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Release: New Color Picker, Tiny Character Counter, Image Rotation and More!

Hello friends of Balsamiq!

Another month, another cool little release. Let's get right to it!

New color picker and color names!

We made quite a few improvements to the color picker:

colorpicker

You can now enter any HEX color (we even support 3-digit gray notations), or type the name of a color like "white", "black", "yellow". If you roll over one of the built-in colors the tooltip will show you that color's name as well.

These color names also work in the {color} macro, like this:

colormacro

We think these additions improve your flexibility in creating mockups without adding much complexity at all. Our favorite kinds of improvements! 🙂

New tiny char counter!

Speaking of small but very useful improvements: after learning how Balsamiq Champion Glenn Murray and others are using Mockups to do copy-writing, we added a small character counter to the text editor:

charcounter

You'll see this counter when editing Labels or Paragraphs of text controls, and you'll always know if you're within your character limits or not.

Because of this change, we removed the little known l0rem shortcut (the one with the zero instead of the O), which gave you some lorem ipsum text with character counts sprinkled around. The tiny character counter is much more useful and fine-grained. The regular "lorem" auto-expand shortcut is still there, don't worry. 🙂

What else is new?

  • All versions: you can now rotate images!
    imagerotation
  • All versions: moved the group breadcrumb bar / crop bar / symbol overriding bar to the bottom, to avoid the jarring "jump down" of your controls.
    groupbar
  • All versions: CTRL++ and CTRL+- now always zoom, CTRL+[ and CTRL+] now always change the text or icon size.
  • All versions: Fixed an issue when resizing groups by a tiny amount. Thanks Martin for reporting it!
  • All versions: we now support CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS for copy and paste on Windows
  • All versions: Quick add menu items are now all properly left-aligned.
  • All versions: improved the rotation algorithm of the iPhone and Triangle Geometric Shape
  • All versions: Fixed the Tooltip's control vertical alignment, which was off with wrapping lines of text. Thank you chrisse, Chad Larkin and Milos Krocian for reporting it!
  • All versions: fixed the wireless icon on wireframe skin (it was missing a dot)
  • All versions: made the app a bit more resilient to errors when loading corrupted bmml files
  • All versions: Fixed an issue when removing a link of a symbol control with just one link. Thank you Luke Potter for reporting it!
  • All versions: Fixed the alignment of text in radio button group when text wraps.
  • All versions: Fixed an issue with cropped groups sometimes changing location when the file is opened. Thanks Reiner S. for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: we deprecated the <documentsPath> tag in BalsamiqMockups.cfg and replaced it with a more flexible and much easier to use <assetsPath>. See the updated documentation here. If you had a documentsPath tag already set up you don't have to do anything, Mockups for Desktop will update your cfg file automatically on the next startup.
  • Mockups for Desktop: Fixed a little visual artefact on the property inspector on retina displays.
  • Mockups for Desktop: Fixed the group breadcrumb label widths on retina displays.
  • Mockups for Desktop: We improved the feedback when a user enters a trial key that is no longer valid.
  • Mockups for Desktop: Fixed an issue with files getting opened twice if the folder has an & character in it. Thank you Holger H. for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: The app now correctly remembers your open files even if you double-click on a bmml file to open it.
  • Mockups for Google Drive: made our revisions sticky so that they don't get automatically deleted after 30 days.
  • Mockups for Google Drive: we now handle the case in which the Google Apps admin turns off 3rd party Google Drive apps. Thanks Jens K. for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Confluence: Fixed an issue with Confluence instances that had VERY large page IDs.
  • Mockups for Confluence: We now give a correct message if the Blueprint feature is not available (e.g. Confluence 5.0)
  • Mockups for Confluence: added recovery from auto-save data (only works for mockups that have been saved at least once).
  • Mockups for JIRA: added recovery from auto-save data, both for new and old files.

How do I update?

If you're using myBalsamiq, you're already updated. Just log back in and enjoy.

For other versions, simply install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

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:

  • myBalsamiq: build #4061
  • Mockups for Desktop: version 2.2.15 2.2.16*
  • Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.2.22
  • Mockups for Confluence: version 2.2.12
  • Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.2.11
  • Mockups for JIRA: version 2.2.12
  • Mockups for XWiki: version 2.2.11
  • Web Demo: version 2.2.13 launch it

What else is going on?

Let's see...we're busy as usual.

Onward!

*UPDATE: We did a quick update to Mockups for Desktop to fix this bug. Thanks so much baak, Milos Krocian, Jim Jarret and Thorben Egberts for the super-speedy report!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Leave a Comment

Comments (5)

  1. Hi, Justin. You can’t make changes to the color picker, but you can always use your own hex values.

  2. Can you tweak the colours in the Color Picker? Would be nice to change some hues in the CFG file.

  3. What are the changes for release 2.2.17?

    Peter Reid
    • Hi Peter, sorry for not posting about them. We just fixed 4 little bugs in Mockups for Desktop. We are preparing a bigger release that will have all the details.

      Peldi Guilizzoni
  4. Great improvements and fixes 🙂 Keep it up guys! Love your app.