Balsamiq

Weekly Release: Linking in Confluence, Gray Charts and More!

Hi everyone. Here we are again with our weekly update. This one is so big it took us 2 weeks to complete it! 🙂

We're releasing it a day early because we have some other big changes we want to get started on right away (namely integrating Mockups for FogBugz hosted with Spreedly and adding linking functionality to Mockups for JIRA).

The biggest feature this week is the anticipated ability to link mockups together in Confluence. Full announcement here. Thanks to all of you who tested it. Here's the video again if you need a refresher on how it works.

As part of the change above, the behavior of the linking feature has changed in Mockups for Desktop as well: now if you click around your prototype while in full-screen presentation mode Mockups will no longer be opening all the mockups for editing. If you want to "follow a link for editing" you can do so by ALT+clicking on the little arrow icon while in edit mode.

I also had to change the BMML file format a bit to accomodate this new feature. The good news is that creating image maps for links from BMML files is now extremely easy. Details are in the BMML docs already.

While we're on Mockups for Confluence: I also fixed a bug in which Confluence "broke" the {mockup:id|version} macro by adding a \ before the | we need between the mockup name and the mockup version. Now sure why Confluence decides to escape the pipe, but we now deal with it properly.

Charts are now gray! The red and blue colors grabbed too much attention and looked somewhat childish. Here's a before-after picture:

I also fixed a few memory leaks and performance bugs here and there, I hope you'll notice the difference after using the app for long periods of time.

Mockups for Desktop now deals with read-only files much better. See this thread for the full description. Thanks so much Stephan Friedrick for your help designing and testing this little but important feature!

I also removed the annoying "file not found" alert which you saw on launch if you moved a file that was in the current "session". Thanks to Alex X B. for reporting this (via email) and helping me test it.

Update on the Mockups Hosted private beta: we've made significant progress on the application this past week, and I think we're almost screencast-ready, so stay tuned for an announcement here very soon. I have added about 25 people to the beta, and have over 100 people to choose from for the next (and maybe final?) batch. So I've decided to stop accepting requests to be on the beta, at least for now. If you'd like to get notified when it goes live I suggest subscribing to our (somewhat dormant) newsletter here.

How do I update?

• 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
• Mockups for FogBugz: here
• Web Demo: here

On Our TODO

Here's what we're going to be working on this week:

• Marco is almost done integrating Mockups for FogBugz with Spreedly (for FogBugz hosted customers), which means that we'll start selling the plugin very soon! Exciting!
• more work on the web app beta
• I'll start the work of porting the linking feature to Mockups for JIRA

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team