Archives / Year: 2011
Our Donation Policy
We're proud to be able to donate to many non-profits each year. Read all about our Employe Donations Policy.
A Nearly Invisible myBalsamiq Release
Hello friends. Today's release is full of improvements, but most of them are behind the scenes. We are still focussed on bug fixing and providing better stability for the...
Release: Helping the Dust Settle after the myBalsamiq Launch
Hello friends! Today's release is mostly myBalsamiq-centric. We launched less than a month ago, so today's update is focussed on making it smoother rather than adding new features. Here's...
Our first public Mockups + myBalsamiq combined release!
Hi friends! This release is particularly exciting to us because now that myBalsamiq is out we can finally post release notes publicly of all that we've been working on,...
myBalsamiq Launches!
Hello friends of Balsamiq. The news we've all been waiting for is finally here: myBalsamiq launches today. What is myBalsamiq? It's a web-based application, it runs in your browser...
Kyle Dinh Joins Balsamiq
Hello friends of Balsamiq! I am thrilled today to announce that Kyle Dinh has joined the Balsamiq team as full-time employee #10 - double-digits baby! π Kyle, who's based...
Release: Custom Icons!
Hello friends! Today's big feature is the ability to extend our icon selection with your own icon image files. Custom Icons! Starting with today's version, you can now add...
Creating eBooks with Pages.app
UPDATE: This article was written in 2011, with tools that were available to us then. We'd suggest searching for more modern tools for creating eBooks now. iBooks on left...
Test the Custom Icons Feature
We've had a lot of people request a custom icons feature in the past. People want to add their own icons to the app and have them appear when...
Release: A Grab Bag of Little Goodies!
Hello friends of Balsamiq! Today's release brings about a grab bag of little new features and bug fixes. Nothing earth-shattering, but some welcome additions I'm sure. OK here we...
Songs for Entrepreneurs
I've been meaning to write this little post for a long time. There are a few songs whose lyrics stuck with me and have helped me along my programmer-to-CEO...
Release: Prettier Icons, Cyrillic Glyphs, Confluence 4.0!
Hello friends! Today's little release brings a few little goodies: Much prettier icons! The work we did to optimize our application's loading time had the unwanted side-effect of making...
Looking for an Outgoing DevOps in California
Nov 1st UPDATE: the position has been filled! Go Kyle! π Hi this is Peldi from Balsamiq. We are a three-year old, bootstrapped and very profitable little company. In...
Devising a Profit Sharing Program for Micro-Multinationals
Our Profit Sharing program has withstood the test of time. Read all about it!
Our Simple Salary Policy
This post is part of a series about our VERY FEW company policies. Read this intro post for some context. Given that we have different people all around the...
Pace, not Deadlines
This post is part of a series about our VERY FEW company policies. Read this intro post for some context. At Balsamiq, we don't have deadlines. Ever. It seems...
On the Need of VERY FEW Company Policies
I'm not a fan of policies. In fact, the tiny little essay on how policies are bad from Rework is my favorite of the whole book. It's called "Donβt...
DigMyData: Aha!-nalytics
I've never been a metrics lover. Stories like Google A/B testing 41 shades of blue make me cringe. I explain our industry's recent infatuation with analytics-driven-development in part as...
New Release: Font Adjustments and More
Hello Balsamiq friends near and far! π We're back from summer vacation and eager to get back to work. We hope you all were able to take some time...
Do Worry, Be Happy! Keeping Sane as a Software CEO
My talk at Business of Software 2010.
Avoiding the Circumlocution Office
A few weeks ago, I finally received my "permesso di soggiorno," my permission to stay in Italy. As an American citizen I knew the process for getting my paperwork...
βI Love to Do Business with Other Businesses My Sizeβ
I've tweeted about this video a few times in the past. I'm posting it here as well so that I can find it easily every time I'm compelled to...
Mockups Font Takes it First Steps
The first version of the Mockups font is now out in 2.1, and I think we have a good start at eliminating the clipping issues we had using Comic...
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...
Mockups 2.1 Is Coming Soon: A New Font, a new Era!
Hi all! Just a quick post to pre-announce that Mockups 2.1 is coming out in a week or two. The main change of 2.1 is that we're changing the...
Interview with Peldi from Balsamiq
My interview with John Clark of SoftwarePrototyping.net.
Company Retreat Powers Balsamiq Quality Boost
Would you trust your software to these people? You bet What is it like when a small, dynamic, distributed software company gets together for a week-long sleepover at the...
From Our RetrEAT: A Team That Cooks Together Stays Together
One of the hardest things about working with my beloved distributed team (aka balsamici*) is our not being able to see each other in person more often. Just once...
Release: HUGE Loading Time Improvement!
Hi again friends! Today's release main feature is a major optimization to our skin assets and icons, which results in dramatic improvement in loading times for the web and...
Why We Aren't Doing Deep Interaction in Mockups
Opinions matter Every so often we'll get a request to add features that would change Mockups from a sketchy wireframing tool to a prototyping tool. When these requests bubble...
New Release: Partial PNG Export and More!
Hello friends! We're back from our retreat and excited to be back at work. Today's release is a fairly small one, but it introduces a little feature that has...
Our Response Might Be Delayed... We're on Retreat!
Hello friends! I am super-excited as I type this. I am alone in the office today because it's an Italian holiday, a French holiday, and OUR WHOLE US TEAM...
Speed Wireframing a Click-Through Prototype Using Symbols
ββ There's so many ways to use Mockups. I rarely do click-through prototypes, but if I have to, then I count on Symbols and links to make it painless....
New Tutorial on Specifying Interaction with Mockups
We've aded a new tutorial in the support section to suggest some best practices for specifying interaction using Mockups. Software designers and developers designing for the screen have an...
Tip: Adding Color to Components with No Text Color Property
Mockups can seem like an iceberg. There's so much beneath the surface in terms of advanced features. The features that seem to be hidden are learnable, but we don't...
New Release: Rename, Icons on the Right, Break Apart...
Hello old friends. If you've been wondering what we've been up to, I won't blame you. We say we release almost weekly and then if you look at this...
Joy McCrea Joins Balsamiq
Hello everyone! I know it's been a while since our last blog post, my apologies. We've been crazy busy with lots and lots of new customers and working on...
Tip: Using Dingbats in Text Components
Text components are interesting in Mockups. We have a lot of wiki-style syntax for formatting, and a lot of people have been asking to extend this to do things...
Tip: Creating Linkable Whole Symbols Using Nested Groups
This is a tip for Mockups for heavy users of symbols, that shows you how to make an entire set of objects in a symbol linkable. While doing support...
Sketching in Mockups
Interface sketching is a path focussed on generating ideas and finding solutions. I feel good when I have a drawing pen or pencil in my hand. Doodling, sketching, and...
Top-down Symbol Library Creation in a Nutshell
I've been creating and converting a lot of symbols libraries of the top-down variety, where you create a symbol library and save to assets, rather than using the inline/bottom-up...