Hello friends of Balsamiq!
It's a very exciting time here in Balsamiqland. After years of work, we think we're THIS CLOSE to being able to release our brand new, fully rewritten Desktop applications for Windows and Mac.
The new versions are fully native, no longer relying on the soon-to-be-outdated Adobe Air technology.
What's new in Balsamiq Wireframes?
First of all, the name! Balsamiq Mockups served us well for a decade, but it's finally time to call things for what they are. 🙂 What our tool lets you create are actually called low-fidelity wireframes, not mockups!
Other than that, our main focus was to not to change the tool's UX or feature set, but to rewrite it completely to work on a more modern technology stack. In other words...EVERYTHING is new, but it's hard to see. 🙂
We now deliver a top-class native experience, using standard controls on each platform. We improved performance, and stability.
We also added a few key improvements:
- Comments! You can add comments, with callouts, threads, mentions...the works!
- Wireframes To Go is now tightly integrated in the editor. You can find and import symbols in just a few clicks.
- A brand new Full Screen Presentation Mode! More powerful, and better for user testing.
- Editing of Balsamiq Cloud projects! That way you get the best of both worlds: you can use a fast, powerful native desktop app, but your data is saved in the Cloud, with all the collaboration features you expect.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Balsamiq Wireframes also has a much larger canvas to work with, exports to high quality vector-based PDFs, includes more Android controls, has better trackpad and mouse support, and - only on macOS for now - even has built-in spell check!
Where can I get it?
Well, it's not widely available yet. We need your help to get us over the finish line.
Before we can call it 'ready', we need more feedback. Would you be up for trying it out and telling us what you think about it?
We set up a temporary staging website with the new app, the new docs, the new online store, and all that good stuff.
Here's the secret link to download the app: [redacted] - please don't bookmark this or share it too widely, it will go away soon! 🙂
The new app can run side-by-side with Mockups 3, and the BMPR file format hasn't changed.
Balsamiq Wireframes is a major-version update, so it's a paid update.
Alright, I'll let you go and try it out!
Any questions, we're here.
Onward!
