Balsamiq

Weekly Update, a Bit Late

Hey there, here's what happened in Balsamiq-land since last week's update:

• I fixed the blocking Mockups+Confluence bugs
• I set up my build machine to post new builds of the 30-day trial downloadable plugin automatically
• I added the e-junkie shopping capabilities to the site, linking paypal to my business bank account, adding the necessary pages to the site etc.

The combination of these three mean that I am officially open for business!

If you'd like to try the Confluence plugin go here, download the trial, install it and start playing with it for 30 days. If you then want to buy it, the process is painless and starts on that same page.

Other things I did:

• I am working on a new version of the introductory video...I haven't had some time alone to record a good quality voice-over for it but the demo/video is almost ready. I like it, stay tuned. P.S.This stuff is really time-consuming, and definitely not as easy as you may think.
• I added a Tree Pane control. Thanks Stefano for requesting it!
• I found a good CPA, but he won't talk to me until after April 15th, which is understandable. 🙂
• I applied to become an Atlassian partner. Having the badge on my site gives me more legitimacy, plus since I'm betting the house on them 😉 I want to stay "as close as possible", so to speak. Also, I have heard a report of one person who was evaluating different wikis and chose Confluence after finding out about Mockups (thanks Jason for the word-of-mouth there). So who knows, I might help them sell some more of their great software.
• I fixed a bunch of annoying little bugs: you can now hold down keys in the editor to repeat them, and add TAB spaces (I can't believe Flash/Flex doesn't support either of these out of the box), the property inspector moves out of the way when needed, the menus don't look as ugly, plus a bunch of other small fixes here and there. I am waiting for someone at Atlassian to create a public JIRA account for Mockups (hint hint Jonathan 😉 ) so that I can link to it from the site and track/prioritize them all. I am definitely switching to bug-fixing mode now that all the v.1 features I wanted have been coded.
• I updated the blog to WordPress 2.5

For this week:

• finish the intro video
• write a draft for the EULA to give to the lawyer - SO FUN! 🙁
• continue fixing bugs
• work on the site a bit...I have gotten feedback that it's a bit "too wordy"
• maybe start the brainstorm with Atlassian on how to port Mockups to JIRA.

On a personal note, my one-way flights to Italy are exactly a month from now, so I'll have to scale back the Balsamiq efforts a bit and step up the "pack to ship / pack to store / try to sell / give away / throw away" efforts for the big move.

Until next week,
Peldi

P.S.I'm still having a lot of fun with this, EULA and all. I can't wait to do this full time! 🙂

---