While we work on a couple of BIG features (Cropping/masking for images, groups and Symbols, a new wireframing skin and Mockups for iPad), we are staying focussed on quality / bug fixes / test and back-office automation.
With that in mind, here's what's in today's release:
All versions: Geometric shapes are now drawn programmatically, meaning that they look less sketchy but they finally stretch properly!
All versions: Charts controls also got a similar treatment, they stretch much more nicely now.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug in which the editor would break if you hid and showed the UI Library again.
myBalsamiq: in the editor, thumbnails in the project browser get updated as you edit mockups. This is a MUCH nicer user experience.
myBalsamiq: we no longer send email notifications when a user is removed from a project.
myBalsamiq: Added a "notify project members" checkbox in the add comment form. Thanks Pete K. for asking for it via email and to andygeek for this GS thread about it.
myBalsamiq: fixed the "propose alternate mockup..." menu item in the single mockup page. Thanks to Dennis L. for reporting it via email.
myBalsamiq: fixed A LOT of little bugs here and there, too small to mention.
myBalsamiq: improved A LOT of little back-end features and processes. Invisible to you but resulting in a more stable and manageable web app for everyone.
Mockups for FogBugz: we were sending a wrong HTTP header response. Thanks Chris K. for reporting it!
IMPORTANT: if things look wonky in the myBalsamiq editor or in the web demo version, please clear your browser cache and reload the page.
How do I update?
If you're using myBalsamiq, you're already updated. Just log back in and enjoy.
For other versions, simply 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:
In other news, we're a few days away from hitting $10,000,000 in total Mockups sales since launch (June 19th, 2008)...WOW! Who'd have thunk it! ;)
Our newest baby myBalsamiq is also doing well, it already made around $11,000 in December. Not bad for its first full month of being public, very encouraging! :)
We also posted a little blog post about Our Donation Policy. Check it out, 2% of our profits go to charity each year. It's the right thing to do.
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
Jan 17th UPDATE: I just did a quick release today to fix this bug.
Hello friends. Today's release is full of improvements, but most of them are behind the scenes.
We are still focussed on bug fixing and providing better stability for the web app. Just like with any newborn, the first few weeks are the toughest. It definitely feels like the worse is over though...thanks for your patience everyone! :)
Here's what we did since our last update:
myBalsamiq: When converting a group to a Symbol, you no longer see the confusing and misleading "Symbol not found" message while the symbol is getting saved, but instead a much nicer "Loading Symbol..." message.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug with not Symbol edits "not sticking" due to improper caching.
myBalsamiq: removed the double progress bar on Assets upload.
myBalsamiq: improved how the footer resizes at small browser window sizes.
myBalsamiq: moved from a single Elasticache node to an Elasticache cluster.
myBalsamiq: fixed reconnection code to Elasticache so that we recover properly, should it go down again.
myBalsamiq: moved session sharing from apache tribe to memcache (Elasticache). This is why you got logged out today unless you had the "remember me" checkbox selected when you last logged in. Our apologies, it shouldn't happen again.
myBalsamiq: improved the performance of some common queries.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug that resulted in some mockups not being accessible due to floating point numbers in link highlight coordinates.
myBalsamiq: tweaked our database connection pool configuration and memcache levels based on recent usage stats.
myBalsamiq: fixed mockup image zooming toggle, it now correctly toggles between "fit to screen" and "1:1" again.
myBalsamiq: fixed a typo in the image upload dialog in the editor.
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with not being able to see images in prototype mode in private projects unless you were logged in.
myBalsamiq: we no longer show the "edit this mockup" button in prototype view to users who don't have access to the editor.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug that prevented anonymous users from uploading mockups in wiki-access projects.
myBalsamiq: fixed access issues to the "propose alternate mockup" for blog and wiki projects.
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with asset thumbnails not showing up in some cases.
How do I update?
This is a myBalsamiq-only release, so you're already updated. Just log back in and enjoy.
For posterity, today's release is build #3704.
What else is going on?
We are investing A LOT of time right now in our testing automation frameworks and automated test suites.
Now that we have more developers, more products, more code, and LOTS more customers, we need to get more rigorous about automated testing.
With our products being in pretty good shape, this felt like the right time for us pay off the technical debt we've accumulated over the years.
Here's a few demo videos I recorded in order to show the team what we're doing in this area, I'm posting them here to keep you in the loop.
First off, it's our "Bot", the Selenium-Webdriver-JUnit-powered functional testing robot for myBalsamiq:
The video above also quickly shows "MailCatcher", a mailinator-inspired little tool that Kyle has been working on as a way to learn groovy, grails and all the AWS goodness.
Next up, Luis shows off his load testing harness:
Today's last demo is our by new friend Florian (with some help from his 2-year-old daughter), who demos his automated testing suites for the Mockups editor, including a sweet Actionscript code-coverage tool I didn't even know existed! :)
Other things we're working on right now are:
Finishing up Symbols support in myBalsamiq.
The crop/mask feature (now not just for images any more but also any group!).
Mockups for iPad.
Putting the finishing touches on a free ebook (stay tuned).
More back-office automation.
I think that covers it!
If we don't talk before then, have a great holiday season everyone!
Today's release is mostly myBalsamiq-centric. We launched less than a month ago, so today's update is focussed on making it smoother rather than adding new features.
Here's what's changed:
All versions: fixed Help and Support links, they no longer 404 now, sorry about that.
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with notifying project members on save.
myBalsamiq: fixed a number of image upload bugs in the myBalsamiq editor.
myBalsamiq: greatly improved the "propose alternate mockup" flow. We no longer throw you back to the comment view on save, you submit the comment directly from the editor. Try it!
myBalsamiq: upped the file size limit for project or assets to 100Mb (used to be 10Mb).
myBalsamiq: Fixed an issue with some notifications not showing up after cloning a project.
myBalsamiq: Started the "toggle link highlights" feature both on the single mockup view and the prototype view.
myBalsamiq: Added some handy buttons to the prototype view (look at the bottom).
myBalsamiq: you can now erase project description and mockup notes if you want to.
myBalsamiq: you can now undo a project delete when deleting it from the archives.
myBalsamiq: Fixed a bug in calculating myBalsamiq credits for Desktop licenses keys.
myBalsamiq: Anonymous users can now upload bmml assets to wiki-level projects.
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with not being able to delete a comment right after deleting one.
myBalsamiq: project members no longer see an empty "Site Settings" title in the settings view.
myBalsamiq: lots and lots of behind the scenes stability and performance changes, especially focussed on helping us make releases with zero downtime. The smoother we can make the release process for our users and ourselves, the more releases we can do! :) For the server-side geeks among us, with today's update we switched from a local ehcache implementation to Amazon's ElastiCache, so that the cache stays warm during an update and the new server boots up MUCH faster. We still have some work to do on this front but we're getting there.
myBalsamiq: Fixed a markdown formatting bug when using the same modifier more than once, *like* *this*. This fix was already live on the other versions since 2.1.9.
myBalsamiq: lots of little cosmetic changes here and there
How do I update?
If you're using myBalsamiq, you're already updated. Just log back in and enjoy.
For other versions, simply 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:
We are going to keep focussing on automating our tests and on fixing bugs for the next few weeks. But the image crop feature is almost ready, so that will come soon as well.
This release is particularly exciting to us because now that myBalsamiq is out we can finally post release notes publicly of all that we've been working on, all at once.
There are a number of nice little changes today, so let's get to it!
What's in today's release?
All versions: Added a "menu icon" toggle option to the Button and Pointy Button controls. I can't believe we haven't had this until now.
All versions: improved the markup matching algorithms to be a little less aggressive. Now they only match when your markup characters are not next to a space. No more accidentally disabled text! Click on the images below for details. BEFORE: AFTER:
All versions: Fixed URLs in help menu links.
All web versions: the right click menu is back! Sorry this took a while to fix. We can all take a big sigh of relief now. Thanks to Scott for reporting it.
Mockups for Desktop and myBalsamiq: we extended our auto-save feature to include files that have never been saved before. This is a nice important one. Hopefully you won't ever see this feature, but you'll love it when you do! :)
myBalsamiq: Better keyboard shortcuts support! Copy, Paste, etc! Not all of them, but the most common should work. Your milage may vary depending on which browser you're using (i.e. stay away from Internet Explorer), but this is definitely an acceptable baseline, we can improve over time.
myBalsamiq: Added an "you are now offline" dialog window in the editor, for those rare cases where either your connection goes down or myBalsamiq goes down briefly for updates.
myBalsamiq: Added a Close button in the top-left corner, next to the Save button. Handy!
myBalsamiq: greatly improved Symbols support! You can now create new symbol libraries and edit existing ones, convert groups to symbols, the goods!
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue when uploading/importing mockups that use custom icons - it no longer explodes now. :)
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug with the mockup notes being wrong when proposing alternate mockup.
myBalsamiq: hovering over an avatar in the world map view now brings it to the front.
myBalsamiq: A LOT of behind-the-scenes work to make the web app more reliable and our Zero-Downtime-Updates have as little impact as possible on users (still working on that).
Mockups for Desktop: Open Recent works again! And for the first time ever, it works on Linux as well! Thanks to all who reported it: Coean Naninck, @minarad and Palmin.
Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a bug that had to do with using accents in mockup names. It all works now.
How do I update?
If you're using myBalsamiq, you're already updated. Just log back in and enjoy.
For other versions, simply 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:
Here's some of the more technical projects we're working on:
We are doing lots and lots of fancy ops work for myBalsamiq: we now have servers that auto-scale for converting your uploaded mockups: we create and kill new servers as needed, fancy stuff!
We are building automated load tests for myBalsamiq.
We are converting our Selenium HTML integration tests to JUnit, making them much more powerful.
We are automating the testing of the flex Mockups editor.
We are working on a mailinator-like service to help us with selenium testing (it's also a great training ground for Kyle).
Other than that, myBalsamiq is off to a great start, with over 1700 new trials created since we launched two weeks ago, and over 260 paying subscribers. We use it ourselves more and more (see some of the links above), and it's really a nice way to work. Not bad for a 1.0!
There's a lot more happening, but I'll save it for a Life @ Balsamiq blog post next week. Stay tuned!
We want it to be the best way to do remote, collaborative UX design.
Here's another few things you should know about myBalsamiq:
myBalsamiq is solid: it's been in private beta for months and we have never lost anyone's data.
myBalsamiq is useful: we already have 224 paying customers and 149 classrooms who rely on it month after month.
myBalsamiq is powerful: SSL security, version history, support for proposing alternative designs, automatic project mailing lists, email and Skype integration, RSS feeds, you name it.
our company is ready: we now have both support and technical staff both in Europe and in California, ready to answer your questions whenever you may have them.
our processes are ready: we have backups, redundancy, clustering, the goods. We can do zero-downtime updates and rollbacks with one click. We have monitors and alarms.
even our documentation is ready: we've put a lot of thought into it, take a look!
That said, myBalsamiq is officially born today, so it's still a little baby. There are some rough edges and some features are clearly missing (here's our myBalsamiq roadmap).
But you know what? Fixing bugs and adding features with your input is what we do best, what we love to do day after day! :)
Get on board, and together we can make myBalsamiq the most useful online UX tool in your company's arsenal, one weekly release at the time. It will be fun! :)
This has been a MAJOR effort for the whole Balsamiq team, above all Luis, Louanne, Mike, Marco and Paolo. We've learned a lot in the process, and are excited to learn a lot more.
If you like what you see, please come back here and help me congratulate - and thank! - the team for making this new phase of our company community a reality.
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.
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:
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!
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!
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:
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.
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! :)
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:
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:
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! :)
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:
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:
AFTER:
