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 in text so I made a little video about it.
Big thanks go out to GooeyGrl, Julian Whitacker and Jenni Merrifield for schooling us on the right conventions to use, to Greig Varga for a related request and to David Hirschfeld for helping us debug this awesome little feature.
What else is new
- All versions: Added support for two-finger horizontal scrolling on Mac trackpads! That's right. Works both in the UI Library (when placed on top) and in the canvas. Try it out! Whoo-hoo! Thanks to jacksonfox, Paul Help Guy, Ian, Victoria Wagman, the_undefined, besi and the countless others who have complained about this issue.
- All versions: Improved the property inspector positioning algorithm one more time. It now only "moves out of the way" if your selection would be completely obscured by the inspector, not if it just touches it. Try it, we think you'll like it. It stays put a lot more.
- All versions: we now sort the locked items in the right-click menu by z-Order, which is more intuitive (just like we do for the "select behind" feature).
- All versions: fixed a bug in link positions in export to PDF when markup was hidden. Thanks again to David Hirschfeld for reporting this (via email).
- All versions: label color of callout controls now automatically switches to white when necessary (like for Buttons, Text Areas and other controls).
- All versions: fixed a few little bugs with label and icon color not changing to white properly when the background was dark and exporting. Thanks to Kenny Saunders for this bug report and to Will for this one.
- Mockups for Desktop: Copy icon and menu item are now properly enabled when overriding a symbol's properties.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with "Create new file" in the Export All to PNG feature. Thank you Pascal-Luis Perez for reporting this bug.
- Mockups for Desktop: now remembers the correct windows size and position if you open the application by double-clicking on a .bmml file as well.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with AutoSave showing up too aggressively (after a Save All / Close All). This is another David Hirschfeld email report.
- Mockups for Desktop: fixed a bug with image names in UI Library when using non-latin characters.
- Mockups for Desktop: a lot of you reported closing files by accident, so now we only show the (x) close icon in the selected file. Thanks Roman for bringing this up.
- Mockups for Desktop: you can now save an empty file before doing anything else to it.
- Mockups for Desktop and myBalsamiq: we now show pretty names for Symbols instances in the Unlock and Select right-click menus. Thanks Brett Porter and Ben Norris for the good idea.
- Mockups for Desktop and myBalsamiq: Symbols which use images from Account Assets now can load them when displayed in the UI Library.
- Mockups for Desktop and myBalsamiq: When copying inside a symbol and pasting outside of it, the overridden properties are now maintained properly. Thank you Andreas Weder and Eduardo Vila for reporting this bug.
- Mockups for Confluence: you can now add a mockup to the home page of your Confluence installation.
- Mockups for Confluence: mockups with spaces in their names work again. Thanks Marcin for reporting it.
- Mockups for JIRA: you can now add mockups via the operations shortcuts screen in JIRA 4.2.2. Thanks Ryan Rich for reporting it!
- Mockups for FogBugz: fixed an issue with other mockups not showing up when you go edit a wireframe attached to a wiki page.
- Mockups for FogBugz: fixed an issue with loading images used in a mockup. Thanks Ted Anderson for reporting the bug.
I have to say, Mockups is becoming a nice little piece of software if I may say so myself... 😉
It's getting there...thanks in LARGE part to all of you and your bug reports and feature requests, so THANK YOU and keep them coming! 🙂
Four new extensions, and more coming!
We love to see more and more people building tools that integrate and extend Mockups in various ways. Since our last release, four more have popped up:
- m|oppr is a new mobile application development platform that helps you built rapidly iOS , Android and Windows Mobile 7 solutions, including the back-end data services. A couple of weeks ago m|oppr announced the release of an integration between Balsamiq and their platform. This is very exciting because people can now directly go from concepts to deployment in a very short time. Their integration supports the major controls from labels, text inputs, buttons to tables and even graphs. The integration takes a balsamiq file and generates an m|dsl file which can then be edited and used to generate the native code for each target platform. You can generate an m|dsl file on line.
- Also on the mobile front, RealityMechanic announced a private beta of Mockups2Android, which turns your BMMLs into Android applications.
- Rob Crewdson from SoftwareServant wrote a guest blog post detailing his extension, check it out!
- Wirify Pro is a bookmarklet that lets you turn any web page into a BMML Mockup. Read their announcement about the integration here.
More exciting third-party Mockups extensions are coming, so stay tuned!
How do I update?
Easy! Just 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:
- Mockups for Desktop: version 2.0.16.
- Mockups for Confluence: version 2.0.16
- Mockups for FogBugz: version 2.0.18
- Mockups for JIRA: version 2.0.17
- Mockups for XWiki: version 2.0.15
- Web Demo: version 2.0.14 launch it
One more thing: we now maintain a list of older builds for all of our products, in case you need one. Check it out: builds archive.
Onward!
P.S. By the way, I hope you're having as much fun using Mockups as we are making it. We're having so much fun it's almost embarrassing... shouldn't work be hard? Oh well, let's keep it going and see what happens. Have a wonderful day everyone!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
Comments (2)
Hi again,
You’re absolutely right, it works! Previously I could hit Shift first, and then click the component, but now I need to click the component first and then shift. But it works, thanks for the quick reply!! 🙂
// Martin
Hi!
First, let me say that I absolutely love Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a perfect tool to create great design sketches, and I use it almost every day!
However, I have a big problem with the latest change regarding Shift+Drag.
When I do designs, it’s often very important to ensure that my components are properly lined up horizontally or vertically. Previously I could shift-click a component and then move it along the horizontal or vertical line without worrying that the component would unintentionally move along the other axis. Many other design programs support this and it is a very important feature for me.
However, with the new functionality of Shift+drag I cannot do this any more. Is there another way of moving a component only along vert or horz?
Thanks.
// Martin
[Peldi: Hi Martin, I just tested it an shift+drag to keep horizontal or vertical axis still works. Just start dragging something and hit SHIFT…if it doesn’t work, can you please send us some steps to reproduce the issue? http://community.balsamiq.com or support@balsamiq.com]