Balsamiq

Mockups 1.8: Editable Groups and much more

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?

Easy! Just use our badge button below! Blog-via-email readers, head to our download page instead.

Balsamiq Mockups requires Adobe AIR, so please install it first. Once you have AIR installed, click below to install Mockups for Desktop.

// 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 1.8.1
• Mockups for Confluence: version 1.8.1
• Mockups for JIRA: version 1.8.1
• Mockups for XWiki: version 1.8.1
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 1.8.2
• Web Demo: version 1.8.1 launch it

Company Update

We're doing great, thanks for asking. :)

• I've been speaking in public quite a bit lately (Mixergy, BetterSoftware, LessConf, Entrepreneural Profiles, Working Capital).
• Valerie has started blogging in earnest, and is at the Atlassian Summit, stop by booth #12 and say hi! She has lovingly hand-crafted presents for those who give her a video testimonial, you should take advantage! :)
• Mike went to Palo Alto for a few days for a very fancy conference he was invited to, he'll share more on his blog soon.
• Luis went to the GR8 conference in Copenhagen and had a great time, he's fixing Grails bugs left and right these days. :)
• Marco somehow found the time to blog as well, interviewing Simone Zinanni from Develer for his blog (in Italian).
• myBalsamiq is so good it makes me want to LICK IT. :) We are less than 5 Pivotal stories away from being able to refresh the beta build on production...it's all coming together at the same time, finally! :)

We've also started supporting a great new little blog called Wireframe Showcase, check it out!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq team