Weekly Release: Bug Squashing Time

February 8, 2009 · Posted by Peldi in Products · Add a comment

I have added a lot of new code in the last few weeks, so it makes sense to focus on quality for a little while.

Here's the full list of fixes in this week's free upgrade:

First up, the "misteriously reappearing UI library bug", (a.k.a. the bane of my existence). Although this is turning out to be an incredibly hard to eradicate bug, I am publishing my changes today because they appear to improve things and have the pleasant side-effect of making the application snappier overall. Warning: you might have to re-set the application's size, position and list of open mockup files on first launch, as well as the visibility of the UI library and the notebook. You'll have to do this just once, these values will get remembered across sessions thereafter. If they don't, my apologies, but there's a workaround: please close the app, delete the #SharedObjects folder which you can find here:
- On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#\Local Store\#SharedObjects
- On Mac OS X: <your user home>/Library/Preferences/BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#/Local Store/#SharedObjects
- On Windows Vista: C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#\Local Store\#SharedObjects
- On Linux: ~/.appdata/BalsamiqMockupsForDesktop.#numbers#/Local Store/#SharedObjects
then relaunch the app, fix it one more time and you should be good to go. In case you're wondering, there seems to be something fishy with Adobe AIR not being able to write to local sharedobjects in some cases, and just failing silently. Grrr.
all dialogs have a focused button when they open again. This means that in most cases you'll be able to just hit the ENTER key to accept the default action and close the dialog box. This used to work but got broken in the first 1.5 release when I added the invisible-but-important feature of displaying the OK and Cancel buttons in a different order depending on what operating system you're running.
Going from QuickAdd to editing position and size directly and hitting the delete key no longer deletes the selected control. Thanks SO MUCH arv43 for his awesome bug report (with a screencast even!)
Importing mockup data containing images now properly updates the image inspector pulldown showing the images in the mockup.
Importing mockup data containing web or Flickr images from the Desktop to the Confluence, JIRA or XWiki version (and vice-versa), no longer breaks the whole app. This was a tricky one, thanks David B. for reporting this!
added some new control names for better Quick Add goodness (many thanks to Ari F. for the suggestions):
- "Button Bar" --> "Button Bar / Tab Bar"
- "ComboBox / PullDown Menu" --> "ComboBox / PullDown Menu / DropDown List"
- "Date Chooser" --> "Date Chooser / Date Picker"
- "Title" --> "Title / Headline"
- "Text Input" --> "Text Input / Text Field"
fixed a bug with Text Styles Inspector not displaying the right font size
fixed a rare but dramatic bug with pull-downs which would put the whole app in a strange state
fixed a bug with the List Inspector not showing the right selected row in some cases
when using / or + to send focus to Quick Add, you will no longer have to manually delete the / or + characters from the Quick Add Input box before using it. Thanks again to David B. for raising the issue!

Next week's release will be similar to this one, but perhaps with a couple of small feature improvements as well.

If there's a bug that annoys you, please let me know! I'll bump up its priority and try to fix it right away. For instance, I'm going to takle this one next since Michael's asked so nicely. 😉