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Release: New Image Inspector, Huge Leap Forward in Mockups for Google Drive, and More!

Hello friends of Balsamiq! It's time for another release!

This one is an exciting one. Let's see what's new.

New Image Inspector Pulldown

The image inspector pulldown had been in need of some love for a long time. It only showed images used in the current mockup, it sometimes showed images twice, it didn't show where images came from...in short, it wasn't very useful.

imageinspector_old

That all changes today. The new pulldown is more organized, more visual, faster to use and, we think, much more useful.

Take a look:

imageinspector_passets

imageinspector_aassets

The Project Assets panel shows all images in your assets folder. If you have site/account assets, a tab will appear for them. If you use web images or images using relative paths that are not project assets, those will show in the Other tab. On the desktop, you'll also see a handy link to open the Account Assets folder.

This is a step towards making projects first-class citizens in our app, as it encourages people to use project assets more, following our best practice. We have many more steps planned, but as you know, we like to ship things one little free-standing piece at the time, so that we can get your feedback on it. 🙂

Let us know what you think!

Projects come to Mockups for Google Drive!

We are continuing the work to bring all of our product versions to feature parity with each other.

With today's release, Mockups for Google Drive moves a huge step forward in that direction. In fact, it even gets some features that other versions don't have yet!

Here's a list of today's biggest improvements:

  • The Project Browser: just like in myBalsamiq, you can now see all the mockups in your Google Drive folder, and quickly jump from one to the other to edit them. There is a list view:
    pbrowser_list

    And a thumbnails view:
    pbrowser_thumbs

    You can also sort your mockup with drag and drop, as well as create new mockups, and clone, rename or delete existing ones, all from within the editor.

    pbrowser_menu

  • Project Assets Support: you can now see images saved in your assets/ folder directly in the UI Library, in the new Image Property Inspector panel, and in the Image Import dialog.

    gd_passets

    gd_imagedialog

  • Links Support: yes! You can now finally specify links between mockups, just like in our other versions.

    gd_links

    To navigate between mockups, just go full screen and click around!

  • Real Time Collaboration: this is huge, and a long time coming. You can now collaborate on each mockup in real time with others. Just share your folder full of BMMLs and assets, then when you both open the Mockups for Google Drive editor at the same time you will see the other person's edits happen in real time. Try it out, it's awesome.

    gd_rtc

    notif_deleted notif_moved notiv_added

As usual, everything is auto-saved, all the time.

As an added bonus, if you use the Google Drive Desktop Sync client, you can collaborate between someone using Mockups for Desktop and Mockups for Google Drive pretty seamlessly! Whoa, right? 🙂

We think you'll love the new changes, let us know if you run into any issues and we'll fix them right up!

The last two big features missing, which are coming very soon, are automatic fixing of links on file rename (we call it 'the relinker'), and Symbol support!

Only $5 per month for all this goodness is starting to feel pretty darn cheap ...you'd better act now before we raise our prices... 😉

Designate a Secondary Billing Administrator in myBalsamiq

Up until today, the site owner was the only person who could make billing changes to a myBalsamiq site. This is often not ideal, as the person with purchasing power might not be the same person that needs to manage (or even use) myBalsamiq.

Starting today the site owner can designate a staff member as the secondary billing contact. This allows them to see the payments page, renew, upgrade, downgrade and download past myBalsamiq receipts. Try it out!

myb_secondary_billing

Other fixes and improvements

  • Mockups for Desktop: double clicking on a file to open the app did not open the new file in OS X Maverick (fixed in 2.2.17).
  • Mockups for Desktop: the application would grow in size on Windows if you opened it by clicking on bmml files on disk (fixed in 2.2.17).
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed a memory leak on Windows 8 when the app was not in focus (fixed in 2.2.17). Thanks Julianna Cs. for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed the way we encoded Symbol paths in the BMML in 2.2.16 (fixed in 2.2.17).
  • Mockups for Desktop: Added a "Rename Mockup" menu item to the File menu, to expose this awesome little feature a bit more. Thanks Jacqueline S. for requesting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed an issue with command line export hanging sometimes. Thank you Dave B. for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed an issue with the app window growing by 20 pixels on Windows when opening a bmml file by double-clicking on it. Thanks Andreas F. and B for reporting it!
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed an issue with the positioning of the tab for newly cloned mockups (now they stay next to the original mockup, they don't jump to the end). Thanks Dave Perkins for bringing this up! This also fixes Milos Krocian's bug report.
  • myBalsamiq: big performance improvements on editor startup time.
  • myBalsamiq: added an automatic retry mechanism on image uploads (should cut down on the Error #2038 messages).
  • Mockups for Confluence: made it compatible with Confluence 5.4.

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 #4074
  • Mockups for Desktop: version 2.2.18 2.2.19
  • Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.2.32
  • Mockups for Confluence: version 2.2.18
  • Mockups for JIRA: version 2.2.18
  • Web Demo: version 2.2.19 launch it

What else is going on?

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Leave a Comment

Comments (8)

  1. The rename funcion is not working properly…
    In the previous versions it worked just fine! Please fix this bug soon…

    Ewerton
  2. Hi Henk, only those who want to edit and save mockups have to pay. Everyone else can just install the trial and continue to use it for free to view mockups even after the trial period expires. They just won’t be able to save their changes.

    Peldi Guilizzoni
  3. Hey Peldi,

    This is looking great and I’m keen to try it out (after a few years of the Desktop client).

    I’m not clear on how the pricing works… Does every person I collaborate with need to pay $5 per month? (It could get very costly very quickly… most of my collaboration is really just to get feedback from Stakeholders, not collaboration from other UX designers)

    Or is it only the “owner” of the project who pays the $5 per month? (i.e. others can view and edit the mockups, but can’t create new mockups themselves).

    I look forward to your response.
    Henk (@geekrebel)

  4. Hi Peldi, thanks for the response (it’s Peter by the way, not Paul). Making the font smaller only helps a little, many of my images have filenames that will still be too long to distinguish one from another. I still think that a 1-dimensional alphabetical list is quicker to search than a 2-dimensional grid. With my projects I find that the small thumbnails in the grid are either too crude or too small to be of much benefit. Can we have a menu option (like the Skin options), or preference or config file setting that switches between list and grid for this, then users can choose whatever suits their projects or personal preferences? By the way, the icon for the Default Placeholder (in the top left corner of the new grid) looks too much like the X for closing a window and its location is just where the X is for Mac windows. I’ve found myself clicking this to close the grid only to find I’ve changed an image in my mockup by mistake!

    Peter Reid
  5. Hi Paul, thanks for the feedback. We’ll make the font smaller so that it fits more characters, and we’ll definitely work on selecting the current image automatically. We should also make the combo-box editable so that as you start typing, it filters the contents of the pop-up. In the meantime, I suggest you use Quick Add instead, you can type the file name and it will show a filtered list.

    Peldi Guilizzoni
  6. A significant disadvantage of the new image inspector pull-down is the truncation of image file names. I have large collections of images with filenames longer than the 12 characters you’ve allowed for. With the new pull-down I can no longer see the full names. Also, the old style pull-down highlighted the currently selected image, the new one doesn’t, making it harder to confirm the current selection. A general point is that users can search 1-D lists in alphabetic order much quicker than 2-D lists. The visual grid style works great for small collections but is much slower for the user with large collections than the previous 1-D list. PLEASE can we have the option to have the old-style pull-down, ideally on a per object basis. I can see me using the new style for some images and the old style for others.

    Peter Reid
  7. Does the real time collaboration work if the bmml mockups are in Google Drive and 2 team members uses the Google Drive Desktop Sync client and Mockups for Desktop? (No Mockups for Google Drive)

    Mathieu