Balsamiq

Weekly Release: Improved Presentation Mode

Hi everyone. Apologies for not doing a release last week, but we're really busy with lots of very exciting projects and we grew as a company! So in a way you could say that we "released" Valerie onto the world! 😉

This week's update brings one main new feature, an improvement to how "Full Screen Presentation" works:

When you start a Full Screen Presentation, either by clicking on the button or the menu or hitting CTRL+F, you'll now see the two little toggles above in the lower-right corner of your screen. They'll fade out in a few seconds, but you can always bring them back by mousing over the bottom-right corner of the screen.

The first toggle is for showing and hiding linking hints and the big pointers. You can now turn them off if you're using the presentation mode to test a new UI on some user and don't want to give them hints on where to click, or simply if you find the big pointer distracting.

The second toggle is for showing and hiding markup elements, such as sticky notes, arrows and callouts (any control under the "Markup" tab in the UI Library). This is useful if you want to just look at your UI without the annotations that surround it.

The state of the two toggles is remembered across sessions, and in the Desktop version you can use the "m" (or "M") and "l" (or "L") keys to toggle the two settings as well.

We also made the blue link highlight a lot more faint, it was too distracting.

This feature is the result of a few rounds of great feedback from Michael Bourque and all the others that contributed to his GetSatisfaction thread, thanks so much everyone.

I promise to never again make the mistake of releasing a big feature without getting help from the community like I did for the linking feature. My apologies and thank you so much for your continued support and feedback, I really appreciate it and enjoy our conversations on GetSatisfaction tremendously.

Other changes in this update

• slowed down the double-click speed to 400ms (from 200), and added some code that detects the distance between the two clicks, which should take care of a few double-click related bugs
• added font sizes 60 and 72 for text
• made the app much more resilient to unknown BMML data (thanks to Max's SWT->BMML importer for bringing these up)
• the Import dialog now properly sets focus on the text area, so that you can now just CTRL+SHIFT+E and CTRL+V and ENTER to import, no mouse needed
• the pull-down menus for the Link and Image inspectors now grows to show the whole file name
• fixed an issue in which Mockups though the SHIFT key was down when it wasn't, resulting in the wrong mouse pointers being shown
• changed the key modifier for ignoring the elements under the mouse when dragging from SHIFT to ALT, which makes much more sense. Sorry about this change but it's an advanced feature and only a few days old so hopefully it won't be too hard to switch
• added "Select List" as another name for the ComboBox control
• fixed a bug with the selection highlight not showing up when you select the last row of a DataGrid that's never been manually resized

Updating Instructions

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Web Demo: here

Have a great week everyone!

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