervé L. for reporting this!

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.0.24
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.0.23
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.0.24
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.0.23
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.0.21
• Web Demo: version 2.0.20 launch it

What else is going on?

On June 19th our little company turned three years old! We now have over 50k customers, sold over $6,600,000 of Mockups, and are lucky enough to be working with nine awesome people, doing what we love together. Who knows, maybe we even helped rid the world of a little bit of bad software, which is still our ultimate goal. Life's too short for bad software! :)

I don't usually dwell on things, but I'm letting myself be proud for 5 minutes today. Here's to 30 more years! :)

Onward!
Peldi

Hello friends! We're back from our retreat and excited to be back at work.

Today's release is a fairly small one, but it introduces a little feature that has been on our list for a long time.

So without further ado, we give you...

New feature: Partial Export to PNG

Starting with this Mockups for Desktop release, if you have something selected when you go and choose "Export Mockup to PNG" you will see the following dialog pop up:

Select what you want to export and voila', your PNG will only contain what you wanted.

This is very similar to the "Export Mockup to XML" feature we've had for a while, and it will be very handy for when you only want to export a subset of your mockup at the time (when you're developing a mobile application with multiple screens on the same bmml file for instance).

Handy!

Thanks to jhatrc for requesting this feature a year ago, to DanM for requesting it 9 months ago, to Matthew for requesting it 3 months ago and to Lauren Shupp for requesting it again 28 days ago. :)

New feature: copy image to clipboard on Copy

Enabled by the feature above, we now place a bitmap representation of the data you copied into the clipboard as well as the BMML source data. This makes it much quicker to work between Mockups and other graphic software: select what you want to export, copy, switch to the other software and paste! If you see text instead of the image, you might have to use "Paste Special" instead. Still, quicker than exporting to file and importing the file!

Other enhancements and bug fixes

• All versions: we now automatically delete empty groups when you exit them.
• All versions: fixed a bug with the text property inspector not showing bold as the default. Thanks to Andreas Weber, Tom Simpson and Jan.mysior for reporting it here, and to B for reporting it here.
• All versions: split up position and size property inspector editors in two. Thanks Nadeem Bakhsh and Dave for the feature request.
• All versions: you can now use commas, spaces and x's in both position and size text inputs, we'll understand them all.
• Mockups for Desktop: cloned mockups now properly show the project assets (from the source mockup). Thanks to Chris Velevitch for the idea. It also fixes the last bit of this bug reported by Bruno and Besi.
• Mockups for Desktop: cloned mockups are now marked as dirty right away.
• Mockups for Desktop: changed the program icon at small sizes (29x29 and 32x32) to be just the smiley face, which is more recognizable.
• Mockups for Confluence: fixed an injection which broke the ability to create new links between mockups.
• Mockups for FogBugz: fixed errors 2032 when editing mockups (sorry about this, it was an injection from the last build).
• Mockups for JIRA: we now accept license keys containing special accented characters (like ø for instance).

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.0.22
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.0.22
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.0.23
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.0.22
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.0.20
• Web Demo: version 2.0.19 launch it

What else is going on?

We're pushing with all our strength towards a myBalsamiq release. The last feature before we can release is clustering so that we can handle the load on launch, and Luis is making great progress on it.

Other than that, we have made a bunch of great TODO lists while on retreat, so now we have our work planned out for the next few months, all we have to do is execute. :)

Check out some photos of the retreat on this facebook album!

Onward!
Peldi

[Update: we just released 2.0.23 of Mockups for Desktop to fix this injection, sorry about that. Download it.]

Hello old friends. If you've been wondering what we've been up to, I won't blame you. We say we release almost weekly and then if you look at this blog, it looks like we do nothing for a month.

Well, that's actually not the case. We have been doing lots and lots of releases (I think we did maybe 6 releases since our last blog post), but we've been releasing myBalsamiq, our web app, which is still invitation-only.

Since I don't want those who are not invited to feel too bad, we haven't been posting release updates for myBalsamiq here. When myBalsamiq finally goes live we'll be posting that stuff here along with the Mockups updates and everything will be back to normal, with weekly or biweekly updates. Give us a few more weeks, and thanks for your patience and understanding.

So we've been totally heads down in myBalsamiq, but we've also had time to work on Mockups for Desktop and on the plugin versions a bit.

Let's see what's new in today's release, starting with a few new features.

Rename Mockup in Mockups for Desktop

This new feature will help those of you who use the linking feature extensively.

Just right-click on a file tab at the bottom of Mockups for Desktop and select "Rename Mockup...": the app will go through all the BMMLs contained in the same folder as the one you're renaming and look for links pointing to the current mockup. If it finds any, it will show you this:

Pick a new name, hit Rename and voilà, Mockups will rename your file and update all the links in all the other mockup files for you! This should save you a few hours here and there... ;)

Break Apart Symbols in the BMML I'm about to Export

This one is pretty advanced.

As the dialog says, this is primarely useful if you're uploading a mockup from the Desktop to a version of Mockups that doesn't support symbols yet such as Mockups for Confluence, or myBalsamiq (symbol support for myBalsamiq is getting there...).
The feature transforms the symbols into groups in the exported BMML (without affecting your file), so that the BMML snippet you're sending or uploading is more self-contained. Note that images will still not be included.

Icons on the right in "Icon and Label" control

You can now place the icon on the right of the label in the "Icon and Label" control.

Thanks to all those who pushed for this feature!

What else is new?

• All versions: changed the behavior of the property inspector. It no longer fades in and out as you move your mouse, nor it fades out after a few seconds of inactivity. If you want it to disappear, click on an empty spot on the canvas to deselect everything. We also made it so that the inspector will "jump around" a lot less often. This makes the inspector more predictable, and, maybe, finally, not annoying - Mike, who lives in Mockups, loves it. We hope you will too.
• All versions: we now disable cut/copy/delete icons in toolbar when nothing is selected.
• All versions: fixed a number of little ComboBox bugs. Thanks Andi, rcollings, baseliners, Jenni Merrifield and Jason for the bug reports.
• All versions: updated the icon in the About Box to the new smiley one - thanks Leon Barnard for the request (via a Twitter DM).
• All versions: updated the copyright notice to say 2011 - thanks again Leon for noticing!
• All versions: fixed "View Graph Paper". It didn't work until you resized the application window. Thanks Mike for noticing.
• All versions: made sure "Use System Fonts" works for all control types, and updates immediately as you toggle the option.
• Web Demo version: export to PNG and PDF no longer crops the bottom and right of the image.
• Web Demo version: improved the text of the nagging dialog to better describe the benefits of switching to another version.
  
• Mockups for Desktop: added some text to the activation dialog to help you when the key is invalid: this should cut down on support emails a bunch! :)
• Mockups for Desktop: when using symbols, Z-order of label was sometimes being changed (moved back) when dropping the symbol on the canvas.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with auto-save dialog being shown incorrectly when using "Save As". Thanks samshoulders for reporting this (via Skype).
• Mockups for Confluence: fixed a bug in the plugin when browsing space admin pages in Confluence 3.1.2. Thanks alex.holtz for the bug report.
• Mockups for Confluence: links between mockups now continue to work even if you change your Confluence URL altogether! Thanks apschenx for the feature request.
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed a bug when browsing certain JIRA pages. Thanks Ryan Rich for the bug report!
• Mockups for XWiki: fixed a compatibility issue with XWiki 3.0. Thank you Kevin Foote for reporting it!

That's it!

On other news, we added a new member to our Balsamiq family! Her name is Joy, read the announcement here!

We also added a bunch of new recipes to our What should I make for dinner? feature, check them out! Yum! :)

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

As always, if you hit any snags with the new build let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)

For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:

• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.0.21
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.0.20
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.0.22
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.0.21
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.0.19
• Web Demo: version 2.0.18 launch it

Onward!
Peldi