Little Updates Here and There
Hi there, sorry for not blogging for a while (a whole 10 days!), but I've been pretty busy with both Balsamiq work and life in general: after 3 months "on vacation" traveling around Italy, real life is starting here in Bologna: we are buying furniture, unpacking boxes, dealing with immigration for my American wife (so fun!)...plus our little one started school last week, talk about milestones! 🙂
Anyways, a quick update to list the improvements and bug fixes I made since the last "update" post of August 31st:
Feature improvements:
- ALL: moved the About dialog to the Help menu
- ALL: added a background color to the TextArea control
- Confluence / JIRA: added a javascript warning if you try to leave/close the Mockups editor without saving your changes
- ALL: you can now hold down CTRL while resizing or moving to temporarely turn off snapping
- ALL: added the ability to drag past the edges of the app to select and resize. This is worth another blog post: it took days, it's not perfect and I'm not even finished (I'm missing auto-scroll on move), but the consensus is that what's there is better than nothing. This was definitely NOT fun, look I even resorted to asking advice on StackOverflow!
- ALL: Dialogs now stay centered as you resize your editor window (this fixes an edge case in Google Chrome)
- ALL: you can now ESCape your way out of Quick Add.
- ALL: the app is now more respectful of your empty spaces. You can type spaces to make room for icons and they won't get deleted. Same for empty rows in lists
- ALL: DataGrid now has text editing controls, so you can make the text smaller, centered, etc
- Desktop: added CTRL+L to toggle the UI Library
Bug fixes:
- Confluence, JIRA: added no-cache directives to work around IE7's aggressive caching of the mockup's XML data
- Confluence: now ignores carriage returns in the license key (this was bad, it would take down Confluence)
- Desktop (Windows): the open dialog now lists both XML and BMML files by default
- Desktop: removed leading "/" from PNG export confirmation dialog
- ALL: fixed an horizontal alignment bug in the Horizontal Curly brace control
- Confluence/JIRA: added /, \ and = to the illegal characters in the mockup names
- Desktop: "Save As..." automatically goes to the last folder you used (for real this time)
- ALL: fixed a bug with going back to "None" as the selection for List, TabBar and VerticalTabBar (now it works)
- Desktop: no longer adds .bmml.bmml.bmml...
- ALL: the mockup canvas now has a maximum size of 2880x2880. I had to add this because Flash cannot export PNGs bigger than that. 🙁
So if you haven't upgraded in a while, maybe today is a good time to do it? Download and install Mockups for Desktop, for Confluence or for JIRA now! 😉
Business Update: has it really been 3 months already?
Things are still going really well for Balsamiq. Today is exactly the 3-months mark since launch, and Mockups keeps getting rave reviews and tweets. Sales are growing nicely, and the combined income from the 3 different products makes for some exciting variations week by week. I'd love to share more but I promised I'd save it until revenue reaches $100K, and I'm only half-way there. Oops, did I say too much? 😉
What's next
Two other BIG things are going on:
- I am very close to announce the port of Mockups to another wiki platform. Stay tuned for more, I'm excited about it!
- I have started implementing the "image upload" feature, a.k.a. the #1 most requested feature. Wish me luck! 🙂
Thanks for reading this far and have a great day!
Peldi