The Balsamiq Blog

Mockups for JIRA 3.x, Now with User-Based Pricing!

2009-11-16T08:19:02Z

Hi there. So when Atlassian changed the pricing structure for JIRA 4.0 last month we rushed to match it, and sales of the JIRA 4.0 version have been very good already.

The demand for it has been so high that we decided to go back and implement user-based pricing for Mockups for JIRA when you run it on a JIRA 3.x server as well!

That’s right, you can now purchase a 10-editor, 25-editor, 50-editor or 100-editor license of Mockups for JIRA and run it on your JIRA 3.7-3.13 server.

If your Mockups for JIRA license level is lower than your JIRA license level, all you have to do is create a user group called “balsamiq-mockups-editors” and manage its members it normally. These are people who will be able to create and edit mockups, everyone else will only be able to see them. Just like in Mockups for JIRA 4.0 and Mockups for Confluence.

The only thing you have to watch out for is to not go over your license limit, or Mockups will complain with a not-so-subtle “EULA Violation” message.

The nice side-effect of this change is that even if you purchase an unlimited license of Mockups for JIRA, you can still create a user group if you’d like to limit who can see the “Add/Edit UI Mockup” link on issues. This was requested by a few users in the past: if you’re one of them, just update to today’s version and give it a try!

We already updated the Mockups for JIRA page and the JIRA 4.0 licensing changes FAQ, but if you run into any issues or have any questions don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll do our best to clear things up.

And of course if you purchased Mockups for JIRA Unlimited in the last month and would like to downgrade to a smaller license, let us know and we’ll be happy to refund you the difference (we’ll email you about in the next few days if we don’t hear from you).

Alright, go download Mockups for JIRA here!

Onward!

Weekly Release: Export to PDF, a fresh coat of paint!

2009-11-13T10:05:25Z

Hi everyone. Man am I ever excited about this week’s release!

A fresh coat of paint!

First of all, we’d like to unveil…our new application icon!

Isn’t she gorgeous?

Here it is again “in action” (click to enlarge):

We are absolutely THRILLED with it, we cannot stop looking at it.

We think it really captures the essence of Mockups: it’s about brainstorming, quick iteration, and the same ease of use as a marker on paper.

The new icon was created by The IconFactory: I’m going to write a whole blog post about all the iterations it took us to get to the final version, but let me just tell you that there’s a reason these guys are considered the best icon-makers out there. They are GOOD. Very professional, very accommodating, very talented! Many thanks especially to Cheryl Culling, a.k.a. “she of infinite patience”.

Another thing that The IconFactory did for us is to completely redo all of the icons in the application! There were 78 of them, so it was quite an effort. And while we were at it , we took the time to rationalize the icon sizes and colors throughout the application, reskinning some of the standard Flex UI components in the process. We are really pleased with the results, let us know what you think!

We now have the monumental task ahead of us to update all the screenshots and most of the screencasts on the website…but it was long overdue anyways so it will be good.

As a personal note, I feel a mixture of pride and incredulity about the new icon. I have always had great admiration for other people’s gorgeously crafted icons and never even dreamed of building an app that could “stand its ground” on someone’s OS dock. I can’t believe this is happening to me now, that’s just SO RAD! Our little app is growing up…awww…organic growth FTW! Ok, back to work <slaps_himself/>

Next up, we added one of the most highly requested features to Mockups for Desktop:

Export to PDF!

That’s right. You can now export all of the mockups you have loaded in Mockups for Desktop into a single PDF file, for even easier sharing.

The PDF will have one mockup per page, and INTERNAL LINKS!

So if you need to send a full-blown multi-page prototype you built with Mockups to someone who doesn’t have the app, just open all the files, link them all together and export to PDF!

Here’s a quick example PDF I threw together: exportToPDFmockups.pdf and the BMML sources for it: exportToPDFmockups.zip

This feature was the result of a great group effort. The Actionscript PDF generation library we’re using is the excellent AlivePDF, by Thibault Imbert, who added the inter-PDF linking feature to it just for us! Thanks so much Thibault!

The code to take a group of images and image maps from Mockups and create a PDF out of it was written by a very talented Flex developer we know, who we contracted for this quick 3-day project. If you need a Flex coder for a short-term contract, this guy is one the best out there. Email me for details if you’re interested.

And of course I cannot forget to thank all the people who have asked us for this feature, both on GetSatisfaction and via email! Our customers are the best, how did we get to be so lucky!?!

We have also updated our FAQ here with the new info.

Let us know if you run into any issue with this feature and we’ll do our best to fix it right away! Thanks so much to Michael Bourque and Bruno Hofstetter for helping us find and fix a sneaky little bug with it already!

Other changes

Added “Export to PDF” to the demo version here. Why not right?
Made it so that the 5-minute timer only starts when the demo is fully loaded, so that you don’t run on the same issue as @elangogovind
In Mockups for Confluence, the HTML generated by our macro now sprinkles class=”balsamiq_mockup” everywhere, so that you can style it with CSS if you want! Thanks so much Bryan Crotaz for the feature request!
As suggested by Samson, we have made the current tab stand out more, with thicker lines and by moving the label a little bit – now that the green highlight is gone, it was a bit trickier to see which tab was selected. I think the new look is a definite improvement, let us know what you think
Made a ton of progress towards enabling real-time-collaboration in the web app…screencast coming soon I promise. It’s SO cool, can’t wait to ship it already.
You can now resize the iPhone and iPhoneKeyboard controls. They will maintain aspect ratio, and both have an “AutoSize” button now so that you can go back to their “natural” size easily. Thanks to Charles Du and others for the feature request.
Fixed a crazy little bug in the Browser control, thanks Andi for the bug report!
Radio Buttons and Check Boxes are now a little taller by default, which takes care of this bug reported by Jaanus.
The icon in disabled buttons is gray again, thanks Jon Boardman for the bug report, sorry about the injection!
The font color in the Text Input and Text Area controls now changes automatically based on the background color (white or black, just like for Buttons and other controls that do the same)
The font size of the pull-down elements in the Combo Box now reflects the size of the first line. Thanks to “Mark Two Thousand Two Belgium” for reporting it!
fixed a bug that allowed you to open files while in presentation mode. Thanks to Simon Tetu for reporting it!

I think that’s it! Not a bad little release!

How do I upgrade?

Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while). If you still see the old icon after installing, try rebooting!
Mockups for Confluence: here
Mockups for JIRA: here
Mockups for XWiki: here
Mockups for FogBugz: here (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
Web Demo: here

Onward!

Free Balsamiq Mockups for UX Training

2009-11-12T16:21:03Z

Hello everyone!
Did you know that today is World Usability Day 2009? It’s a global initiative now in its 4th year, aimed at raising the awareness of the importance of good usability in our daily lives. Head over to worldusabilityday.org for all the details, or follow them on Twitter here.

Also, why not take this opportunity to talk to your in-laws about usability today? They’ll be impressed by it, we promise!

Clearly, with our core belief that “life is too short for bad software“, we care about usability a great deal.

We didn’t have time to plan an event for WUD this year, but we still wanted to contribute somehow…that’s why we are proud to introduce our brand new “Free Balsamiq Mockups for UX Training” program!

The idea is simple: we have great admiration and are very thankful to those of you whose job is to teach other professionals the importance of usability / user experience / good information architecture.

In a way, it’s the same admiration I have for surgeons and the like: I could never do your job, but I am SO thankful that you’re doing it, making the world a better place in the process.

So if you’re that kind of person, we’d like to offer you a new version of Mockups to use in your UX workshops, free of charge. It’s very much like the demo version on this site, but without the annoying nagging every 5 minutes.

We’re not doing this for money or exposure, really. We just want to help you in our shared quest to rid the World of bad software, if you’d like us to. If you don’t like this idea, that’s totally cool, no hard feelings!

Alright, all the details are here, see for yourself.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Theresa Neil of Designing Web Interfaces fame for giving me this idea. She has already used this version of Mockups in two of her UX workshops and was very supportive of this idea from the start. Thanks so much Theresa!

Onward!

YouTube-ing Up a Storm!

2009-11-11T14:46:59Z

Hi all. So we’ve been travelling quite a bit in the last few months for conferences and such.

Aside from learning a lot and sharing what we know, conferences turned out to be the perfect way to meet some of our customers face to face (so rare for us!).

The result is a new piece of our website, at the top of the Testimonials page. Here’s a little taste:

You can also see all of the videos by heading to our new and improved Balsamiq YouTube Channel, which is where we’re migrating all of our videos to (we had to say goodbye to Vimeo due to their unexplicable Terms of Service. I’m actually glad we did: YouTube is the standard and its playlist-related features are still unmatched out there IMHO).

Click below to visit our YouTube Channel:

These videos were shot using a cool little Flip Video Camera, which has great usability.

We will be posting more video testimonials in the future as we meet with more customers.I have added the YouTube feed to our OPML so if you want to follow that way, you can.

If you have a webcam, a YouTube account and you would like to create your own home-made testimonials, don’t be shy! We’ll be happy to add it to our playlist – hey, it might bring you some traffic, right?

Thanks SO much for those who agreed to be interviewed by Valerie and Marco and for sharing their success stories using our tool, we simply love to hear we’re helping you out, even if it’s just a little bit.

Together we can rid the world of bad software!

Onward!

Weekly Release: a nice basket of low-hanging fruit

2009-11-03T10:18:05Z

Hi everyone! I know I said we wouldn’t have an update this week, but we ended up being able to carve out some time to dedicate to adding a few of those long-requested-but-not-so-high-priority features that have been sitting in our GetSatisfaction forums for a while.

So without further ado, here’s what’s new this week:

A new “Subtitle” control. Halfway between a Label and a Title, handy to have sometimes. Obviously you could build a subtitle by changing the font properties of the Label control, but having its own control makes it faster and a bit more standardized. Thanks so much to Roland for asking for it!
Added border support to the Icon, “Icon and Label” and Image controls. Very useful, sorry it took me so long to get to it. Thanks Michael Matti for requesting it!
You can now remove the frame around the Tab Bar and Vertical Tab controls, and just keep the line. Thanks to Brian Jamieson for requesting it! I also removed the green from the selected tab, which was distracting to some. The selected tab is now white and bold (and looks connected to the main area, of course). A great idea by Nathaniel Flick (via email) and Stephen (on GetSatisfaction).
You can now specify a 2nd level of items in an Accordion control. This turns an Accordion into a quick 2-level navigator easily. This was a highly requested feature, thanks to Bi-Roller Disorder and the others who helped me design the feature!
Added background color support to the Button and Text Input controls. Thanks to adrienne, olofweb and Erika for their requests!
Fixed a bug in the new Custom ID feature: you can now give Groups IDs as well. Thanks to sebastian.vorlaender for bringing this up!
Fixed an issue with the demo version: if the nagging screen comes up while you’re dragging things around (or editing text), things no longer go south. Thanks to Santi for reporting the issue!
Images in the image selection pulldown are now sorted properly (case-insensitive)
You can now disable items in the Menu control, by wrapping them -like this-. Thanks so much Robert Sholtz for asking for this!
You can now use &this notation& to underline text throughout the app. This is very useful for specifying Windows accelerator keys for instance. Thanks so much to Ilya Ryzhenkov, Andi and Oli for their help designing this feature.
[], **, __ (and the new &&) notations now work after a \r as well. I forgot who pointed this out, but thank you!
The Image control now shows the “little arrow icon” properly when needed (it was hidden by the image before)
Mockups for Desktop: We removed an option we had recently added (I doubt any of you used it yet) to keep your BalsamiqMockups.cfg file in your Documents and Settings folder. We are back at looking only at the old locations. The good news is that we have added support for a new configuration tag: <documentsPath>C:\something\something</documentsPath>, which tells Mockups where you want to keep your account assets (we create a “Balsamiq Mockups\assets” folder there). So if you want to keep your account assets on a thumb drive, now you can! This also provides a workaround for those of you who keep their Documents folder on a network drive and want to use Mockups even when that drive is not connected (hello Laurent!)
Mockups for Desktop: Fixed a bug with pasting text in the “create new image from clipboard” dialog. Thanks to Martin N. for reporting the bug (via email)
Mockups for Desktop: You can now double-click on the empty area to the right of the mockups tabs at the bottom to create a new mockup, Firefox-style!

How do I upgrade?

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 (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
Web Demo: here

What’s next?

We’re making great progress on the web app, with real-time-collaboration being very close to being usable.

I also plan on picking some other low-hanging-fruits this week, like adding link support to Menus, List and Trees for instance.

We are also doing a long-overdue round of reskinning of the app (it won’t be very different, just a bit cleaner and more professional-looking. We had all of our icons made professionally, and they look very nice!). Come back next week for updates, or check the pre-release version in the next few days if you’re curious.

Onward!

Tools we use for running our startup

2009-10-31T07:55:46Z

Hi there. I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time, but things were still evolving too much for me to come up with a definite list.

Now that we’ve been in business for a whole 15 months, the dust has settled a bit on the tools we use in our day-to-day operations.

We’re pretty happy with our tool set so I thought we’d share it in hope it will be useful to some, and hopefully to get your feedback on it!

We are NOT affiliated with any of the companies that make the tools below, just happy customers.

I do know some of the companies below are Mockups users, which makes me SO proud. Come out in the comments if you are, it will be a big lovefest!

Also, apologies for the OS X-heavy list…perhaps someone has a Windows-heavy list of equivalent tools to share?

Internal tools

Apple laptops – our hardware of choice. Mariah and Valerie work off of their MacBook Air laptops and Marco and I each use a 17-inch Macbook Pro (with external 24-inch LED Cinema Displays). We also have a mac mini (our “cash register”), and we’ll probably get Valerie a new 27-inch iMac soon (the Air is awesome for traveling, but not the most powerful machine for work.)

The iPhone – the first thing you get when you join Balsamiq as an employee. Aside from being a great perk, it’s so useful in so many ways that I can’t imagine life without one. Also most of the tools mentioned below have an iPhone client, so it’s great for us to “carry the whole office” with us at all times with no extra effort. Last but not least, I find it a great source for UX inspiration.

Typinator – I cannot count how many hours this has saved Mariah, Valerie and me. If you use email for work, you need this. It’s a tiny little tool that listens to your keystrokes and expands what you type if it matches a certain shortcut you previously specified. Just like typing “lorem” in Mockups expands it to a full “lorem ipsum” paragraph. We have A TON of shortcuts (email replies, URLs…) saved up and we share our shortcuts via DropBox. I found this tool via a Guy Kawasaki tweet, and we now each have a license. Awesome.

DropBox – If you don’t use DropBox, I will shake my head at you in disapproval. It’s “shared network drives” taken into this millennium. Nothing to set up, works across firewalls, brilliantly easy to use, insanely cheap. If they go public one day, I’ll be buying stock. We use it for ALL of our internal files, from graphic assets to contracts, invoices, UI mockups, screenshots, and accounting data (we’re totally transparent internally, even more than externally). We even built a feature of Mockups that enables near-real-time collaboration by using DropBox!

Confluence Hosted – the other place where we keep our documents is an instance of Atlassian Confluence (hosted by Atlassian). It comes with Mockups for Confluence pre-installed, which is killer. It’s basically our Intranet (and our browsers’ home page). It has a list of links that we share, an RSS feeds for all the mentions of Balsamiq on the Internet, and most importantly meeting notes, documents we want to collaborate on (like drafts of new pages for the site or blog posts). Confluence is the best wiki software I know of, and every time I use it I wish I needed to use it more…I used to live in it when I was back at Adobe and I miss it! I’m serious. Good software has that effect on people.

Yammer – Yammer is like a “Twitter intranet”. We use it to share links and to help each other with internal issues. We also use it to tell everyone else what we’re working on, and to share an occasional viral Youtube video. Since our team is distributed, this is our water-cooler. Very effective and took no time to get adopted (even faster than Twitter itself). To give you an idea, if we didn’t have it we’d be looking for a replacement or try to build our own. We use the Gabble client (it’s native OSX, uses a ton less ram than their AIR client) and their own client on our iPhones.

Microsoft Excel – we use this for our “beans”, i.e. our big spreadsheet where we record all sales and expenses. We keep the file on Dropbox and update it daily (Val updates it with the help of a script Marco wrote and I double-check it). Excel has its quirks (1904 date format anyone?) but overall there’s no better tool to manage thousands of rows of data and make pretty charts out of it.

PivotalTracker – you probably heard me rave about it before. PivotalTracker is as simple as a TODO list you might write on paper, but online, shared and collaborative (try the real-time collaboration and be amazed). Every bug or feature request we get ends up on our pivotal list. Once in a while we go through and prioritize the next few weeks, but we’re not religious about following it (customer issues always take precedence for instance). We have 3 projects in Pivotal right now: one for Mockups as a whole, one for the web app and one for Valerie and mine’s shared TODO list, so that we always know what we’re working on. The only problem with PivotalTracker is that it’s free. I’d feel MUCH better if I was paying for it, I need them to stay in business forever!

Apple Preview (for PDFs) – I find that I use the Mac’s native PDF-handling abilities quite a bit. We print stuff ot PDF for our records, sometimes remove pages, sometimes merge two PDF files together (a simple drag and drop!)…it’s nice. If we were on Windows we’d probably be buying Acrobat Professional to do most of the same things.

Parallels – we use Parallels mostly for testing Mockups on different flavors of Windows and Linux (I have an Ubuntu Hardy image as well as an XP, Win 2000 Server and a Vista one, while Marco can run Vista , 2 flavors of XP, Ubuntu and soon Windows 7). The other reason is to run QuickBooks, but hopefully that will soon be a thing of the past (see below).

Writeroom – Writeroom is what I’m writing this post in and what I use any time I have anything to write (I usually end up copying and pasting the text into Confluence or Wordpress). It’s a wonderful piece of ZenWare and it inspired me to keep Mockups as clutter-free as possible. If you need to focus on your writing (and you should!), I highly recommend it.

Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop – Fireworks is my “go-to” graphics editor, I use it almost daily. It’s just fast and easy to use. Illustrator is what I use when I need to design something, though thankfully I am now able to outsource as much design work as possible (it’s better for everyone). Photoshop I can barely use any more, I learned it maybe 10 years ago and haven’t touched it much since, but that’s what designers use so I’m using it to interact with them, plus there are a few things that Fireworks just can’t do.

Skitch – if you need to put an annotated screenshot online, Skitch is the fastest, easiest and most fun way to do it. I just love tools like this: it doesn’t try to boil the ocean, it does one thing, does it well and makes it fun. Killer. Marco says he likes LittleSnapper as well.

Screenflow and Screenr – I use Screenflow to record all the screencast for the website. It’s very well done, very mac-like. Great UX. I usually record the video first, then record the audio and add it to the video track. Screenflow lets me do that easily without having to launch GarageBand or other audio-editing software (which is a software category that generally makes me queasy .) I also use Screenr if I need something quick to show a customer for instance. Also great UX, and cross-platform (it’s a Java applet). Awesome. Some people also use Jing for this stuff but somehow it never stuck with me (it used to crash quite a bit plus that little non-standard “yellow ball UI” never really sat well with me).

QuickSilver – I use this over the built-in Spotlight because I find it faster. It also has a ton of plugins and cool features. Thanks to Elliot Winard for showing this to me back in the day!

Last.fm – I used to be a Pandora enthusiast when I lived in the US, but alas, that’s not available here in Italy. Last.fm has proven itself to be even better, with the “social discovery” features helping me not get totally bored with my music all the time. It’s worth paying for an account just for the “only play my loved tracks” feature.

Tweetie and TweetDeck are the Twitter clients we use. I like how little memory Tweetie uses but it’s been a bit flaky lately (the search column doesn’t update any more?), so I’m back to Tweetdeck for now.

Google Reader – is what we use to read (and share internally) RSS feeds. I follow quite a bit of blogs (here’s an OPML file with a subset of them about startups), and Reader has the best UI. I used to use it as part of iGoogle but I have now come to love the full-screen UI of it.

Coding Tools: Adobe Flash Builder, Flash Authoring, Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio Express. Mockups is a Flex app, so Flash Builder (I still call it Flex Builder, sorry) is our IDE. The UI controls in Mockups are hand-drawn by my wife Mariah, and taken into Adobe Flash authoring (via Fireworks) to turn them into something that Flex can use.

For our server-side coding, we use eclipse for java development (Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki), NetBeans for the web app (the back-end is in grails) and Visual Studio Express for C# development (Mockups for FogBugz). We also use Firebug to help us with jQuery development.

Charles – Charles is essential if you do anything client-server. It inspects requests/responses like nobody’s business. The problem with Charles is that I’ve been able to use the free demo for years, their limitations are too loose! I know tons of people that use it, but don’t know anyone who’s paid for it. I think I’ll go pay for it right now, it’s a really good piece of software.

Deployment tools: for source-code-repository, I used to use Perforce when I was alone but it’s too expensive for a small business like ours, so we switched to Subversion, mostly because it’s mature and has lots of 3rd party tools that support it (before you have a fit, we’ll be using git for sharing some open-source scripts soon). One such tool is Versions, an OS X native client for it with great usability. I still use the command-line interface for merging and other complex stuff, but for day-to-day coding Versions is quite nice.

For building our products we use a combination of Ant and Maven scripts, all continuously built (and deployed!) via CruiseControl. I know that CC is like living in the dark ages when it comes to CI servers, but I’m pretty happy with it, it’s very reliable. Plus it’s free. We might invest in something that lets us run parallel builds sometimes soon, as we have 8 different builds going off after every check-in right now, which takes about 10 minutes. We’ll be sharing some of our build scripts soon (see below).

We also just installed Atlassian FishEye. I was REALLY excited about it for about two days, but haven’t really looked at it since. I suspect that for a team of 2.5 developers like ours it might be overkill, but maybe I’m not using it right. I thought I’d mention it because it really seems like a very well-made and powerful product.

Slicehost – we chose to host our web app on Slicehost for 3 reasons: reasonable price, outstanding customer support and the best technical documentation I’ve ever seen (I might write a blog post about it one day..it’s concise, to the point, funny and makes you feel like a super-human). I hope Slicehost realizes how important PickledOnion’s articles are to their overall success and compensate him (her?) accordingly. A word of caution, Slicehost can get pretty pricey if you install memory-hogging apps like Tomcat on it. Still reasonable, but their cheapest option won’t make it.

Apple Keynote – I only just recently started using, for my WebExpo talk in Prague last week. All I gotta say is WOW. Keynote’s usability kicks the pants off of Powerpoint…it’s really a wonderfully designed piece of software. I was especially impressed with their progressively disclosed snap lines, which are SO MUCH BETTER than the ones we have in Mockups. It must be nice to be Apple and have tons of brilliant engineers and designers to help you, I’m jealous!

QuickBooks – oh, man. We use QuickBooks Assisted Payroll for Valerie’s payroll. It’s nice and automated, but still requires Val to launch Parallels in order to launch their Windows-only application, which is NOT the pinnacle of usability…we just asked our accountants if we could pay them a monthly fee to take this painful part of Valerie’s job away from us. There’s plenty of great software to replace QuickBooks (our friends at LessAccounting know a thing or two about it), but IMHO the best software to use for certain things is one that you don’t even use yourself! Much better to have professionals use whatever they like best.

Our own scripts – we wrote a bunch of little scripts to automate some of the most tedious tasks. We plan on sharing those as open-source soon, and we’re going to be hosting them on GitHub because that’s where all the cool kids are these days , and actually looks REALLY nice for open-source projects.

Customer Facing Tools

GMail – we use Google Apps for your Domain so all of our mail is handled by GMail. I actually end up forwarding all of my email (personal and for business) to balsamiq@gmail.com because the “consumer” version of GMail gets Google Labs features earlier than the other one. GMail’s search, threaded view and filters are absolute must-have for us, we couldn’t run our business without them. Also, the “Default to Reply All” feature in Labs is effectively replacing our need for a CRM tool (even though we looked into ZenDesk and it looked nice, especially since it integrates with GetSatisfaction).

Marco wanted me to mention that he’s a mac purist and uses Mail.app instead. Oh well. We also use Mail.app on our mac-mini to run the cash register…but that’s a subject for another post.

Skype – where to begin. Our phone number +1 (415) 367-3531 is a SykpeIn number, meaning that if you call it both Valerie’s computer in Foster City and mine in Italy will ring. When one of us answers, the other laptop will stop ringing. How cool is that? Valerie and I use Skype internally for our daily catch-up meetings…we use it as an instant messenger, we use Skype chats as “war room” for development, we use the new screen sharing feature all the time (which is a bit flaky but nicely integrated). I have been interviewed for a number of podcasts via Skype as well. If there was one piece of installed software in the last 7 years that changed the World we live in forever, Skype might be it. Can you believe Skype is only 7 years old? Can you remember life before it? I can’t.

Adium – for instant messaging. This stuff is boring by now, but Adium connects to everything and just works.

Freshbooks – when I first started Balsamiq I dealt with invoices and estimates by hand, I used one of the default templates that came with Microsoft Word. I am SO glad that we make enough money to be able to afford the (very affordable) Freshbooks. It has great usability, it’s very fast to use, it’s a web app so Val and I can access the account at any time, and most importantly it has APIs! I just spent a couple of days last week cooking up some PHP scripts that allow our customers to generate estimates (quotes) and invoices by themselves when they need them. This freed up an hour of Valerie’s time EVERY DAY, just like that. Better living through scripting! Freshbooks also has GREAT customer service, plus they seem to be really nice people overall. We’re happy to support them.

GetSatisfaction – you’ve probably heard me rave about GS before. I was lucky enough to be one of their first paying customers so I’ve seen it get better and better. I REALLY love what they stand for and how they put the customer and the company on the same level. They win on UX as well, with the smiley faces and the “gardening tools” being right there where you expect them to be. I hope they do well, I really do.

Payment Processors: Paypal, Google Checkout, E-Junkie and Spreedly – We use E-Junkie as a shopping cart. Their name is terrible, but their admin UI is pretty good and flexible enough for all the different things we need to do (generate keys based on the names, etc). It integrates nicely with both Paypal and Google Checkout, and I recommend using both since Paypal won’t accept as many credit cards in as many countries as Google Checkout does. We also decided to pay $30/month for Paypal’s Virtual Terminal (I think that’s what it’s called), which lets us take credit-card orders over the phone. Best $30/mo ever spent, I wish we had done it earlier. Pays for itself immediately.

We just recently started using Spreedly as a payment processor for our hosted offerings, and we’re very happy with them. The APIs are super-easy to pick up, they have good docs, accessible support and overall seem like good, trustworthy people. I like their administration’s UI as well. Thanks to Ryan Carson for recommending them in this talk.

Delicious – I think I’ll write a separate blog post about this, but I use delicious extensively. Want a few examples? Look at the balsamiq_press tag, or the balsamiq_reviews tag, or the balsamiq_love one. It’s SUPER useful, I’ll write more about it I promise.

Twitter – I wrote about Twitter before, and can’t wait to buy as much stock as I can afford in it when they go public.

Facebook – I admit that I never “got” Facebook much before Mariah and Valerie showed me the way. If Yammer is our internal water cooler, our Facebook page is our “community water cooler”. Valerie, who has effectively taken over our page there, says that it’s like this blog, but less formal (I know, can you be less formal than this? I didn’t think so either). I love it! The best part about it is that we can see actual FACES of our fans and customers, it’s so magical. We are not a company selling software to customers: we are people helping other people ridding the World of bad software, one wireframe at the time. Social media really brings this point home, I love it. I wouldn’t want to live in any other time in history actually.

For this website, we use Drupal for every page except for the blog section, for which we use Wordpress instead. I think I use about 10% of what Drupal can do, but it works well enough for me. Wordpress is Wordpress, there’s a reason it’s the standard.

Posterous – ah, another one of my favorite tools. SO simple. No, you don’t understand, it’s SO simple. We use it for MockupsToGo, our community site. Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal are awesome and always put my own customer support response-times to shame. I swear they respond INSTANTLY! They also implemented a feature “just for me“, which makes me feel all nice and special. I heart them!

That’s it for now!

Ok so first of all, I have made a Twitter list of all the tools I mentioned above that I could find: http://twitter.com/balsamiq/essential-startup-tools.

Then, are you using these tools? Do you think we should swap out any of them for a better one? Note that what we care the most about are usability, customer service and the people behind the tool. Features come a distant 4th.

Note: I plan on deleting comments that are too “sales-y” or “pitch-y”. If you want to pimp your product, get someone else to do it. If it doesn’t strike me as a truthful endorsement, I’ll delete the comment for everyone’s sake. You have been warned.

Peldi

P.S.There are some interesting comments over at Hacker News about this post.

Weekly Release: OS X Extras and more!

2009-10-28T18:14:45Z

Update (6:09pm GMT): we have posted 1.6.42 which fixes the a bad issue with the 1.6.41 release. Give it a try!

Hi there! I hope this finds you well.

Things are crazy busy around here these days (no, really, you don’t understand, it’s REALLY crazy right now).

Nevertheless, we wanted to share a little update with you guys.

Here’s what’s new this week:

The Balsamiq Mockups OS X QuickLook and Spotlight Plugins

We’re heavy mac users here at Balsamiq, and Marco’s not-so-secret passion is native Cocoa development. So when a few of you asked us for a QuickLook plugin, we thought it was a great idea. This past week-end we realized that we could leverage the command-line interface of Mockups for Desktop to generate previews on the fly, so Marco whipped up a wrapper for it as a QuickLook plugin!

That’s right. You can now hit “space” in the finder on a bmml file and see a preview of it!

While he at it, Marco also built a Spotlight plugin for Mockups, which indexes all the text contained in your BMML files, so now you can look “inside” your wireframes when you search with Spotlight. Brilliant!

The two plugins are a bit rough around the edges at the moment, but we plan on releasing them open-source along with a bunch of other scripts sometimes soon.

Installation instructions:

Install today’s Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop build (1.6.41) from here.
Download the extras from here: Balsamiq_Mockups_OS_X_Extras.zip
Unzip the zip, launch the installer and wait until you see an “Installation complete” dialog appear.
Done!

If there are issues with these extras, let us know on GetSatisfaction and we’ll try to fix it…be aware that this is not super-high priority right now but we’ll try our best.

Other improvements in today’s build:

added support for CTRL+B, CTRL+I and CTRL+U to toggle the bold, italic and underline state of the selected controls. Tell me why did we wait so long for this again?
added more keyboard shortcuts to the tooltips around the app so that you don’t have to keep a printed copy of this page by your desk all the time.
on the Mac, the tooltips now say COMMAND, instead of saying CTRL, which makes it feel a bit more native (CTRL will still work if that’s what you’re used to).
Mockups for JIRA now warns you when you try to install the plugin on a JIRA installation that has attachment disabled.
Mockups for Desktop no longer “flashes” when you use it from the command-line. (we had to temporarely revert this improvement in 1.6.42, but we’ll fix it properly tomorrow).
If you have both Mockups for JIRA and Mockups for Confluence and use Crowd or LDAP to authenticate your users, you can now differentiate your plugin users by using the following two user group names: balsamiq-mockups-editors-confluence and balsamiq-mockups-editors-jira. The old “balsamiq-mockups-editors” group still works, so this shouldn’t affect the vast majority of you.

And some bug fixes:

selecting “No Link” properly removes the link again!
if your documents folder is in a non-standard location (like a disconnected network drive for instance), Mockups will fail more gracefully (instead of hanging on launch)
you can now enter links right after a “(” character again, like ([this]).
we had to rename our internal fileType’s name from com.balsamiq.MockupFile to com.balsamiq.mockupfile (all lowercase). This shouldn’t affect any of you, but let us know if it does!

How do I upgrade?

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 (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
Web Demo: here

I’m pretty sure we won’t do a weekly release next week, and probably not the week after that either. We’re working on adding real-time-collaboration to the app (the web-app first, the desktop app will come later), which is an awesome feature. Unfortunately it’s a very big change, we have to effectively break everything and put it back together again. Don’t worry we’ve done similar things before. Still, wish us luck!

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Listen to this blog

2009-10-23T08:38:39Z

Hi there, just a quick post to let you know that you can now listen to the most popular posts on this blog via the new blog-to-podcast service from the guys at HearABlog.

I like their idea because it’s so focused and useful at the same time: they take a blog and have an actor read it aloud, that’s it! It’s great for accessibility and I have found it a great way to keep up with some of my favorite blogs like A Smart Bear and Seth Godin’s blog.

Here’s a link: http://www.hearablog.com/site/21/Balsamiq-Blog

The link is also at the top of the sidebar on the right, which I cleaned up for the occasion (notice the new “subscribe via email” link as well).

Thanks so much Daniel and Pablo for providing us with this service!

Peldi

Weekly Release: Custom Properties and Bug Fixes

2009-10-21T15:36:41Z

Hi there, just a small release this week since we’re focused on the web app.

New “Custom Properties” feature

This feature is especially useful if you’re using one of the 3rd party tools that extend Mockups, such as Napkee for instance.

You can now right-click on any control of your mockup and select “Custom Properties…” from the little context menu:

This will open a dialogue like this one:

Like the dialog says, you can enter a custom ID for the selected control and some custom data to go with it. Mockups will not use these properties directly, but it will save them in the BMML file along with the rest of your mockup.

Other tools can use this data to do some fancy stuff like allowing you to specify some javascript to run when the control is clicked or even just simply using the custom ID you specified in the HTML exported.

Here’s a quick video that Enrico from Napkee put together:

BTW, if you are building an extension to Mockups and would like to be notified of these changes before anyone else, email me and I’ll add you to the bmmldev@balsamiq.com mailing list!

By the way, this feature is available on all versions of Mockups.

Bug Fixes

We made some pretty important bug fixes in this release as well:

the demo version on the site saves everything you do again! So sorry about that, it got broken a little while ago. Thanks to @chuchuva for pointing it out!
fixed a bug with presentation mode sometimes overriding data (when going back and forth between mockups), and not using the latest data (if you entered presentation mode before saving all your mockups). Both are fixed now.
tuned the “automatically suspend snapping when the mouse moves fast” feature, so that it will be even faster
fixed a bug with loading and saving images that had spaces or % characters in their file names. It should all work now. Thanks to Steven A. and Eva for reporting the issue!
changed how we interpret the *, [ and _ special characters, so that they are ignored if they’re in the middle of a word. So now you can type USER_ID without having to write USER\_ID any more.
tweaked a couple of tooltip wordings to make them more clear, and fixed a typo in the menus.

How do I upgrade?

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 (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
Web Demo: here

Other Updates

There’s a lot going on in Balsamiq-land.

Mariah and I spent a few days in Prague where I gave a speech at the WebExpo conference called “Lessons Learned from Running a Successful MicroISV“. I was really nervous but I think the talk was well received. I think the WebExpo organizers will post the video of it on YouTube soon, so I’ll post it here, along with a full trip report.

We spent some time working on internal scripts to help us run more efficiently. The scripts behind the “make your own quote” or the “get a formal invoice” pages, for instance, are in PHP and talking to FreshBooks APIs.

We have collected quite a few of these little useful scripts, and we’ll be sharing them soon for you to use. Here’s a tentative list of what we’re planning on releasing as open-source, and here’s the github project page for it (nothing there yet).

Valerie is going to AtlasCamp today, where she’ll be speaking on the “Commercial Plugin Vendor” panel. Walk up and say hi if you’re there!

Onward!

Weekly Release: Image Improvements, Bug Fixes…

2009-10-12T12:29:42Z

Hi all.

Another week, another release.

Here’s what’s new:

all the good stuff we announced last week is now live in 1.6: account and project assets folders, pasting images directly to the Desktop, pasting text…good stuff. Thanks to all of those who helped us test it!
we now show the image name in the “unlock” right-click menu
the primary location of the optional BalsamiqMockups.cfg file is now <your documents folder>/Balsamiq Mockups/BalsamiqMockups.cfg – if we can’t find the .cfg file there we’ll look for it in the old obscure location, so there’s no need to move it if you don’t want to.

We also made a number of important bug fixes:

we reworked how all of our dialogs work so that when you hit ENTER you no longer get a run-time exception if you’re using Flash Player 10. This was causing some data loss, especially for Mockups for FogBugz customers. Our apologies, it’s fixed now.
In Mockups for FogBugz onDemand, fixed an exception some customers were getting when starting the sign-up process without actually signing up.
In Mockups for Confluence, some users were getting a “Stream Error” on load when editing some mockups. It’s fixed.
ALT+Click now follow links even if the control is locked
\r works in the iPhone menu on Windows as well
The default row height for the DataGrid is now back to 20 pixels (not 23).
Fixed a bug that was causing some Mockups not to render properly

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 (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
Web Demo: here

What’s next?

Aside from fixing any bugs or urgent customer issues, we are going to focus our coding efforts on the mockups web app for the next few weeks. We’re no longer accepting people to the beta and we really want to do this final push before going live with it, somewhere around Dec 1st.