It is with great excitement and pride that I present to you our biggest release yet: Balsamiq Mockups 2.2!
The new release sports an updated look and feel, and a new "wireframe" skin for you to use in your mockups, and lots more!
A new editor look and feel
As a programmer, I have always cared more about making my software SOLID rather than having it look pretty. When I was back at Adobe, my friend and colleague Nigel Pegg would spend hours tweaking the speed of an animation tween and working with our designer Tim Allen to make sure that everything looked beautiful and pixel-perfect. The three of us made a great team.
When I started Balsamiq, I was on my own. I did my best to make the Mockups skin look OK, but I clearly never made the look and feel a top-priority. Just like a wireframe, I wanted to make sure the app worked well before spending time and money making it pretty.
It's been four years now, and it's time for Mockups itself to grow up. We have a world-class graphic designer on our team, and it's time we start using his skills to the fullest. Mike started by redesigning myBalsamiq while still in beta, and now we're taking his gorgeous, minimalistic design sensibility to Mockups itself, and it feels great. In fact, it's making me appreciate how important graphic design is, even early on. We live and learn... :)
Our goal with the new look and feel was to make something that is beautiful, professional, incredibly intuitive, all the while staying out of your way as much as possible.
Since we run on Windows, Mac, Linux and the Web, we needed a look that didn't try to mimic the native look and feel of the controls, but also one that didn't scream "Look at me, I'm a Flash application!"
We think Mike did an amazing job with this new look, it's truly gorgeous and does its job extremely well.
It makes working in Mockups for hours and hours an even smoother and fun experience.
An additional skin for your wireframes!
The fact that wireframes created with Mockups look hand drawn has been one of our best ideas yet. It makes it obvious to everyone that the design is NOT final, and encourages people to give honest feedback, which is what it's all about. It also has an instantly-recognizeable, playful character that makes everyone who uses Mockups a little happier at their job every day. :)
We love our sketch-like skin and are very proud of it, but over the years we've heard from many of you that it doesn't fit every situation.
The first person to raise the issue was famous British designer Andy Budd, back in 2009! In his My First Impressions of Balsamiq article, he argues that our skin had TOO MUCH character, it distracted stakeholders from looking at the structure of the wireframe. I think his criticism came mostly because we used Comic Sans as a font back then (we've since switched to our own, hypoallergenic font), but his point was valid, the playful look and feel didn't fit all situations.
Over the years, as Mockups became mainstream, we have heard the same argument from many of you: you love Mockups and want to use it on every project, but sometimes its playful character didn't help, your awesome wireframes weren't being taken seriously by your boss / your graphic designer / your client.
We even heard from someone who did all the thinking in Mockups, but then had to painfully re-create each of their wireframes in a different tool just to present them to their clients. Ouch.
Starting with today's release, you have a new Skin choice in the View menu:
The Sketch skin is the one you know and love, only cleaned up a little bit. It is still the default and what we recommend people use most of the time.
Our goals with it were to make a skin that still conveyed "this is not final" while also disappearing in the background as much as possible, the goal was for it to be "totally vanilla".
After experimenting a while with some product design skin in the style of sketch-a-day, we landed on a clean, straight-lines look that we feel is timeless because of its simplicity.
Take a look at some example wireframes shown in both skins (click to enlarge):
Switching from a skin to the other should be totally painless, most things won't move around at all. We think most of you will do all the thinking in the Sketch skin, and only switch to the Wireframe skin when it's time to present your work, when you're trying to "sell" your designs to other stakeholders. We'll see what happens...
A personal note from Peldi
On a personal level, these two feature were a bit painful for me to work on, which partly explains why I postponed them for so long. Let me explain.
My fear was that a cleaner look and feel and a cleaner skin would make Mockups lose too much of the character that has made it so successful. I didn't want it to look like "just another pro design tool", boring in its similarity with all the others.
Well, I have been using Mockups 2.2 for weeks now, and I gotta say, I can't go back. The new look and feel of the app doesn't feel boring, it just feels RIGHT. Whenever I have to use 2.1 to debug a customer's issue, my eyes hurt and I can't believe we've been so successful with such an ugly app.
The new wireframe skin is actually REALLY FUN TO USE, darn it! :) It totally grew on me. My wife Mariah drew all the controls of the original sketch skin, so falling in love with a skin that she didn't draw feels a bit like I'm cheating on her! You understand my internal conflicts here, right?!?!? ;)
Another thought about these two features: I built and launched Mockups in 2008 as a programmer who had developed a passion for UX, but was totally self-taught and didn't really know anyone in the IA / UX industry. We can safely say that Mockups has come out of left field in the UX industry, mostly introduced by developers and product managers.
We have never marketed Mockups directly to UX professionals, because in some way we didn't feel that it was good enough for them. With the 2.2 release, four years after the original launch, I think we are ready to start changing that perception. We know lots of UXers who already rely on Mockups, and we think that today's release elevates Mockups to become a first-class citizen in the UX professional toolbox.
We hope those who considered Mockups a toy will give it a second look now, it has really come a long way since we first started, Comic Sans and all...
A new Site Map control
While we were at it, Paolo threw in a new, highly requested control type: the Site Map!
It's super-easy to use and helps you make site maps in a snap.
Each page is linkable, easy peasy. Try it out.
What else is new?
- All versions: changed the size of the background grid to match our 10px - 20px shift+nudging dimensions.
- All versions: reduced the bottom padding of the sticky note control so that you can make smaller stickies.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed the "Copy to Clipboard doesn't copy transparent PNGs when transparentBackground is true." bug. Thank you Nathaniel Boehm for reporting it!
- All versions: fixed a long-standing issue with links being offset while full-screen presentation mode. Thank you Peter Baker for reporting it and sorry it took us so long to fix it!
- All versions: we now hide the property inspector while panning with space+drag.
- All versions: when ungrouping the z-Order of the ungrouped control was wrong in some cases.
- All versions: Fixed Tab bar control spacing when right-aligned
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed more erroneous "the file is read only" errors.
- Mockups for Desktop: the DMG file on the downloads page no longer gives the Gatekeeper error on OS X Mountain Lion. This was crazy hard to do, thanks Marco and Paolo for figuring it out.
- Mockups for Desktop: we now use the native menus in Linux. Thank you Jonta for spurring the change.
- myBalsamiq: if you use "Use System Fonts" in your mockups, the generated mockup images will now properly show your text.
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with using images in symbols.
- myBalsamiq: improved handling of JPEG assets. Thank you Sophie G. for reporting it.
- myBalsamiq: fixed caching for mockup images and implemented an improved caching strategy.
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with the editor displaying real-time notifications for other projects in the same site. Thank you Bartosz J. for reporting it!
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with using quotes in staffer's names.
- Mockups for FogBugz: revamped the UI and fixed some bugs.
- ...and lots and lots more, either behind the scenes or to small to mention
Thank you to all of you who helped us test 2.2 in the last month, especially Ben Norris, Eric Chan, Paul Harrison, Christian Colding and Timothy Whalin.
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.
Thanks to Florian's huge test automation efforts, this is the best-tested release of our history. It's still a huge update though, so something might have broken. If you see it, let us know immediately and we'll fix it right up! :)
For posterity, these are the version numbers of today's release:
- myBalsamiq: build #3859
- Mockups for Desktop: version 2.2.1
- Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.2.1
- Mockups for Confluence: version 2.2.1
- Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.2.1
- Mockups for JIRA: version 2.2.1
- Mockups for XWiki: version 2.2.1
- Web Demo: version 2.2.1 launch it
Did you know that...
- we released the TrueType files for the Balsamiq Sans font?
- we added kid-sized T-Shirts to our SWAG store?
- we improved our "send us an email" submission form for myBalsamiq to help us help you faster?
- Peldi will be speaking at Business of Software 2012 in a few weeks, and hopes to see you all there?
- most of us took some time off in August to rest and recharge, and are totally fired up for all the goodness that we're going to work on this fall? :)
- while our sales continue to grow, support load is actually decreasing?
In short, we're stoked about 2.2 and the future. We hope you are too. :)
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq team
Hello friends! We hope you're having a great summer.
We've been very busy working on the 2.2 release of Mockups, which will include a new awesome look and feel, a new wireframe skin for you to use and a new "Site Map" control type. The release is ALMOST ready, and you can try it today here.
We are aiming to release 2.2 at the end of the month, after some of our engineers get back from vacation. :)
In the meantime, we wanted to get out one more 2.1 release, which include some bug fixes and other minor enhancements.
Here's what's new in today's release:
- All versions: Arrow heads now look good on straight arrows. Thanks Rolias for reporting it!
- All versions: Fixed a number of Button Bar sizing and display issues. Thanks to Yaroslav Berezovsky, henri.juntunen, rbstijl and Christine Mayeux for reporting them!
- All versions: Label control's dimensions were not rounded when the label was tilted.
- All versions: Multiline button labels are now properly centered even if the second label is longer than the first. thank you pswulius for reporting it!
- All versions: Rounded Rectangle geometric shape looks better.
- All versions: Right-aligned Tab Bars are now right-aligned properly. This also fixes this crazy bug reported by robert.wallerblad.
- All versions: Added {color} macro support to the Tag Cloud control.
- All versions: made straight arrows (and any other thin control) easier to grab and move.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed a few issues with incorrect "This file is read-only" warnings being shown.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed a few issues with renaming files by just changing the capitalization of some letters.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed "Pressing CTRL+S when Save Mockups dialog appears when 2 dirty files are unsaved only saves the focussed file" bug, reported by Nathaniel Revathi.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed an issue with showing UTF-8 file names.
- Mockups for Confluence and JIRA: fixed an issue with local attachment images not being found when editing old mockups.
- Mockups for Confluence and JIRA: made it possible for Marketplace trial customers to purchase the plugin from us directly.
- Mockups for JIRA: fixed an issue with session expiring when editing mockups for a very long time.
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:
- Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.20
- Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.1.20
- Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.23
- Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.20
- Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.21
- Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.19
- Web Demo: version 2.1.19 launch it
We hope you enjoy the new release.
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
Hello friends!
We've been heads down for months, but it looks like things are finally coming together and we can start sharing some exciting new stuff with you.
myBalsamiq updates
First of all, myBalsamiq. As you know, we've had a bit of a rocky road with its stability since launch, but the dust seems to have really settled now, the servers have been humming along for weeks now.
We have been pushing a new update every Monday morning, quietly and without any downtime (yay!), mainly to fix bugs.
Here's what's been fixed in myBalsamiq since our last announcement:
- In story view, don't show long left border in thumbnail
- Fixed uploading multiple images in the editor (thanks Abdul R.)
- Reduced the impact of RSS spiders on server load by implementing if-modified-since handling
- Fixed an issue with removing staff (thanks Noah P.)
- Setting site design settings to Default now correctly sets background to Pleather
- Uploading gif assets with transparency now works correctly (thanks Alex B.)
- Fixed an issue with deleting site assets (thanks Ed C.)
- Implemented a way for customers to cancel and stop auto renew so they can continue to use their site until the end of the payment period (thanks Rick New)
- Fixed an issue with deleting project assets (thanks Verónica T.)
- Fixed an issue with caching BPML urls, should fix blank new mockup on edit (thanks Kenneth S., Craig L.)
- Fixed missing edit note in email notification on mockup save (thanks Peter G.)
We are now working on improving the management of people and projects, as well as finishing up some infrastructure pieces.
Oh, and myBalsamiq has surpassed $200,000 in total revenue since launch! A nice milestone for what is still a pretty young product for us, yay! :)
Next up...
Mockups 2.2: a new skin for us, a new skin for you!
Version 2.2 of Balsamiq Mockups is coming soon, and it's AWESOME.
This new version brings two long-awaited features to Mockups:
- A new look and feel - we're finally getting rid of my programmer art, and replacing it with a look that's cleaner and consistent, while still staying out of your way. Here's a bit more background on this change. Thanks so much to Mike and our friend Mims Wright for an EPIC effort on this.
- An additional new skin for your wireframes - that's right, you can now switch to a clean, thin-lines skin. This is useful for presenting your work to your bosses or anyone else who thinks our default skin is too cartoony.
We hope to release it as an official release in a week or two, but we need your help! As you can see, this was a big change. We need your help in making sure it's solid before we ship it to the masses. Can you please start using it today and report bugs with it to support@balsamiq.com?
We suspect the bugs will mostly be cosmetic little things here and there, nothing catastrophic - that said, the usual disclaimer applies: this is a pre-release version, not to be used with data you're afraid to lose.
You can try the pre-release here on the web or download the latest 2.2 candidate here. Bookmark that page and check it daily! ;)
That's it for now, but there's lots more cooking, so stay tuned... :)
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
The following is a guest post by UserZoom.
Testing prototypes and wireframes with unmoderated remote usability testing tools is not only cost-effective, but timesaving as well. These are very important considerations for any designer - especially if he/she is designing on an agile timeline.
In this article, we will show you how to test your myBalsamiq prototypes with UserZoom, an “all-in-one” solution for remote user experience research. Whether your prototype is “skin-and-bones” or high fidelity, testing with UserZoom is a breeze.
Most of the UserZoom remote unmoderated studies consist of the following: a welcome screen, an initial survey-like questionnaire, tasks with branching logic (the heart of the study), validation and final questionnaire. Let’s break this process into 5 easy steps. We’ll be using a Kayak prototype for the illustration purposes:
https://acme.mybalsamiq.com/projects/kayak/Home
1. Launch myBalsamiq project in prototype mode
First, you have to create your mockup in myBalsamiq and link all the pages in order to create a clickable prototype. Then, click on the Launch Prototype arrow, which is just below the New Mockup button.
After launching the prototype, you will see the URL of your project in a new window. This is the URL that you need for creating a study in UserZoom.
2. Create a study in UserZoom
To get started, click on Create new project. Then, select a tracking type from the dropdown menu. There are a total of three tracking options:
- no tracking needed
- tracking with add-on (requires participants to download an Add-on)
- tracking with JS code (requires tagging webpages with JS code)
Tracking enables UserZoom to capture behavioral data, such as clickstreams and heatmaps, from participants.
Give your project a name and you are all ready to move to your remote usability study setup.
3. Setup your study
Creating the study welcome screen
The welcome screen is the first screen participants see as they enter the study. It is a mandatory page that contains the terms of use and privacy policy. A welcome page should briefly explain what participants should expect during the study and should include information on how long the study will take.
Creating the Initial Questionnaire
The initial questionnaire can be used to gather demographic information and other pre-task metrics. To add a question, click the Add Question button and then choose a question type from the drop down selector.
UserZoom allows you to create screenshot click testing and screenshot timeout tasks in your initial questionnaire as well. Here is an example of a click test question that we had for the Kayak prototype.
Please click once on the page where you would go to manage your itinerary.
Creating a Navigation Task
During a navigation task, participants are provided with a goal and sent to a starting webpage. Participants are allowed to navigate freely in an attempt to complete the goal. Navigation tasks can be designed with validation (by URL or by a question) to determine whether participants are successful.
The first step when creating a navigation task is to enter the starting URL. This is the
webpage that all participants will start from. This is were you want to enter the URL of your myBalsamiq prototype.
The task description is positioned right below the Starting URL field. It is the initial mandatory page for a navigation task and should contain a full description of the task that the participants are asked to perform.
The simplified task description is used as a persistent reminder message as participants navigate.
Task Validation
UserZoom supports multiple task configurations to accommodate a wide range of study designs. The most commonly utilized setup involves using validation and sending participants to specific questionnaires based on task performance. By utilizing branching logic, you can setup timeout, error, abandon and success questionnaires.
UserZoom offers a total of three possible validation settings: Self-reported, Validation by question, and Validation by URL.
Self-reported validation: With self-reported validation a participant is counted as successful when they click the Success button in the UserZoom browser bar.
Validation by Question: Validation questions are choice based questions that have specific “correct answers”. A participant is counted as successful upon choosing at least one correct answer.
Validation by URL: You can assign any number of “success” URLs. When a participant is navigating through a URL validated task and if they reach a “success” URL, they will be counted as successful.
The Final Questionnaire
The final questionnaire is the last questionnaire in the study and will be shown to all the participants by default. The final questionnaire is an opportunity to gather feedback on a participant’s overall experience. To create a question in the final questionnaire click on the Add question button and select a question type from the drop down menu.
4. Recruiting participants
There are three different ways to recruit participants for a UserZoom study:
Through a panel supplier: UserZoom includes a Recruiting quote link that will connect you directly with our recruiting partners. Alternatively you can choose to work with your own preferred panel vendor.
Through a study link: UserZoom includes two types of invitation links for participant recruitment: the email distribution link and the unique link. The Email Distribution Link is a single link that can be used unlimited number of times. The Unique Link is good for a single entry into a study.
Through an intercept invitation: The intercept layer is a method used for capturing real users of a website. UserZoom can generate customizable intercept layers to appear on one or more pages of a website.
5. Analyze the results
UserZoom gathers rich user experience data and allows researchers to perform advanced analysis. Some of the metrics that you can get include effectiveness & efficiency ratios, visual clickstream paths, click heatmaps, popular words (text clouds), satisfaction & perception indicators, cluster analysis & dendograms. In addition, UserZoom’s analytics dashboard allows you to do advanced data analysis and filter results by task, page, user, and time.
Figure 1. Task effectiveness and efficiency

Figure 2. Clickstream
Figure 3. Heatmap
Summary
In summary, UserZoom allows you to get really valuable user data on your myBalsamiq prototypes. All you need is the URL to your prototype and a set of tasks that you would like to test.
The importance of user testing your prototypes cannot be overemphasized. This is the point in time when critical design decisions set the stage for all that will follow. With remote unmoderated usability testing, you can collect feedback quickly and cost-effectively, which is key in agile design.
Hello friends!
Hopefully none of you noticed, but two weeks ago Balsamiq took a week off to get together at our 3rd annual company retreat! Val wrote all about it here.
Now that we're back, it's time for another little release while we work on some bigger features in the background.
What's in today's release?
- All versions: fixed a number of little rendering bugs (including custom icons) in the export all as PDF or PNG features.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with some operations happening twice if caps+lock was turned on in Windows.
- Mockups for Desktop: now copies images to the ./assets/ folder when dragged on to the canvas (this helps keeping everything nice and tidy).
- myBalsamiq: fixed issue with database contention causing severe slowness and downtime due to inappropriate implementation of "last updated" feature which has been removed temporarily.
- myBalsamiq: major optimization in project save speed when using Symbols.
- myBalsamiq: now properly treats usernames as case-insensitive everywhere
- myBalsamiq: custom icons in assets now show up as expected. Upload from within the editor is coming soon.
- myBalsamiq: fixed loading issue for the myBalsamiq editor in firefox (thanks Mario Rimann).
- myBalsamiq: fixed a white page issue when launching editor if flash cookies are disabled (thanks Toby Irvine).
- myBalsamiq: we now use url fingerprinting for mockup snapshots and thumbs instead of relying on browser cache directives to avoid refresh issues.
- myBalsamiq: fix issue in image asset thumbnail generation that caused issues on some PNG files.
- myBalsamiq: mockups names ending with .bmml or .png are no longer allowed.
- myBalsamiq: fix issue with uploading projects containing .DS_Store files.
- myBalsamiq: fix issue with relative links in trial started email (thanks Maury McCoy, Ian Stokes-Rees).
- myBalsamiq: fix issue with symbols getting stuck on "loading symbol" in editor (thanks Brent Turner).
- Mockups for Google Drive: full rewrite in Java (more soon on why) and fix for "saving errors" when working on mockups for more than an hour.
- Mockups for Confluence: made links backward compatible.
- Mockups for Confluence: fixed an injection where the plugin always thought confluence had an unlimited license.
- Mockups for Confluence: finally fixed a bug with session timeout.
- Mockups for JIRA: finally fixed session timeout bug.
- Mockups for XWiki: now supports XWiki setting saving attachments to disk.
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:
- myBalsamiq: build #3818
- Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.19
- Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.1.16
- Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.20
- Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.18
- Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.20
- Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.18
- Web Demo: version 2.1.18 launch it
What else is going on?
Lots, as usual. Luis is working on setting up unified myBalsamiq logs with logstash and Kibana, Marco is putting the finishing touches on the iPad app's beta, I am working with my contacts at Google on adding support for image loading and uploading to Mockups for Google Drive, and lots and lots more. There's never enough time to do everything, but we're growing and are loving it every step of the way.
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
Hello friends!
My, we've been busy. Lots and lots of cool stuff cooking.
The big announcement of today is that our Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for JIRA plugins are now available on Atlassian Marketplace!
We won't blame you if you've never heard of Atlassian Marketplace yet...you see, it hasn't really officially launched yet (that will happen with great fanfare next week at Atlassian Summit). It's the new incarnation of the Atlassian Plugin Exchange, think of it as Atlassian's "App Store" for plugins and extensions.
Check out our brand new plugin pages on Marketplace for Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for JIRA, and make sure to read the Balsamiq and Atlassian Marketplace FAQ we put together to explain what this means for new and existing customers.
Oh one thing: we could use some more good reviews on the Marketplace pages! So if you use the plugins and like them, you know what to do...wink wink! ;)
What else is in this release?
- All versions: huge editor performance improvement when loading files that use many symbols from the same Symbol library.
- All versions: made it more resilient to occasional Flash Local SharedObject issues.
- myBalsamiq: fixed "images don't refresh after uploading" bug.
- myBalsamiq: fixed "attach button should be disabled until you browse in image upload dialog" bug.
- myBalsamiq: fixed "creating a Site Symbol Library would show it twice" bug.
- myBalsamiq: now properly disallowing cancelling out of save dialog (not supported yet).
- myBalsamiq: the editor now properly downloads thumbnails for mockups that have a dot in their name
- myBalsamiq: Symbols and assets now work again in Propose Alternate mockups.
- myBalsamiq: Improved stability and performance (too hard to explain the details, but we did a lot of work in this area and will do even more).
- myBalsamiq: fixed conversion of some types of PNGs.
- myBalsamiq: fixed "endless spinner" issues (this took a few days but it seems that we really nailed it now).
- myBalsamiq: fixed two issues with people having to refresh or shift+refresh to see mockup changes.
- myBalsamiq: made some major improvements in our operations scripts and metrics. The web app is getting easier and easier to manage for us and so is our ability to update without any downtime (we did a few releases already without anyone noticing, which let me tell you it's a great feeling. :)
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with email notifications not going out for mockup edits.
- Mockups for Confluence: the mockup2 macro shows the mockup preview when editing a wiki page again.
- Mockups for Google Drive: now gives a nicely formatted error (and workaround) if you try to access the app from the wrong Google account.
- Mockups for Google Drive: fixed a bug with people unable to save after working for a mockup for over an hour.
- Mockups for Google Drive: removed misleading image file upload tab. I am working on a better solution to allow image upload and import from within the editor but I am waiting on a fix from Google before I can ship my code. Hang in 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:
- myBalsamiq: build #3803
- Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.17
- Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.1.14
- Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.18
- Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.16
- Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.18
- Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.16
- Web Demo: version 2.1.16 launch it
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
Hello friends!
Today's little update fixes a number of little bugs here and there. As you may notice, some are injections, meaning fixes for code that used to work in the past and broke in the previous release. Clearly we need to do a better job at preventing these issues from happening, so it's a confirmation that putting Florian on building up our suite of automated tests full-time was a good idea, and absolutely necessary. :)
Anyways, let's get right to it:
- All versions: Alert dialog with a single button no longer looks ugly. Thanks halsura for reporting it!
- All versions: Fixed a couple of issues with the mouse cursor not switching back after a crop operation. Thanks Jason Kerchner, Dakota Brown and andreasgibnes for reporting it!
- All versions: Fixed an issue with the UI Library staying open during full-screen presentation mode (and links not working). Sorry about the injection, and thanks Wiking, Jason Kerchner, Tim LaBonne, chris.gatland and Bruce MacNaughton and László Bővíz for reporting it.
- All versions: Fixed a bug with the Data Grid not hiding rows properly. Thank you Marshal Datkowitz for reporting it!
- All versions: Fixed a bug with the tooltip text not wrapping. Thanks to halsura and paul for reporting it!
- All versions: Fixed "some controls don't look disabled" bug. Thanks to Eric Chan for reporting it and to Chris M. for emailing about it.
- All versions: The Button control now uses smaller horizontal label padding when the button itself is small. Thanks ireddick for requesting it and to Chris M. for emailing about it.
- All versions: A Search control with no text doesn't "get squished" any more.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed "Caps-lock breaks keyboard shortcuts" bug on Win and Linux. This was an old issue, first reported by Armaud 3 years ago, then again by Joe Eckert and pswulius. Florian wrote a blog post about it too!
- Mockups for Desktop: Auto-Save had broken for existing files, it only worked for new files. Thanks rafa for reporting it!
- myBalsamiq: Fixed issues with failing conversions (endless spinner). So sorry about this one. Our conversion servers ran out of disk space. We now updated them to a 20Gb hard drive (from 8Gb) and most importantly made sure old logs and error reports get deleted after a week so that the disks won't fill up again. Thank you sarah for reporting it.
- myBalsamiq: Anonymous users can edit and save mockups in wiki-access projects again. Thanks Jonta for reporting it!
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with image upload from the myBalsamiq editor. Thanks dcanarick, blackdr and Keving Fox for reporting it!
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with links not showing up in the HTML and PDF views after editing some mockups. Thank you Mattmas and Sarah Edwards for reporting it!
- myBalsamiq: Updated our real-time messaging protocol to something a little more firewall-friendly.
- myBalsamiq: We no longer log out users automatically on suspended sites.
- myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with some mockup thumbnails showing a single band.
- Mockups for Google Drive: renamed the Create New menu from "Wireframe" to "Wireframe (with Balsamiq Mockups)".
- Mockups for Confluence: migrated the plugin to V2, so that it's now compatible with the latest Atlassian SDK.
- Mockups for JIRA: Fixed a bug with mockup thumbns not showing when running JIRA with a contextPath.
- Mockups for JIRA: Now more resilient to mockup names that include special characters.
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:
- myBalsamiq: build #3779
- Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.16
- Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.1.8
- Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.16
- Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.15
- Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.16
- Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.15
- Web Demo: version 2.1.15 launch it
Onward!
Hello friends!
In case you missed it, Google just released Google Drive, their new storage and collaboration offering in the cloud.
We've been using it for a couple of months over here, and it's really awesome. You can get to all your files from any device, it all syncs automagically.
What's especially cool in Google Drive are the super-powerful sharing abilities: you can share files and folders with another person, a group of people, everyone on your Google Apps domain, or the whole world. If you've used Google Docs in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Except now you can save ANY kind of file in there, the first 5Gb are free and Google Docs files don't count against your quota. Sweet.
Another feature that really stands out to us is Drive's extensibility. You can create and edit documents directly from Google Drive, using in-browser applications.
When Google approached us to see if we would be interested in integrating Balsamiq Mockups with Google Drive, we jumped at the chance. It's been a couple of months in the making, but we're proud to release it to you today!
Balsamiq Mockups for Google Drive is available on the Chrome Web Store, and it works on all modern browsers.
There's a free 7-day, fully-functional trial. After the trial you'll have to sign up for a paid plan ($5/month or $50/year) to continue to save your mockups with the app, but you'll still be able to view them.
The editor is the one you know and love from the other versions of Balsamiq Mockups, but it's a little more limited in its feature set (linking, image upload and symbols are not supported right now). As usual, we wanted to get something useful out the door quickly, then listen to your feedback to help us prioritize what to work on next. We plan on improving the app FAST, don't worry. Use it for a while and tell us what you think! We're all ears.
Here's a few links:
One of our goals as a company is to be there where you need us, not to force you to work in a specific way in order to use our software.
Mockups for Google Drive brings us closer to that goal. We hope it will help you and your team design better software, and have fun doing it!
Onward!
Peldi and the Balsamiq Team
Hello friends!
We just updated myBalsamiq. The process was still rougher than what we'd like, but it definitely went much better than last time. Doing the update on a Saturday lowered the stress level considerably. We'll continue working on our processes to make it super-smooth in the future.
What's new in this myBalsamiq release?
- GIANT refactoring work in order to generate mockup images in the background. This results in dramatically faster saving times from the editor, and most importantly, brings full support of Symbols to myBalsamiq. Now when you update a Symbol, all the images of the mockups that use it get regenerated for you. You'll just see a spinner for a few seconds. Same for images, both site and project. This was a huge effort, and it smoothens what was certainly the roughest edge in myBalsamiq. Thanks to all who reported it here.
- Finally, we have proper timezones! Thanks Sagar A. and Steve C. for reporting it.
- We now inject some real-time events in the editor, instead of polling. In English, this means that your editor will work faster and use the Internet a lot less. For us, it should result in hundreds of dollars in hosting savings each month.
- Fixed an intermittent issue with mockup reordering.
- Now we really allow projects uploads up to 100MB.
- We now properly show Renew and Upgrade buttons when a site is in the grace period.
- Clicking "edit this mockup" in presentation mode works now. Thanks Melvin Ram for reporting it!
- Now the editor skin file is versioned as well, so you won't have to clear your cache after our updates.
- We no longer send you an email confirmation request if you're creating a new myB site with an old email - you've already confirmed your email address the first time!
- Fixed a formatting issue on the "What site do you want to work on?" selection page.
- Mockup thumbnails are now in jpg format (smaller, faster to load)
- Made a lot of little performance improvements here and there. The app should feel snappier, let us know if you notice it as well!
- In free for classroom use sites, we now allow students who are project members (but not staff members) to buy Mockups for Desktop at the discounted price.
- We no longer refresh the whole assets dialog when one is deleted. Faster!
- Added an "hideBar=true" URL option to the prototype view, which is handy if you're doing running usability tests on your myBalsamiq prototypes
- We now remember if you selected "show linking hints" across single mockup pages, as well as in prototype view.
- In prototype view, we also remember if you had the bottom bar showing or hidden across different pages.
- We now fail more gracefully if you point your browser to a non-existing project.
- Fixed an error in the editor when switching between mockups that contained Symbols.
- In order to work towards a more RESTful API, we now reserved some mockup names. If you get some weird XML instead of your mockup, just go to the project home page and rename it from there (we could have renamed the few offending mockups automatically, but it felt too aggressive on our part). Sorry for the hassle, we hope it won't happen again.
- We now ignore mockups whose names start with a dot (.) in project uploads
- We no longer refresh the whole project grid when deleting a project. Faster!
- The editor now shows nicer, smoother thumbnails in the project browser.
- We moved our database to a reserved RDS instance to save some money.
We are very happy with this release, can't wait to see how it performs as traffic increases during the week! :)
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
The following is a guest post by John Clark of Kupima. We also interviewed John in our free eBook! :)
I'm a big fan of using Balsamiq Mockups to help shape the design of a new website, or to compare proposed enhancements without the pain of actually building them. It's the smart way to do things, and so I was delighted to see myBalsamiq offering all that was great about the Mockups tool, but in a way that fits in with modern distributed teams. It's exciting that people can collaborate from anywhere in the world and help build better things.
Of course, building great designs is fine and well, but the beauty of myBalsamiq is that it's so quick and easy to create a number of different interpretations and evaluate each in turn. To do this does require stepping outside of myBalsamiq, however, and making use of some kind of user feedback tool. You could, of course, get your friends to give feedback but if you're running as a distributed team, why not use the same approach and use the 'power of the cloud' for your feedback as well?
Kupima is one tool you can use. Kupima is all about getting video reviews of how real users use a website in combination with what they think about that website. It's a bit like getting someone in to 'test drive' your site without the hassle and, more importantly, without the risk of pestering your friends and family with 'yet another test'. What's more, using an existing user panel such as we have ensures that you're getting fresh eyes on your site.
You can use Kupima to get feedback on your myBalsamiq prototypes quite easily. After all, what myBalsamiq gives you is effectively a kind of 'wireframed website' anyway, so it's not really so different to testing a completed site. What's more, by using Kupima at this stage you can get fresh insight from real users to help steer your design toward something that is effective and usable.
How to test your myBalsamiq prototype using Kupima
It's easy: firstly, if you've not tried Kupima before, sign up here and choose the number of users you want to receive video reviews from. I generally recommend 5 users to start with, as with that number you'll likely identify 80%+ of any problems or usability issues with your design.
Once you've signed-up, you can either choose one of our existing template tests or create your own from scratch. Whichever you choose depends on the type of feedback you are after. For this article, we'll create a test from scratch so that you can see how easy it can be:
Simply put the link to the myBalsamiq prototype starting page in the field called Website Address. If you're wondering where to get this address from, press the myBalsamiq Launch Prototype button (which looks like an arrow) just below the New Mockup button, and copying the url from the new browser window:
Back in Kupima, you can also select the number of users that you want to take your test. Note that you can, if you like, choose to have your own users take the test. Otherwise, you can specify a target demographic profile which matches your 'typical' user:
You can then set individual tasks or test steps for each user to perform during their test. I recommend thinking carefully about what you want to achieve from your test so that you can guide users toward the pages of most interest. Of course, maybe you're just after general first impressions, in which case you might want the users to explore freely...
The final step of setting up your test is to set some questions. Kupima offers two main categories of question; the first is the written question, which allows users to provide open-ended opinion and suggest improvements to your design:
The second is the discrete question, which limits the responses to one or more fixed values. This allows you to extract real data from your results across the entire set of test participants.
Once you've created your questions (and paid the test fee, of course ;-) then users matching your target demographic will be notified and will take your test. Each time one of them completes the test and uploads their video, you'll get an email notification and can view their response. When the test is done, you can also view the summarised questionnaire responses and generate a PDF test report.
User testing your designs is a very worthwhile step; the earlier you involve users, the more effective your design will be and the better your website will end up. To make it all the more tempting, we've included a special offer so that you can try out Kupima at a discounted rate. Simply set your test up and then enter the following code at the payment page to receive a discount: KMYBALSAMIQ30
Please get in touch with us at Kupima if you have any questions - we'd love to be able to help you get the most from your designs!
John Clark
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