Balsamiq

myBalsamiq Updated

Hello friends!

We just updated myBalsamiq. The process was still rougher than what we'd like, but it definitely went much better than last time. Doing the update on a Saturday lowered the stress level considerably. We'll continue working on our processes to make it super-smooth in the future.

What's new in this myBalsamiq release?

• GIANT refactoring work in order to generate mockup images in the background. This results in dramatically faster saving times from the editor, and most importantly, brings full support of Symbols to myBalsamiq. Now when you update a Symbol, all the images of the mockups that use it get regenerated for you. You'll just see a spinner for a few seconds. Same for images, both site and project. This was a huge effort, and it smoothens what was certainly the roughest edge in myBalsamiq. Thanks to all who reported it here.
• Finally, we have proper timezones! Thanks Sagar A. and Steve C. for reporting it.
  
• We now inject some real-time events in the editor, instead of polling. In English, this means that your editor will work faster and use the Internet a lot less. For us, it should result in hundreds of dollars in hosting savings each month.
• Fixed an intermittent issue with mockup reordering.
• Now we really allow projects uploads up to 100MB.
• We now properly show Renew and Upgrade buttons when a site is in the grace period.
• Clicking "edit this mockup" in presentation mode works now. Thanks Melvin Ram for reporting it!
• Now the editor skin file is versioned as well, so you won't have to clear your cache after our updates.
• We no longer send you an email confirmation request if you're creating a new myB site with an old email - you've already confirmed your email address the first time!
• Fixed a formatting issue on the "What site do you want to work on?" selection page.
• Mockup thumbnails are now in jpg format (smaller, faster to load)
• Made a lot of little performance improvements here and there. The app should feel snappier, let us know if you notice it as well!
• In free for classroom use sites, we now allow students who are project members (but not staff members) to buy Mockups for Desktop at the discounted price.
• We no longer refresh the whole assets dialog when one is deleted. Faster!
• Added an "hideBar=true" URL option to the prototype view, which is handy if you're doing running usability tests on your myBalsamiq prototypes
• We now remember if you selected "show linking hints" across single mockup pages, as well as in prototype view.
• In prototype view, we also remember if you had the bottom bar showing or hidden across different pages.
• We now fail more gracefully if you point your browser to a non-existing project.
• Fixed an error in the editor when switching between mockups that contained Symbols.
• In order to work towards a more RESTful API, we now reserved some mockup names. If you get some weird XML instead of your mockup, just go to the project home page and rename it from there (we could have renamed the few offending mockups automatically, but it felt too aggressive on our part). Sorry for the hassle, we hope it won't happen again.
• We now ignore mockups whose names start with a dot (.) in project uploads
• We no longer refresh the whole project grid when deleting a project. Faster!
• The editor now shows nicer, smoother thumbnails in the project browser.
• We moved our database to a reserved RDS instance to save some money.

We are very happy with this release, can't wait to see how it performs as traffic increases during the week! 🙂

Onward!

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