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Mockups 2.1!

Hello friends, we hope you're having a great summer!

Today's release marks the end of an era for us, as we introduce our very own font. It's a big enough change that we feel it warrants a new minor version update:

We also fixed a number of little issues and added a few little features since the last release. Let's take a look!

A new font!

As pre-announced last week, the main feature of Mockups 2.1 is the switch from Comic Sans / Chalkboard to our very own font, designed by Michael.

The main goals of the change were to get rid of a very frustrating clipping bug that affected lots and lots of users, as well as removing a part of Mockups that was distracting to some of our users.

The new font is still sketchy, playful and readable, but also a little less noticeable. As far as we know, it hasn't caused any allergic reactions in anyone who has seen it so far. 😉

We created a Balsamiq Mockups Font FAQ document that has more details on what changed and how it might impact your work. It's a quick one, worth a read! 🙂

New Triangle Shape!

We added a new geometric shape: a little triangle!

You can find it in the property inspector of the Geometric Shape control. Once you select it, you'll also see a "rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise" icon appear.

Thanks to Praveen, Meza and Rolias and for requesting this, as well as @benfurneaux.

Bye bye JIRA 3.

In line with Atlassian's Support end-of-life schedule, we now no longer support JIRA 3. This means that we will no longer create and sell a new version of Mockups for JIRA compatible with JIRA 3: the last version of Mockups for JIRA that supports it is mockupsJIRA3x-2.0.23.jar, from June 22nd 2011.

We updated the Mockups for JIRA 4 licensing FAQ to reflect this change.

Other improvements and bug fixes

  • All versions: added bullet support to Text Area control. Thanks Richard Collins for the feature request.
  • Mockups for Desktop: non-latin file names now properly show up as page names in exported PDFs. Thanks Joe H. and 雾都孤狗 for the bug report (via email).
  • Mockups for Desktop: cloned mockups now remember where they came from better. This means that project assets will show up, symbols will still work and the default folder for saving will be the same as the original mockup. Thank you Maurice Svey for the request and to merle.corey for this related request.
  • Mockups for Desktop: we no longer show lots of "New Mockups" tabs if you open Mockups after moving the files that were open last time you closed the app.
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with files (with spaces in their names) getting moved to the end of the list when renamed. Thanks Hal Shubin for the bug report.
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with project assets intermittently not appearing in the UI library
  • Mockups for FogBugz: If a .bmml was attached to fogbugz case without the corresponding .png the "edit existing mockups" window was empty. Thanks Andri H. for the bug report.
  • Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a bug with FogBugz OnDemand not being able to use images from web. Thanks again to Andri H. for the bug report.

What else is going on?

We had a bit of a rocky week with myBalsamiq: we updated the beta build with a version that added both clustering and project zip upload, the last two important features we wanted to have before our public launch. It turns out that uploading projects uncovered some issues with our clustering code, so we had to turn it off while we look for a fix. Stay tuned here for updates. After fixing these two bugs we plan on leaving the build up for a little while longer to make sure it's plenty stable and scalable for launch. Exciting times! 🙂

We are also gradually migrating our internal support processes from "always reply all in GMail" to Assistly, a much more powerful help desk web tool. We really like it so far, it came highly recommended and the UI is very intuitive...I wonder why? 😉

This change should be pretty invisible to you, other than possibly receiving faster, better answers, and not receiving the same answer from two of us at the same time. 🙂

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 2.1.1
  • Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.1
  • Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.1
  • Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.1
  • Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.1
  • Web Demo: version 2.1.1 launch it

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Leave a Comment

Comments (10)

  1. Liking the new update, though I would kill for a choice of fonts.
    Sketchy, less Sketchy, not sketchy at all.

    Too many snobs read my documents and I get ridiculed to no end when I whip out anything even remote resembling the dreaded comic sans

  2. Any word on Jira 4.4 compatibility?

    [Peldi: works fine!]

    Rick Crow
  3. Thank you. Awesome. I haven’t been reporting bugs since I starting using the product, but I will try to do it from now on. It seems like, from other bugs that I have seen, you guys have fixed things in a timely manner when they are legitimate bugs.

    I am, though, still hoping for some sort of file management/project management feature to come out soon. I know there have been several threads about it and it would make a nice addition to an awesome product.

    Corey O'Brien
  4. Corey, Marco just fixed the tree alignment issues in the pre-release version. If you’re brave you can try it out: http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/next

  5. Corey, we’re definitely going to fix the vertical alignment issue on the tree pane. That’s a bug. Thanks for reporting it. We’ll try to get a fix out soon.

  6. I did revert back. I would love to move forward and just update my screens but I just can’t do it with the positional issue of the Tree Pane. Is it intentional that the icons next to the text aren’t positioned vertically centered? Is there a way I can fix just that or any other control where the font change has made that type of issue more apparant?

  7. Corey, it may make sense for you to stick to the earlier version until you’re interested in using the new one for new projects. You can revert to the older version of Mockups from the archives here:
    http://builds.balsamiq.com/archives/mockups-desktop/

    If you want to switch back to Comic Sans or another font, please see the instructions for setting up fonts in the font faq, which explains all of the issues that lead us to needing to stop using Comic Sans/Chalkboard:

    http://balsamiq.com/support/font

    Please have a look and let us know if you need any more info or help.

  8. We have an 85 page, 40+ asset project and the update really messed it up. Not only is the font completely different in terms of size (off by several points) but the position of elements isn’t the same.

    An example of this would be on the Tree Pane control. When you add icons next to the items in the tree, they no longer line up vertically centered. It wasn’t perfect before, but it was pretty close. Now, the text pretty much lines up vertical-top which means it looks really weird if used for a left-hand menu.

    Another thing that the new font changed was the sketch look. Our situation might be unique, but we want our wireframes to look like sketches and the new font looks alomst too crisp. As much as I hate comic sans, at least it looked sketchy.

    Not to be all negative with the new font because I am sure it fixes the issue we have of going from OSx to Windows. In the past, with Comic Sans, every time we open a wireframe from OSx on a Windows computer we would see font sizing issues. I would assume that the new font addition would address this font difference in operating systems.

    Corey O'Brien
  9. Pingback: Balsamiq fights for the Users | Stereo Artist - blog

  10. It’s quite cool to see how much Balsamiq Mockups has grown, keeping it’s simplicity and easiness. Mockups is one of the tools that I definitely recommend in most of my lectures.
    Maybe someday we could somehow integrate Mockups with Airgile (http://airgile.com ), our team management platform (also flex-based)? 😉

    Keep up the good work