Balsamiq

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, all at once.

There are a number of nice little changes today, so let's get to it!

What's in today's release?

• All versions: Added a "menu icon" toggle option to the Button and Pointy Button controls. I can't believe we haven't had this until now.
  
   
• All versions: improved the markup matching algorithms to be a little less aggressive. Now they only match when your markup characters are not next to a space. No more accidentally disabled text! Click on the images below for details.
  BEFORE:
  AFTER:
  
   
• All versions: Fixed URLs in help menu links.
   
• All web versions: the right click menu is back! Sorry this took a while to fix. We can all take a big sigh of relief now. Thanks to Scott for reporting it.
  
   
• Mockups for Desktop and myBalsamiq: we extended our auto-save feature to include files that have never been saved before. This is a nice important one. Hopefully you won't ever see this feature, but you'll love it when you do! 🙂
  
   
• myBalsamiq: Better keyboard shortcuts support! Copy, Paste, etc! Not all of them, but the most common should work. Your milage may vary depending on which browser you're using (i.e. stay away from Internet Explorer), but this is definitely an acceptable baseline, we can improve over time.
   
• myBalsamiq: Added an "you are now offline" dialog window in the editor, for those rare cases where either your connection goes down or myBalsamiq goes down briefly for updates.
  
   
• myBalsamiq: Added a Close button in the top-left corner, next to the Save button. Handy!
  
   
• myBalsamiq: greatly improved Symbols support! You can now create new symbol libraries and edit existing ones, convert groups to symbols, the goods!
  
   
• myBalsamiq: fixed an issue when uploading/importing mockups that use custom icons - it no longer explodes now. 🙂
   
• myBalsamiq: fixed a bug with the mockup notes being wrong when proposing alternate mockup.
   
• myBalsamiq: hovering over an avatar in the world map view now brings it to the front.
   
• myBalsamiq: a lot of little cosmetic fixes here and there. (including this one suggested by Heiko Haller
   
• myBalsamiq: A LOT of behind-the-scenes work to make the web app more reliable and our Zero-Downtime-Updates have as little impact as possible on users (still working on that).
   
• Mockups for Desktop: Open Recent works again! And for the first time ever, it works on Linux as well! Thanks to all who reported it: Coean Naninck, @minarad and Palmin.
   
• Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a bug that had to do with using accents in mockup names. It all works now.
   

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 #3688
• Mockups for Desktop: version 2.1.8
• Mockups for Confluence: version 2.1.7
• Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.1.7
• Mockups for JIRA: version 2.1.7
• Mockups for XWiki: version 2.1.7
• Web Demo: version 2.1.7 launch it

What else is going on?

Lots and lots of good stuff.

Here's some of the more technical projects we're working on:

• We are doing lots and lots of fancy ops work for myBalsamiq: we now have servers that auto-scale for converting your uploaded mockups: we create and kill new servers as needed, fancy stuff!
• We are building automated load tests for myBalsamiq.
• We are converting our Selenium HTML integration tests to JUnit, making them much more powerful.
• We are automating the testing of the flex Mockups editor.
• We are working on a mailinator-like service to help us with selenium testing (it's also a great training ground for Kyle).
• We have started development on a simple "keyboard shortcut helper" widget.
• We have started development on the image cropping feature.
• We have started working on improving the myBalsamiq prototype view.
• We have started development on Mockups for iPad!

Other than that, myBalsamiq is off to a great start, with over 1700 new trials created since we launched two weeks ago, and over 260 paying subscribers. We use it ourselves more and more (see some of the links above), and it's really a nice way to work. Not bad for a 1.0!

There's a lot more happening, but I'll save it for a Life @ Balsamiq blog post next week. Stay tuned!

Onward!

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