Hi again!

This week’s release is not a huge one but I’m very happy about it since it includes some features and bug fixes I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time.

Let’s get right to it!

New features

• All Versions: if you add a row with * or – in the Paragraph of text control, we transform it into a bullet (click below to enlarge). Thanks to ruben for his initial feature request, and for everyone else who chimed in!

• All Versions: you can now hold down SHIFT when moving to make the selection snap to the original X or Y axis. Combined with ALT, this makes for very quick creation of rows or columns of controls of the same type. Thanks to everyone who asked for this feature: Mitchell Fox started this thread 11 months ago, michael.aird this one 6 months ago, and Doug Hughes this one a month ago, but it was Jenni Merrifield’s latest comment that made me decide to get off my butt and just code the darn thing. Thank you Jenni for your continuous feedback and enthusiasm!
• All Versions: lorem now works in the middle of a paragraph and not just at the end, and no longer shows you character count numbers. If you want the numbers, type l0rem instead, with a zero instead of an o. Nerdy, huh?
• Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki: when doing a “Save and Continue” operation, we now show a little notifier that says “Saved!”, or an error if the save operation failed for some reason (say your administrator restarted the wiki, or your connection went down, or something). This is an old Adam Wride idea, thanks as always Adam!

Bug Fixes

• All Versions: fixed this bug about not being able to make the first item in a menu bar NOT bold. Thanks Mr Joseph Tate for reporting it!
• All Versions: bigger font size for combo boxes and pill buttons. Thanks to Roman for asking for this one.
• All Versions: Quick Add text no longer gets cut off on Windows. Thanks to and Jon Edlund and Martin Kemp for reporting this (via email).
• All Versions: fixed another instance of the “controls loose their properties” bug. I think we caught it all now, but if you still see this, let us know!
• All Versions: fixed a bug with moving objects with the arrows after a small resize. Thanks Jon Boardman for the bug report!
• All Versions: Replaced the ugly “Error #2035″ message to a more human-friendly “Image not Found” error in images. By the way, have you seen our tutorial on how to minimize seeing this error in the first place? Check it out: Working with Projects in Mockups for Desktop.
• All Versions: fixed a bug with image paths when dragged from the desktop onto Mockups. Thanks to jochen and nico.rouanne for the debugging help with this one.
• Mockups for Desktop: opening a file by double-clicking it now correctly sets the “last open path” internal variable, so that when you go to open another file, we’ll pre-select the folder of the file you double-clicked on. Easy, huh? Thanks to Besi for the detailed bug report.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed other issues around the “show me the last open path” feature.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug when doing two consecutive “Save As…” operations. Thanks to Mo for reporting this one yesterday.
• Mockups for Desktop: changed the text of the “Your mockups were exported to folder XYZ” notifier. We no longer show all the paths since it wasn’t really helpful and kind-of ugly. Thanks again to Jon Boardman for reporting this one.
• Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki: fixed a bug with doing a “Save and Continue”, changing something in the mockup and leaving the page. The Javascript alert to warn you about the unsaved changes wouldn’t show up in this case. It does now. Thanks so much to Ed Scharrer for reporting this one via email.

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Hello friends! With most of the team traveling around the world for vacation and family visits, summers are a bit slow here at Balsamiq. We are part European after all…

That said, we managed to do two new beta refreshes of myBalsamiq, as well as adding a few little features here and there and to fix a number of pesky little bugs.

Here they are:

New Features

• All Versions: New {color} modifier for text. You can now use the {color:#123456} modifier to color parts of your text, like so: {color:#FF0000}this is red{color} or {color:00FF00}this is green{color}. Notice that the macro works both with and without the # in front of the HEX color value. This simple one-line change takes care of a number of feature requests. Here’s the main thread by anamitra banerji, trubliphone, derrickjon, Adi Roiban and Jon Daues, but there are others: this one by Phil Haselden and others, this one this one by Kevin, this one by adrienne, this one by walter.smith and this one by Adi Roiban. Thanks for your patience everyone!

• All Versions: New notifications: we have removed some annoying, flow-interrupting dialogs and changed them to growl-style pop-up notifiers. This is a classic example of something that’s been on our TODO since day one but haven’t gotten around to implementing until today – two years later! Funny how that happens…thanks so much Mike for whipping up a design for the notifiers in no time.

  Huge thanks to Robert M Münch, Andi and Philipp Quaet-Feslem for the input and to the ever-awesome Jon Boardman of Red Gate software for all the help debugging this new feature. These are the dialogs that got replaced with notifications: “your mockup was exported to PNG”, “your mockups were exported to folder XYZ”, “your PDF is ready”, “the file you’re editing is read-only” and “your mockup was exported to XML”. Yay for less distractions!

• All Versions: Added Align support to the Geometric Shapes control, which also finally fixes the pesky “words go missing” bug:
• Mockups for Confluence: you can now add Mockups to bug reports! Simple as that. Thanks to Roberto Dominguez for the feature request and to Kevin R. for a strongly worded email about it.
• Mockups for Desktop: opening files via the “Open Others in Same Folder” right-click menu item now opens the in alphabetical order! This was part of the Projects feature request discussion.
• Mockups for Desktop: added a new “the file you’re editing was moved or deleted” notification. We now deal with this case properly. This is another “Jon Boardman special“, so you should all thank him.

Bug Fixes

• All Versions: dramatically improved performance on Windows XP, and improved performance on Mac and Linux as well. Our performance improvement when scrolling a large mockup was a little too aggressive, and due to an Adobe Air limitation it made XP really slow. It should be all better now, thanks aaandre for reporting the bug and to Marco for fixing it quickly!
• All Versions: moved the zoom pop-up in the toolbar to the right a bit, so that it doesn’t interfere with the lock icon any more. Thanks Tony Goggin for the bug report!
• All Versions: renamed “Check box” to “Checkbox”, thanks moflaherty for pointing this out!
• All Versions: finally, FINALLY fixed the “mouse goes crazy if you drag something outside of the Mockups window and release the mouse while you’re outside” bug. This actually takes care of a number of other bugs (this, this), it’s awesome. Marco, you are a GENIUS for figuring this out, thank you thank you thank you.
• All Versions: fixed a bug with the algorithm that positions of the property inspector, it got broken when we added group editing, sorry about that. Thanks to Joseph Tate and kbromberger for bringing this up here and here.
• All Versions: moved the default position of new elements added via Quick Add down 10 pixels, so that it doesn’t interfere with the group editing breadcrumb bar. Thanks to Andi and Nelson for the bug reports!
• All Versions: fixed the vertical alignment of the ComboBox control. Thanks Tony for bringing it up and for the debugging help!
• All Versions: fixed a bug with the web panel of image import feature. Thanks mattcruise for the bug report!
• All Versions: fixed a bug with positioning of groups when copied and pasted. Thanks Brian Rittermann for the bug report!
• Mockups for Desktop: Version 2.0 of Adobe Air broke our full-screen mode on Windows Vista: you could see the menu bar while in full-screen. Weird! With the help of Alisa(Ying) Wang from Adobe, we were able to work around the bug. Thanks Mandi for reporting it!
• Mockups for JIRA: fixed a bug that gave you a “EULA Violation” warning if you updated the plugin during your last month of maintenance. It’s all better now.
• Mockups Web Demo: fixed a typo in our nagging screen. How nice of Nathan P. to bring it up via email!
• Mockups for XWiki: fixed a bug with the way we parse the mockup macro on the page in some cases. Huge thanks to Julian Whitaker for reporting the bug and helping us debug it!

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Hi everyone!

This update is a small one, we’re still recovering from our first company retreat, which was AMAZING.

You can read all about it in Natalie’s trip report here.

Here’s what’s new in today’s release:

• All versions: we fixed the elusive “properties revert to default” bug, which was caused by using a slider in a property inspector and accidentally moving the mouse outside of the Mockups window. I know, crazy huh? Thanks to Diana, Jim Jarret and Chris Michael for the debugging help!
• All versions: you can now hit ENTER or F2 to enter a group to edit its contents. Thanks Adi Roiban for the good idea!
• Mockups for Desktop: when pasting from your clipboard, we detect if it contains BMML and interpret it properly for you. This was a feature request by Max Andersen (via Twitter), who needs it for his SWT to BMML tool.
• Mockups for Desktop: added {mockup-name} to Label and Paragraph controls. It’s like {mockup-path}, but it only returns the name of the mockup file.
• Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with exporting to PDF while inside a group. Thanks John Booker for the bug report (via email).
• Mockups for XWiki: fixed a bug with the image dialog.

We also fixed a number of issues with myBalsamiq, and plan on updating the beta on our production machines this week.

How do I update?

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I mentioned today that I feel like Balsamiq (the company) is really just starting now. The team is in place, the processes are pretty smooth, the revenue somewhat stable, the work for the next year or so clearly defined.

To kick off our company’s next phase, I have invited everyone on team Balsamiq and their families over to Italy for 10 days of face-to-face, real-life time.

Valerie, Natalie and Malcolm are coming from California, Mike is already on a plane from New York, Luis will fly down from Paris and Marco will drive up from Bologna.

It all starts tomorrow.

Between staff, spouses and kids, there’s going to be 21 of us.

We’re staying at a great big villa near lake Como (no, it’s not George Clooney’s) with a swimming pool, a tennis court and a great big garden. Yes, it’s lavish, but I cannot think of a better way to spend some of the profits I’ve been putting away since day one.

We’ll be working together, have fun together, dine together, get to know each other’s families… I CANNOT wait!!!

I have some activities planned for us to do – like “watch each other work morning” – but like everything else we do, it will be all pretty informal. I think we’ll work in the mornings and play in the afternoons. Then, being all in Central European Time, some of us might work some more in the evenings to catch up with our US customers.

If we get to it, we hope to rapid-fire blog about what we do and learn every day on the new Life at Balsamiq blog, we hope you’ll want to tune in!

We might be a little slower in our email responses for the next 10 days, and we’re not going to have a release next week. I hope you’ll understand.

I’d better hit the sack, I have to do 3 trips to the airport tomorrow with the 9-seater minivan I rented!

Yay!!!!
Peldi

I am thrilled to announce that my very good friend Natalie Gould has joined the Balsamiq team!

We’re not sure about what her final job title will be, but “like Valerie, but on Central European Time” should give you a pretty good idea…

Based out of our brand new Bologna office (I know!), she will help with sales inquiries, customer support, handing out free licenses to do-gooders and helping me run the Italian company smoothly – dealing with invoices, contracts, expenses and all that good stuff I’m terrible at doing. She will improve our response times for our European customers and free up some of my time for coding, yay!

She will also join Valerie’s blog, which we are renaming “Life at Balsamiq“.

Natalie and I first met in 1999 in San Diego, where I was doing an exchange program with school. We shared a flat in La Jolla and became instant friends.

She’s been one of my closest friends ever since… she was even my “best man” at our wedding!

There are many reasons I am so thrilled that Natalie agreed to move to Italy and join our company.

Just like Valerie, she’s instantly lovable: funny, kind, polite, humble, a great listener, driven by an outstanding moral compass. I know she will be able to handle anything that comes her way… she has the “I’ll learn what I need to learn and get it done” attitude that I value so much on every member of our team. If she has one fault it’s that she’s SO organized it makes the rest of us feel like total slobs.

I can’t wait until you get a chance to interact with her, you’ll love her.

She’s going to spend July and August ramping up and relocating from her current home in northern California, ready to go full-speed starting in September.

What this means for Balsamiq

It’s no secret that my vision for the company is to build “a little 5-star restaurant on the web“: family-run, lasting for generations, delighting you each time with an extraordinary experience while making you feel at home at the same time.

With Natalie, I think our little restaurant is now fully staffed!

Look at our company page:

• 2 full time sales- and customer-support people (Valerie and Natalie)
• 2 full time programmers (Marco and Luis)
• 1 full time designer/UX guy (Mike)
• 1 do-whatever-needs-doing person (Peldi)
• 2 part-time helpers (Mariah and Malcolm)

Add to that a proven network of awesome contractors, and voila’, dinner is served!

I know it doesn’t really make sense, given that we are now over 2-years old, but the feeling I have is that Balsamiq really starts now. All the pieces are now in place for us to do whatever we set our minds to.

Another way to put it is that my dream when I started was to put together a stellar little team exactly like this one. Now that we’re there, I’m ready to start thinking about a new 2-year plan. In fact, I already have one, although it might be unconventional: I would like everything to stay the same for the next 2 years – a wonderful small group of people doing what they love together, making a good living by helping lots of people be happy because they’re building delicious software that makes their own customers happy. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Given our rate of growth, staying small might be hard to do. The fact that we were able to support more than 23,000 customers with 1.5 full-time support staff is encouraging. With 2.5 people, a lot of bug fixes and a good dose of back-office automation, I’m confident we should be able to go up to 75,000 and beyond. We’ll see… we hope you’ll want to join us for the ride!

Please join me in welcoming Natalie to the Balsamiq family. Her email is natalie@balsamiq.com and she’s @balsamiqNat on Twitter.

Onward!
Peldi

Hello friends of Mockups!

Small release this week but packing a powerful punch. Here’s what’s new:

• we changed the font for the chrome of the application. We now use Lucida Grande on Mac and Lucida Sans Unicode on Windows and Linux. This fixes a number of bugs related to using non-latin characters in file names and links, as well as making the application look cleaner overall. Many thanks go to Byungchol who pointed out how important this bug was to our asian customers via this comment, and of course to basaaja, Yuta Kitade and lei han for reporting the issues in the first place!
  
  
  One more thing: since we no longer embed the SegoeUI font, we shaved ~300k off of the download size, which makes the app faster to load!
• with the help of Jian Zhang from the Air engineering team at Adobe, we were able to fix the dreaded “stuck at setting things up” bug that some Windows users were seeing (it happens when your “My Documents” folder is on a network drive that’s not connected when you launch Mockups). We now detect this condition quickly and just run the app without paying attention to the account assets folder.
• fixed a bug with CTRL+[ and CTRL+] also affecting the z-Order of the selection. They now are dedicated for increasing and decreasing the font size of the selection (the feature we introduced last week)
• HUGE performance improvement when scrolling a large mockup. Try it, the difference is amazing. Thanks to haqwin for getting our investigation started via this bug report!
• fixed a bug with Underline not being selected by default in the inspector for the Link and Link Bar controls. Thanks to Patrick Schick for reporting this.
• Cleaned up the look of the UI Library a bit (removed the hairline border around it and improved the selection color)

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Happy Tuesday friends!

Thanks so much for the great feedback on the 1.8 release from last week. We love the group editing feature too!

For this week’s release we decided to focus on bug fixing, but we also snuck in a couple of little features here and there.

So, without further ado, here’s what’s new since the last release:

Bugs Fixed

• All versions: Link Icons Came back in exported PNG files. Reported by László Bővíz, we fixed this in 1.8.2.
• All versions: finished fixing the double click a word in a text area freezes application thanks to new steps by Matt.
• All versions: fixed a few funny issues with Quick Add, when pressing the down arrow to scroll down the list. Reported by jogurt_hu, Matt, and Joe Eckert. Thanks guys!
• All versions: Using left & right arrows changes selected color. Reported by jrenaud.
• Mockups for Desktop: Problem When Pasting an Image. Reported by Frank Mortesen, we fixed this in 1.8.3.
• Mockups for Desktop: New Clone of Current Mockup loses links to images which are part of a group. Reported by Mandi, also fixed in 1.8.3.
• Mockups for Desktop: Balsamiq is not activated if a new mockup is opened via Explorer. A Windows-only bug reported by Besi.
• Mockups for Desktop: Links are not honored in PDF generation when links are buried within a group. Reported by Adam Levine.
• Mockups for FogBugz: fixed an issue with saving Mockups. Thanks Stepan Riha for reporting it!

New Features

• All versions: added support for CTRL+[ and CTRL+] to shrink and grow text size. We already had CTRL+ALT+- and CTRL+ALT+= to do this, but the new shortcuts are handier. Thank you Justin Grant for asking for it!
• All versions: you can now dock the Property Inspector even when the UI Library is at the top.
• Mockups for Desktop: added support for the {mockup-path} macro to the Label control, a good idea by Andy Little.
• Mockups for Desktop: we now remember the undo stack when you switch mockups! Thanks to Isaac Wood and Eva Kaniasty for reporting this.

How do I update?

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Hello friends! Wow, it’s been 4 weeks since our last update, that’s probably the longest we’ve EVER gone without releasing!

I hope you’ll agree it was worth the wait.

This is one of our biggest updates since we started, and we’re calling it 1.8 to celebrate.

Let’s get right to it.

First, new features available in ALL versions of Mockups:

Editable Groups!

You can now double-click on groups to “enter them” and edit their contents.

This seems nice and simple, but it’s actually a HUGE change.

Having this feature will make you WANT to use groups, to organize your mockups into easy-to-deal-with little components. We’ve noticed that it really speeds up our wireframing process as a whole, helping us keep everything more organized and easier to deal with…we can’t believe we’ve managed to go so long without this feature!

This was also one of the hardest programming tasks we’ve ever had to do since we started, a massive refactoring effort which resulted in a much more flexible and cleaner code-base. You should all thank Marco for his dedication on this feature for the last 2 months or so…the Force is strong in that one.

As usual, this feature is a result of a big collaborative effort. Although this has been on my TODO since day one, it came to be thanks to the help from our awesome community. The first public requests for the feature I could find is this old thread by Ilya Ryzhenkov from a year ago, which also contains great contributions from Luke and Jessica. There’s also this thread from Ikhwan Nazri from 3 months ago, and this one about containers from 4 months ago, started by costa and including great feedback from Andi, Serge Wautier and Paul Rylance.

Another HUGELY important piece of this feature has been the extensive testing done on it by the community. Louanne Poisson in Boston is AWESOME, she spent DAYS emailing us test cases and test results. Others who truly made this feature possible are Robin, Jon Edlund, adiroiban, Joe Eckert, Rolias (here’s another thread he started), our good friend Jon Boardman from Red Gate, Philipp Quaet-Faslem and others…if I forgot your name, let me know and sorry!

Let us know how you like it and please let us know immediately if you find any bugs, we’ll jump right on them.

This feature, awesome even by itself, is really the first major step towards the ultimate goal, the components feature. Marco is starting to work on it today. W00t!

Next feature: Data Grid Enhancements

You can now specify relative size and custom alignment to each Data Grid column.

Here’s a short video that shows it in action.

You can find the full docs on how to use this feature here: Working with Tables.

Many thanks to all of those who requested the column resizing feature: first it was rob a year ago,  with input from László Bővíz, Manjunath, Pål Strøm, nik, slarti42uk, Inky and Jon Boardman, more from Michael Haren and Robert Prom and even more from Michael Engeland.

The alignment feature request came 7 months ago by Paul via this thread, with input from Deborah and Achim Ritz.

We also added support for disabled checkboxes and radio buttons in datagrid, a great little request by Jenni ‘awesome bug reports’ Merrifield, and fixed a bug with autosize reported by Phillip. Thanks guys!

Let us know how you like these improvements!

Next feature: Colored Stickies!

Did you ever get confused over who added which comment on a Mockup? Thanks to this great little idea by Jon Boardman, now you can add sticky notes of your favorite color!

Nice huh?

A few more features and bug fixes

• Ungrouping is now DRAMATICALLY faster than before.
• Grouping and Ungrouping no longer bring the selection to the front, a very annoying old bug reported by berl and Michael as well as Nikolay Karev, Vinil, s3a, Jenni Merrifield and Luca Perugini.
• Made the selection color, the focus color and the link color darker. Thank you Eric, Philipp, Andi, Simone, László Bővíz, robin and Roman, for reporting it (here, here and here), sorry we didn’t choose wisely enough the first time around.
• Fixed an Accordion auto-sizing bug, thanks Roman for bringing it up! Also fixed an issue with the Accordion not using the right font when exported to PNG/PDF.
• Added border toggle support to menu bar control (an old request by carol.a.manson)
• Fixed this crazy “undo resize” bug that Jon Boardman found.
• Fixed a little but annoying bug with the Link Inspector pulldown. Thanks farans for reporting it.
• Fixed a couple of weird bugs with entering TAB characters in paragraphs of text. It should all be back to normal now.
• Fixed a LARGE number of little annoying Undo/Redo issues. This very important feature has never looked this good, you should be thankful that this one of Marco’s pet features.

Improvements to Mockups for Desktop

• MAJOR performance improvements in application startup time.
• MAJOR performance improvement when opening multiple mockups at once.
• MAJOR performance improvement when doing a “Close All”.
• Added “Close Other Mockups” menu item (in the right-click menu on the bottom tabs). Also very fast. Thanks Jeff Stewart for asking for this and sorry it took me 10 months to implement it, it only took 15 minutes…
• Added “Open Others in Same Folder” menu item in the right-click menu on the bottom tabs. Also very fast.
  
• If you have a lot of mockups open at once, we now show a pull-up menu to help you select mockups more easily.
  This is a big help those of you who are patiently waiting for the project feature. Thanks to Roman, Jessica from Formulate, Philipp and Dan Castle for the input!
• Cleaned up the File menu a bit (added some separators, renamed some items for clarity…). Thanks Leon for bringing it up and Mike for designing it.
• On Linux, we now set Mockups as the default application to open .BMML files. Thanks Omarello for bringing it up.
• We now save your selection when switching mockups (an idea by dmland). Try it, it’s really cool!

How do I update?

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Hi there, I’ve written bits of this enough times now that I thought a little blog post about it would be in order.

Here’s what we’re working on RIGHT NOW:

• The components feature. STATUS: we are going to release the first big step of it (“double click to enter groups to edit their contents”) in the next release, in a week or so. The plan is to ship the full feature in July.
• The projects feature. STATUS: we are hammering out the details of the feature as part of myBalsamiq. The plan is to bring them to the Desktop in the fall, after the dust settles. In the meantime, the next release will include a little pulldown menu to help you manage many mockups at once.
• The web app. STATUS: we are completing a full redesign and hope to put it on production in a few days. After the current beta users tell us they love it, we’ll expand the beta a bit more and take it from there. The plan is to ship it…I’d say in July, but I’ve been so wrong before so I’ll say “when it’s ready”.

Here’s what we plan on working on THIS SUMMER:

• balsamiq.com redesign – our website is showing its age. We’ll make it more navigable, more useful and yes, prettier.
• a new skin or two for Mockups – see point #5 here.
• exploring Mockups for the iPad – yes, we have a few ideas on how to “do it right”. Stay tuned on this blog / on Twitter for details later this summer. Here’s our iPad thread on GetSatisfaction if you have any input on this.

Here’s what we plan on working on THIS FALL. These are somewhat hazy right now, but just to give you a vague idea:

• bringing projects to the Desktop
• Desktop / myBalsamiq sync
• shipping the iPad app (or at least a beta)
• myBalsamiq APIs
• RTL language support (I looked into it a bit and it’s still SO HARD to do in Flex, sorry)

So these are are our top priorities for the months to come.

We’ll also continue to fix bugs, improve performance and add little features here and there with every release, OF COURSE!

Onward!

Peldi

Hello friends!

We just posted an AWESOME new feature on the pre-release page.

You can now double-click to enter groups and edit their contents. Simple as that. HUGELY useful.

Here’s a little video to see it in action (go full-screen!):

It was an incredibly complex feature to add this late in the game. Marco had to do a MASSIVE re-factoring of our code-base, something I wouldn’t have attempted myself. Thankfully he’s much smarter than me and has the luxury of being able to focus on coding for weeks on end.

There are bugs! For instance, we know copy/paste is a little broken right now (it will be fixed by tomorrow), and we bet some undo/redo operation won’t work properly. We’ll keep working on it and post new builds on the pre-release page, so check back daily!

Will you please download the pre-release from here and report your bugs on our GetSatisfaction forums? Thank you thank you thank you!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team