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Weekly Release: 30-Day Trial for JIRA and More

· Posted by Peldi in Products · 3 Comments

Hello all. We've been very busy in the last couple of weeks, releasing our first public beta of Mockups for FogBugz and opening up the hosted app's private beta to a few selected "friends and family" members (more on both soon).

Even with all that, we were able to make some improvements here and there which we hope you'll like.

New Mockups for JIRA trial policy

The biggest change is the way the Mockups for JIRA trial period works. We received a wonderful email from a perspective customer saying that the big ugly watermark on the generated mockups prevented his company from properly testing the plugin, which really opened my eyes about it. Thanks so much Michi Y., you rock!

I had resorted to the watermark option out of lazyness, it was just so much quicker to code at the time. Once again, the lazy approach proved itself to require more total time than the "do it once and do it right" approach I usually go for. So this week I completely rewrote the license manager for Mockups for JIRA. It now gives you a fully-functional 30-day trial, just like Mockups for Confluence and Mockups for XWiki (and soon Mockups for FogBugz). Ugly watermarks are a thing of the past.

On a personal note, this new license manager is the first one I wrote using the agile "Test Driven Development" methodology, and I have to say, I'm a total convert! 🙂 I finally "get it". I have seen the light, how could I have not been doing this until now? I'm so embarrassed. 😉 I want to publicly thank my friend Stefano Masini (@stefanomasini) for showing me the way to enlightenment, as he has done so many times before.

Other Changes

Here's what else is new this week:

  • all versions: if you save a mockup or switch to another mockup while editing text, the text you typed is saved for you. No more lost text! Thanks so much to Travis Jensen, Kevin Stevens and Theresa Neal for reporting it!
  • all versions: double-clicking on an Icon control opens the Icon Library. For "Icon and Label" controls, you need to CTRL+double-click, as a simple double-click is used for editing text. Don't worry about memorizing this, the tooltip will tell you. 🙂 Thanks so much Michael Bourque and sergeySafonov for asking for this handy little feature!
  • desktop version: a file opened via double-clicking or by dragging now gets properly selected. Thanks Rolf for reporting this!
  • desktop version: fixed a big bad bug on "Save All" on quit. It only happened if you have multiple new files opened and dirty, then go to quit, select to save all and quit. The bug was that only the first of the new files was saved. It's a rare workflow but it results in data loss (which is horrible), so make sure you update this time! Thanks so much Damon Van V. for reporting this and once again, so sorry I lost some of your work.
  • all versions: lots of other little "polish" things here and there, like for instance in the Icon Library the selected icon stays selected if you change the icon size. Or the new little squares in the corner of the Property Inspector which hopefully scream "I'm draggable!":
    dragme

How do I update?

Other News

There's lots going on. In fact, a little too much for my taste. We like to only bite off what we can chew, but the (sudden to us) FogBugz 7.0 release stuffed a bunch more stuff in our mouths unexpectedly. Sorry for the imagery, but it's a pretty accurate depiction of how I feel right now. 😉 Don't worry we'll pull through, give us a couple of weeks.

The big news of the week - which will certainly help - is that Valerie switched from being a half-time to a full-time employee, and she promised to get over her shyness and introduce herself on this blog soon. 😉

I also met with lawyers a few times to talk about protecting the Balsamiq brand and different contracts that I need them to write. Lots going on there, exciting stuff (if a bit dry).

We have lots more news coming up in the near future, so stay tuned!

Onward, this is so much fun!

Peldi

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (3)

  1. My department at Intuit and I really enjoy using the product. Anxious to try the prototyping capability. Its a good tool goes hand in hand with Dan Roam’s book on the Back of the Napkin.

  2. Hey Peldi!
    Thanks for mentioning me on your blog. I’m glad I could do something useful for you, even if it’s hard to really believe I could “enlight” anything on your road. That seems already pretty bright to me! 😉
    Keep up the good work man!
    Cheers
    Stefano

  3. I’m so exited with the online version that I can’t wait. I really think in this “Cloud Computing” era that will be a huge step forward for Balsamiq.

    Maybe I’am too fast, but I’d love to see features like “sharing” mockups with people, make them public or private, having a group of teammates collaborating on the same mockups, allow other people comment about your mockups, and stuff like that. That will be awesome and you definitively will increase the number of people using your tool.

    So keep us posted about Balsamiq Mockups. I’ll be the first reading the upcoming news.

    Thanks for your hard work,

    Santiago L. Valdarrama
    Owner and Funder, Laura Software
    http://www.laurasoftware.com
    Twitter: @svpino