Balsamiq

Release: HUGE loading time improvement!

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