DigMyData: Aha!-nalytics
I've never been a metrics lover. Stories like Google A/B testing 41 shades of blue make me cringe. I explain our industry's recent infatuation with analytics-driven-development in part as a reflection of our nerdy shy personalities: it's a way...
New Release: Font Adjustments and More
Hello Balsamiq friends near and far! 🙂 We're back from summer vacation and eager to get back to work. We hope you all were able to take some time off, relax and recharge. Today's release is fairly small and...
Do Worry, Be Happy! Keeping Sane as a Software CEO
My talk at Business of Software 2010.
Avoiding the Circumlocution Office
A few weeks ago, I finally received my "permesso di soggiorno," my permission to stay in Italy. As an American citizen I knew the process for getting my paperwork to work in the Bologna office would be slow, but...
“I Love to Do Business with Other Businesses My Size”
I've tweeted about this video a few times in the past. I'm posting it here as well so that I can find it easily every time I'm compelled to watch it again, which is at least once a month....
Mockups Font Takes it First Steps
The first version of the Mockups font is now out in 2.1, and I think we have a good start at eliminating the clipping issues we had using Comic Sans on Windows and Chalkboard on the Mac. In case...
Mockups 2.1!
Hello friends, we hope you're having a great summer! Today's release marks the end of an era for us, as we introduce our very own font. It's a big enough change that we feel it warrants a new minor...
Mockups 2.1 Is Coming Soon: A New Font, a new Era!
Hi all! Just a quick post to pre-announce that Mockups 2.1 is coming out in a week or two. The main change of 2.1 is that we're changing the font used by Mockups, from Comic Sans (on Win/Linux) and...
Interview with Peldi from Balsamiq
My interview with John Clark of SoftwarePrototyping.net.
Company Retreat Powers Balsamiq Quality Boost
Would you trust your software to these people? You bet What is it like when a small, dynamic, distributed software company gets together for a week-long sleepover at the CEO's villa in Italy? How can such a retreat boost...
From Our RetrEAT: A Team That Cooks Together Stays Together
One of the hardest things about working with my beloved distributed team (aka balsamici*) is our not being able to see each other in person more often. Just once a year are we together in the same time zone,...
Release: HUGE Loading Time Improvement!
Hi again friends! Today's release main feature is a major optimization to our skin assets and icons, which results in dramatic improvement in loading times for the web and plugin versions of Balsamiq Mockups. See for yourself in this...
Why We Aren't Doing Deep Interaction in Mockups
Opinions matter Every so often we'll get a request to add features that would change Mockups from a sketchy wireframing tool to a prototyping tool. When these requests bubble up, I take the time to explain to people what...
New Release: Partial PNG Export and More!
Hello friends! We're back from our retreat and excited to be back at work. Today's release is a fairly small one, but it introduces a little feature that has been on our list for a long time. So without...
Our Response Might Be Delayed... We're on Retreat!
Hello friends! I am super-excited as I type this. I am alone in the office today because it's an Italian holiday, a French holiday, and OUR WHOLE US TEAM IS ON ITS WAY TO ITALY! 🙂 You see, tomorrow...
Speed Wireframing a Click-Through Prototype Using Symbols
There's so many ways to use Mockups. I rarely do click-through prototypes, but if I have to, then I count on Symbols and links to make it painless. This speed-wireframing video shows you how to: set up a...
New Tutorial on Specifying Interaction with Mockups
We've aded a new tutorial in the support section to suggest some best practices for specifying interaction using Mockups. Software designers and developers designing for the screen have an arsenal of well-known practices for communicating interaction in static documents....
Tip: Adding Color to Components with No Text Color Property
Mockups can seem like an iceberg. There's so much beneath the surface in terms of advanced features. The features that seem to be hidden are learnable, but we don't surface them until you are ready to use them. The...
New Release: Rename, Icons on the Right, Break Apart...
Hello old friends. If you've been wondering what we've been up to, I won't blame you. We say we release almost weekly and then if you look at this blog, it looks like we do nothing for a month....
Joy McCrea Joins Balsamiq
Hello everyone! I know it's been a while since our last blog post, my apologies. We've been crazy busy with lots and lots of new customers and working on our web app. It's all fun, but the blogs have...
Tip: Using Dingbats in Text Components
Text components are interesting in Mockups. We have a lot of wiki-style syntax for formatting, and a lot of people have been asking to extend this to do things like insert icons into them. It's tricky because while a...
Tip: Creating Linkable Whole Symbols Using Nested Groups
This is a tip for Mockups for heavy users of symbols, that shows you how to make an entire set of objects in a symbol linkable. While doing support this week, someone pointed out that it's not easy to...
Sketching in Mockups
Interface sketching is a path focussed on generating ideas and finding solutions. I feel good when I have a drawing pen or pencil in my hand. Doodling, sketching, and drawing has always made me happy, whether it's trying to...
Top-down Symbol Library Creation in a Nutshell
I've been creating and converting a lot of symbols libraries of the top-down variety, where you create a symbol library and save to assets, rather than using the inline/bottom-up approach of just converting groups to symbols as you go....
Get Support Via Screencast
We're trying something new with support. We want to make it easier for you to show us any problems you're experiencing via Screencast, because sometimes it's better to show what's going on than to put your question into words....
Want to Help Test the New Mockups To Go?
Our latest release of myBalsamiq allows anonymous uploading and mockup creation on Wiki projects, so we're opening up the submissions queue on the new Mockups To Go that we've created at https://mockupstogo.mybalsamiq.com So if you want to help us...
Show #103: Peldi Guilizzoni, founder and CEO Balsamiq Mockups
My interview on the Startup Success podcast.
Video of My Business of Software 2010 Talk
Hi friends, sorry for not blogging more, I'm having way too much fun working on Mockups, myBalsamiq and running our little company right now. Today I want to share the video recording of my Business of Software talk from...
A Quick Release, and a New Yummy Project!
Hi friends, we're doing a quick release of Mockups today to fix a few bugs you've reported and to introduce a new fun and yummy project we're starting up. First, the bug fixes and improvements: All versions: added support...
Using Excel Data to Create a Pivot Table
Occasionally I write a support response in our Get Satisfaction forum that seems like it could serve as a mini-tutorial, so I thought it might be helpful to surface those on our blog. I find that the best tips...
Mockups To Go Levels Up
Mockups users know that Mockups to Go (MTG) has been our go-to resource for showing off what you can make with Mockups. Because it's user-contributed, it lets the entire Mockups user community show off what kind of magic they...
Release: Shift+Drag Selection, and a Lot More!
Hi friends. I know, it's been almost a month since our last release, but I think you'll agree this one was worth the wait. Take a look! Shift+Drag to toggle selection! This subtle-but-awesome change is too hard to describe...
A New Mockups Extension: SoftwareServant
The following is a guest post by Rob Crewdson of Software Servant, introducing this Mockups for Desktop extension. Hi everyone, my name is Rob Crewdson. Peldi has given me the opportunity to write about turning your Mockups into a...
Workiamo: Heads Down in UX at Balsamiq
It's been a little quiet on this blog. I'm sorry about that. The time between my last post about balsamiq.com getting relaunched and now has been rather busy. Mostly, we've been heads down making progress all over the place....
Release: Select on Layers, Linux 32bit Installer and Bug Fixes
Hello friends! Another week, another sweet little release! 🙂 Here's what's new today: A way to select elements hidden behind other controls As we say on our manifesto, if we say we're going to do something, we eventually make...
What a Release! Autosave, Toggle Markup, PDF Export Options, New Icons, Native Installers, and More!
Hello friends! We have so much cool stuff for you today, it's hard to believe it's only been two weeks since our last release. Let's get right to it. Auto-Save! I don't need to tell you how horrible it...
First Release of 2011 - Starting the Year with a Bang!
Hello friends and a belated happy new year to all of you! We hope your 2011 will be filled with health, joy and lots and lots of focused, uninterrupted creative work! May the flow be with you. 😉 Before...
The Last Mockups Release of 2010
Hello friends! Here's a tiny little release before we break for the holidays. What's new: All versions: fixed a bad bug when using Checkbox Group and Radio Button Group controls without specifying any text next to each checkbox. Thanks...
Weekly Release: Bug Fixes and Skinnier Arrows
Hello again friends! First of all, you should know that we've just announced our latest addition to our staff: an awesome software tester / tech support guru named Louanne! Head over to our Life @ Balsamiq blog for the...
Louanne Poisson Joins Balsamiq
It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Louanne Poisson, who joined Balsamiq as Regina della Qualita', which is italian for Queen of Quality. She is based in Boston, MA. The tweet-size announcement: Louanne will be doing QA,...
Weekly Release: It's the Little Things
Hello friends. We're back to our weekly release schedule, and it feels great. Here's what's new in this week's release: Text alignment in numeric stepper moved to the right. Thanks Jenni for bringing this up. Added "Closed" and "Closed...