Balsamiq

A Nearly Invisible myBalsamiq Release

December 21, 2011 · Posted by Peldi in Products · 1 Comment

Hello friends. Today's release is full of improvements, but most of them are behind the scenes.

We are still focussed on bug fixing and providing better stability for the web app. Just like with any newborn, the first few weeks are the toughest. It definitely feels like the worse is over though...thanks for your patience everyone! 🙂

Here's what we did since our last update:

myBalsamiq: When converting a group to a Symbol, you no longer see the confusing and misleading "Symbol not found" message while the symbol is getting saved, but instead a much nicer "Loading Symbol..." message.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug with not Symbol edits "not sticking" due to improper caching.
myBalsamiq: removed the double progress bar on Assets upload.
myBalsamiq: improved how the footer resizes at small browser window sizes.
myBalsamiq: moved from a single Elasticache node to an Elasticache cluster.
myBalsamiq: fixed reconnection code to Elasticache so that we recover properly, should it go down again.
myBalsamiq: moved session sharing from apache tribe to memcache (Elasticache). This is why you got logged out today unless you had the "remember me" checkbox selected when you last logged in. Our apologies, it shouldn't happen again.
myBalsamiq: improved the performance of some common queries.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug that resulted in some mockups not being accessible due to floating point numbers in link highlight coordinates.
myBalsamiq: tweaked our database connection pool configuration and memcache levels based on recent usage stats.
myBalsamiq: fixed mockup image zooming toggle, it now correctly toggles between "fit to screen" and "1:1" again.
myBalsamiq: improved our zero-downtime-update scripts.
myBalsamiq: fixed a typo in the image upload dialog in the editor.
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with not being able to see images in prototype mode in private projects unless you were logged in.
myBalsamiq: we no longer show the "edit this mockup" button in prototype view to users who don't have access to the editor.
myBalsamiq: fixed a bug that prevented anonymous users from uploading mockups in wiki-access projects.
myBalsamiq: fixed access issues to the "propose alternate mockup" for blog and wiki projects.
myBalsamiq: fixed an issue with asset thumbnails not showing up in some cases.

How do I update?

This is a myBalsamiq-only release, so you're already updated. Just log back in and enjoy.

For posterity, today's release is build #3704.

What else is going on?

We are investing A LOT of time right now in our testing automation frameworks and automated test suites.

Now that we have more developers, more products, more code, and LOTS more customers, we need to get more rigorous about automated testing.

With our products being in pretty good shape, this felt like the right time for us pay off the technical debt we've accumulated over the years.

Here's a few demo videos I recorded in order to show the team what we're doing in this area, I'm posting them here to keep you in the loop.

First off, it's our "Bot", the Selenium-Webdriver-JUnit-powered functional testing robot for myBalsamiq:

The video above also quickly shows "MailCatcher", a mailinator-inspired little tool that Kyle has been working on as a way to learn groovy, grails and all the AWS goodness.

Next up, Luis shows off his load testing harness:

Today's last demo is our by new friend Florian (with some help from his 2-year-old daughter), who demos his automated testing suites for the Mockups editor, including a sweet Actionscript code-coverage tool I didn't even know existed! 🙂