Balsamiq

I Cut Another Feature, Yay!

My new thing is cutting features. I love it, it gives me a great sense of accomplishment. The product becomes leaner and more clear, more focused and more usable each time. And I save on time, bugs, worry...it's great. Of course it's easy not that I haven't shipped yet...

Today it was the use of "lorem ipsum" in the text controls. It just doesn't matter, and I read this whole article on how lorem ipsum results in worse designs - I wouldn't want my software to help you build bad software, quite the opposite!

I also fixed some bugs (thanks Seth!) and made some other small improvements here and there.

I also moved the demo to its new, hopefully more permanent home (URL below). Don't pay too much attention to the site, I suspect it will change a lot.

Coming up on my TODO list, roughly in this order:

• improve the "blank slate" experience by addin a sample mock-up with instructions. This is actually a bit hard since it relies on the import/export feature, which I need to do anyways
• fix the drag-and-drop experience
• finish groups (man it's hard)
• add some more controls like tabs, menus, links, datagrid, and about 25 more I have on my list
• and of course see if I can cut any more features: right now the "search ui library" search-box is next on the chopping block. If you  have strong opinions on why I SHOULDN'T cut it, speak now. 🙂

One note: my wonderful wife Mariah has agreed to re-draw all of my UI controls. It will still be hand-drawn (it's a feature!), but it will look a little cleaner, with a little thinner lines, maybe a little more colorful and it will definitely have that woman's touch, which I think is awesome and very important for any piece of good software.

Ok back to the grindstone, stay tuned and keep that feedback coming

New URL: http://www.balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html

---