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7-Day Demo, Larger Canvas, Transparent PNGs...

· Posted by Peldi in Products · 2 Comments

Whoa, it's only been 18 days since the last release but somehow it feels much longer.

We've been really busy (see below), but once again we were able to squeeze in a few new features and bug fixes for today's release.

A new, fully functional 7-day demo

The main change of today's release is the switch to a fully-functional, 7-day-long free demo for Mockups for Desktop.

Gone is the nagging dialog every 5 minutes, and you'll be able to fully test Mockups for Desktop for a whole week. This means saving your work, importing images, linking mockups together, the works! 🙂

After 7 days, when your demo expires, you'll no longer be able to save your mockups, export them to PNG or print them (you can still take screenshots with an external program and use the "Export..." feature to save your work manually, as always).

Even after the demo expires, you won't get the nagging dialog any more.

This is what the app will look like during the demo period (click to enlarge):

Why only 7 days? We heard that most people buy Mockups after about an hour or two of testing it, so we feel that a week is plenty of time to properly get the value of Mockups. If that's not enough for you, write us a convincing email 😉 and we'll send you a demo key which will extend your trial for another week or so.

A side-effect of today's change is that we are stopping our old "free evaluation license for bloggers in exchange of a fair review" program.

This change is a bit scary (our sales might drop dramatically for this week), but we believe it's the right thing to do. Everybody hates nagware, and we want our perspective customers to be able to fully test the application before they buy, it simply makes sense. The first person to suggest this change was Rick F. via a very well written and convincing email, for which I am very grateful.

Larger Canvas Size: from 8 to 16.4 million pixels!

The maximum size of a single mockup went from 2840x2840 pixels to 4056x4056. It doesn't look like such a dramatic enhancement if you look at the mockup below (exported with the new build), but it's more than twice the pixels!

Another related change is that you'll now be able to see the "edge of the world" limit of the canvas as you zoom out:

Many thanks go out to all those who requested for this...Daniel Magliolia, Ionut, Debbie, and many others! 🙂

Transparent Background Option for PNGs

A lot of you have asked for this (Travis, Prestoz) and I was able to squeeze it in quickly: you can now add <transparentBackground>true</transparentBackground> to your MockupsDesktop.cfg config file and we'll export your mockups with a transparent background instead of a white one.

A word of caution: all of our UI controls were drawn on a white piece of paper, so they work best against a white background...if you place them on a dark background your mileage may vary...don't say I didn't warn you... 🙂

Other Changes and Bug Fixes

  • All versions: when you clone a control with ALT+drag, we now snap to the original control as well. Thanks so much to Jeff Stewart and Gyuri Juhasz for reporting this.
  • All versions: fixed the sizing of the scrollbar in the Accordion control. Thanks Bob Altman for reporting this!
  • All versions: flipped the iPhone control in landscape mode so that the button is on the right. Thanks David H. for telling us about this Apple guideline (via email)
  • All versions: fixed the sizing of an empty Numeric Stepper control: it's no longer squished. Thanks Petr Vlk for reporting this bug (via email).
  • All versions: fixed a bug with linking Radio Button Group and Checkbox Group controls. Another great Bob Altman report!
  • All versions: fixed a bug with the default text size of the Geometric Shape control. Thanks Crink for reporting it.
  • All versions: a disabled Text Area now properly disables its scrollbar as well. Thanks Heidi Ulrich for reporting this bug.
  • All versions: PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN now work again. Hallelujah! Thanks rcollings for pointing out this big bad bug! 🙂
  • All versions: holding down the TAB key while editing no longer "goes crazy". I can't find the old thread, but thank to those who reported this!
  • All versions: we now do a better job at only selecting actual words (without punctuation) when you double-click on a word. Thanks GooeyGrl for reporting this.
  • Mockups for Desktop: changed the mnemonic for Save As (now "A") and Save All (now "L"), to match the Windows standard. Thanks Mark K. for pointing this out (via email).
  • Mockups for Desktop: in the tabs bar at the bottom of the app, we now show the little "x" button for closing a tab all the time (it's faint, but it's there). This addresses a usability problem pointed out by our good friend László Bővíz. Sorry it took me so long to see the light on this one Leon!
  • Mockups for Desktop: removed the status bar from the bottom of the app. I'm not sure when it snuck back in, but it had no business being there (especially in full-screen, when it obscured the horizontall scrollbar, as orbit and theThought pointed out). It's gone again, sorry about that.
  • Mockups for Desktop: we no longer show the ".bmml" extension in the tabs bar at the bottom of the app. It saves some space for when you have lots of Mockups open at the same time.
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed a crazy bug that had to do with saving BMML files inside your account assets folder. It's an edge case, but it works now. We call this "a 20,000 customers bug", something you only hear about once you pass 20,000 customers. 🙂
  • Mockups for Desktop: we now add the ".pdf" extension if you don't add it to the name yourself. This happened by default on Mac but not on Windows. Thanks Andy Little, duanespin and others for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: we now use "disk" everywhere, not both "disk" and "disc". Thanks to eagle-eye Heidi Urich for pointing this out! 🙂
  • Mockups for Desktop and Confluence: you can now rapid-fire click to navigate your prototype while in full-screen mode without having to move your mouse in between clicks. Thanks to Dave for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: you can now enter {mockup-path} in a Paragraph of Text control and it will be shown with the full path of your BMML file. Thanks for James Crossley for requesting this, we'll add more macros like this one in the future.

How do I update?

Easy! You can head over to our download page.

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 1.7.11
  • Mockups for Confluence: version 1.7.13
  • Mockups for JIRA: version 1.7.13
  • Mockups for XWiki: version 1.7.10
  • Mockups for FogBugz: version 1.7.13
  • Web Demo: version 1.7.12 launch it

Other news

Man, a lot has happened since our last update.

Some of it we cannot share yet (it's all very good, don't worry), but here's a recap of the rest:

  • I got interviewed by Andrew Warner for Mixergy.com (one of my favorite websites!). Head over to http://mixergy.com/balsamiq-peldi-guilizzoni-interview to see the video / download the podcast. Thanks to all of those who showed up for the interview live in the chat room, we appreciate the support!
  • Marco and I went to the Better Software conference in Florence. Although it was a bit awkward to be recognized by people - it's like we're famous or something 😉 - it was great to meet other Italian techies/entrepreneurs, the scene is definitely growing! 🙂 I had a good time presenting my talk as well, you can download the slides in PDF form here: BetterSoftwareBalsamiq.pdf
  • Marco is days away from being able to share his work on "double-click to edit group contents", which is a HUGE change (he had to refactor A TON of our code-base in order to make it happen). It's a great feature, and the first big step towards the long-awaited components feature.
  • myBalsamiq is moving along and it's more gorgeous and usable by the day.
  • Last but not least, Mark Shuttleworth is using Mockups on his blog and called us "pure genius" in the comments, which is super-sweet since all of our servers (and Luis' desktop) run on Ubuntu. We're proud to help! 🙂

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (2)

  1. That was quick! I was about to send an update after I figured out it would only happen when a custom color was used, but you’re on top of it already. Downloaded, using it already 🙂

    Thanks,
    Sergei

    [Peldi: Hi Sergei, you might want to download 1.7.14, I have just fixed one more little color-related bug]

    Sergei Khvatkov
  2. I just updated to v1.7.11 and I wanted to comment on something. The horizontal and vertical rules are now much fatter, one of my recent mockups relied on a couple very thin faint lines separating the logo/menu area and the footer on the page. I was trying to introduce the idea in a subtle way as I think it does a better job separating sections of the site. Anyways, it seems that while you can go into the properties and change the width/thickness, it does not do anything to the appearance and it reverts back to the default value of 5.

    Also, another ‘crazy’ idea, if there were a couple other options in the breadcrumbs control, similar to the text box options

    RootNode > SectionNode > SectionNode > CurrentNode

    It would be nice to have the usual text attributes for each node type (root, section and current) like color, style, decoration, etc. and have a selection for some common separator types > | : :: (fixed dropdown list, dropdown + custom image dialog perhaps?)

    Love the product, would like to know how and when we can use asset manager or create custom controls for even faster prototyping.

    Thank you,

    Sergei Khvatkov
    Developer
    Morrison Management Specialists

    [Peldi: So sorry Sergei! I just fixed the bad thickness injection. Please download the latest, it will all be back to normal]

    Sergei Khvatkov