Balsamiq

Release: A Grab Bag of Little Goodies!

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.