👋🏽 We wrote a book! Order Wireframing for Everyone today →

Balsamiq

Toggle navigation

Improving People Management in myBalsamiq, Image Support in Mockups for Google Drive, Link Support in Mockups for JIRA, and More!

Hello friends of Balsamiq!

We just updated myBalsamiq with a new release, focussed on smoothing over one of the roughest edges of the application, the managing of staff and project members.

We also fixed some bugs and made some improvements in Mockups itself.

An easier way to manage staff members in myBalsamiq

We made it a lot easier to manage your staff members. Look at the new menu for a staffer:

As a site owner, clicking on "Edit User Info" now shows a pop-up which lets you complete or edit your staffer's info:

You'll get similar pop-ups if you click on "Change Password" or "Change Photo".

If instead you click on "Manage Project Membership", you'll get a pop-up like this one:

Just select the projects a certain staffer should belong to, "Save Changes" and voila'! This should save you a bunch of time.

But we didn't stop there! We expanded the "Create new Project" dialog to allow you to specify who should be in that project, right then and there.

Also notice the "Automatically add new staff members to this project" checkbox. Super-handy! You can set it a project creation time, but you can also change it later.

An easier way to manage project members in myBalsamiq

In the settings, we added a "Non-Staff" tab which shows all the different project members invited to your site, regardless of which project they're on. This overview was sorely missing for site owners.

We also made it easier to spot staffers and non-staffers inside a project, by adding a little "staff" label to the appropriate avatars in the project members pop-up menu:

Note how we removed the "quick invite" text input from that pop-up menu. It's now inside the "Add and Manage Members" dialog:

This is a one-stop shop to add or remove staffers and non-staffers to your project, as well as inviting others.

Note that for staff members, we only ever show non-staffers that belong to other projects the staffer is already a member of. In other words, if you want to keep a project and its external members secret, it will work: only the staffers on that project will be able to see the non-staffers from that project. It's complicated, but it works, trust us. 🙂

Other changes to myBalsamiq

  • Greatly optimized the display of the home page and of the project grid page.
  • We now disable the Project Assets UI Library tab in the editor when editing a site symbol library.
  • Alternate mockups in comments now properly show up in the history.
  • We fixed an issue with people logging out when logged in from www.mybalsamiq.com.
  • We fixed some concurrency issues when creating several projects at the same time.
  • We fixed the overly aggressive caching on mockup image permalinks.
  • Improved error messages in editor when there are save / load issues.
  • Improved user photo dialog.

Support for images in Mockups for Google Drive!

You can now use your drive images or upload new images from within the Mockups editor in Mockups for Google Drive.

Support for linking between mockups in Mockups for JIRA!

That's right, you can now link your mockups together in Mockups for JIRA. The feature works just like on the desktop: you select other mockups from the same JIRA issue, then go full screen to navigate between your linked mockups.

Changes to Mockups

  • All versions: fixed the "label control text editor deletes text if you have text selected and press Enter to confirm the text" bug.
  • All versions: fixed some issues with Undo/Redo while editing text.
  • All versions: fixed the occasional "character gets repeated out of control when editing" bug.
  • All versions: roughened up some of the shapes of the Sketch skin, since the 2.2 clean-up had been a little too aggressive.
  • All versions: the Tabs Bar control is now also called Ribbon.
  • All versions: the Text Area control is now also called Memo Field.
  • All versions: the Horizontal Lines icon is now also called Reordering Control and Drag and Drop.
  • All web-based versions: we now hide the inspector while you pan the canvas with SPACE+Drag.
  • All versions: in the Icon and Label control, the text is now properly aligned vertically even when using System Fonts.
  • All versions: dragging the property inspector stops the editing of the position and size text inputs.
  • All versions: we no longer hide the Quick Add behind a + button. This was a change we introduced in 2.2 which didn't work out, so we're rolling back to the 2.1 look and feel (Quick Add is just on the right instead of on the left now).
  • All versions: we now hide the property inspector while you're dragging a new control from the UI library.
  • All versions: If you add a new control via drag and drop while not at 1:1 zoom, you no longer get decimal numbers for the x and y coordinates.
  • Mockups for Desktop: Save as did not give a warning if you didn't add the suffix .bmml in the native Save As dialog.
  • Mockups for Desktop: At startup time, unnamed mockups recovered from a previous autosave are now promptly put back into the autosave database.
  • Mockups for Desktop: when adding a custom icon, the source file name was not properly decoded, thus resulting in wrong filename being used for the new asset file.
  • Mockups for Desktop: custom icons now work properly on newly cloned mockups.
  • Mockups for Desktop: we now properly show assets that contain slashes in their names.
  • Mockups for Desktop: fixed a "hanging on startup sometimes" bug (fixed in 2.2.2 on Sep. 13th).
  • All plugin versions: we now notify you with an error whenever there's a problem uploading an image, we no longer fail silently.
  • Mockups for Confluence: fixed a bug with PNGs not showing up in IE8/IE9 (we had the wrong mime type).
  • Mockups for XWiki: as a side-effect of a big refactoring effort, it now uses the same "Save" and "Close" buttons UI as the other plugins.

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 #3877
  • Mockups for Desktop: version 2.2.3
  • Mockups for Google Drive: version 2.2.2
  • Mockups for Confluence: version 2.2,2
  • Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.2.2
  • Mockups for JIRA: version 2.2.2
  • Mockups for XWiki: version 2.2.2
  • Web Demo: version 2.2.2 launch it

What else is going on?

We have started working on the following issues:

  1. Finally fixing the "links break when I insert or remove a line of text" bug. You can try it now on the pre-release version already.
  2. Improving mouse performance.
  3. Making it so that Mockups for Desktop remembers the order of your mockups for each folder. This should alleviate the pain of working on multiple projects at once. See this GetSatisfaction thread for more info.
  4. Adding support for linking to Web Addresses (URLs).

On other news, we are hiring!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Leave a Comment