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Weekly Release: “Snap on Center” and Other Little Things

Hello everyone, we hope you're having a great day!

We've been busy this week with one big feature and lots of little improvements and bug fixes.

Snap on Center

This is one of those features that's been on our TODO for a while, and now that we have it we cannot imagine how we went so long without it.

snaps

Basically the name says it all: as you drag one or more controls around, you will now see a little blue snap line when the center of your selection aligns with another control's center point.

This works both when moving or resizing, try it out!

We also changed the color of the snap lines that signal proximity, so that you can tell them apart from the ones that signal alignment. Look at this screenshot for instance:

moresnaps

Other Changes

  • In the paid versions, we removed the white space border around the exported PNGs, which makes them easier to use for templates (thanks to MaratB and Crink for their convincing arguments).
  • Pasted controls now get a new position each time you paste them (thanks Adam for the bug report!)
  • we fixed a bug with BalsamiqMockups.cfg, it should all work as expected now (thanks Svante and Thomi for the bug report!)
  • double-clicking on text now removes the punctuation from the selection (thanks Will for the report)
  • the label color of the Multiline Button now changes (black or white) depending on the background color you choose, just like it does for Pointy Buttons.
  • Tab Bars and Vertical Tab Bars now preoperly behave as containers (for snapping)
  • we fixed a problem with double-clicking to edit text (a recent injection, our apologies)
  • during the week we fixed a problem with our build scripts that resulted in the fonts used by Mockups to be thicker and blurrier, thanks so much to Leon Barnard for bringing it to our attention!

Other News

We posted a few new templates on MockupsToGo: YUI Calendars, YUI Menus and Buttons, YUI Carousels. More are coming. It's a great way for us to test Mockups, and we hope you'll be able to save some time in your work by using our templates. Also new on MockupsToGo, a configurable Browser Window thanks to Olli Savolainen and an Image Shoveller/Filmstrip widget courtesy of Ian McAllister.

Linux users with the "file:///" error: Adobe is listening and needs your help reproducing the bug, please head over here and answer Sundeep's questions if you can, thank you.

Last but not least, we received a glowing endorsment from Joel Spolsky, which is already posted on our wall, right next to our "Company Values 0.1" list:

spolski

How do I update?

Here are the links:

  • Mockups for Desktop: here
  • Mockups for Confluence: here
  • Mockups for JIRA: here
  • Mockups for XWiki: here
  • Web Demo: here

Onward and Ciao!

Peldi and Marco

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Leave a Comment

Comments (6)

  1. Peldi,

    This is a bit off topic, but if you haven’t seen this, you might want to check out the new kid on the block:

    http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=54077

    Patrick
  2. Guys, the tool is simply fantastic but I have one major issue that still bother me.

    When making mockups of data entry screens the most commonly used items are
    – Radio button
    – Checkbox
    – Label
    – Text box
    – Command button

    However in the common tab the radio button and text box are waaaay over to the right which means you have to scroll to get them. This makes it quite cumbersome to build control intesive mockups without resorting to copy and paste.

    Is it possible to either
    a) Allow users to rearrange controls to their own needs (preferred!)
    b) At least push the text box and radio button closer to the other controls in the common tab

    [Peldi: thanks for the feedback Conrad, we want to re-organize the tabs soon so we’ll take this into account. For now, have you tried Quick Add? That’s all I use to add controls (I hide the UI Library even)]

  3. Pingback: Dew Drop – March 25, 2009 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

  4. Peldi – you need to get “Barnard” right. That’s my middle name (and a family name). =)

  5. Not a big deal, but you got my last name wrong. It’s Barnard, not Bertran. Ciao!

    [Sorry Leon, it’s fixed!]

    Leon Barnard
  6. Snap on center is brilliant! This one means I’m updating our JIRA plugin.