Recently active topics in Balsamiq

Exporting only a region would be nice, to be able to have a work area that exported as the PNG, but not the side bar stuff.

See Screencast:
http://www.screencast.com/t/57zvFgfKpZG

A small feature that I would appreciate is the ability to "paste in original position." At present, if I cut from one mockup and paste into another, the pasted object is shifted to coordinates offset by x+10, y+10. (And each subsequent paste adds another 10!) I'd love the simple little feature to paste exactly in the original place, with an associated keyboard shortcut of ctrl-alt-v or maybe ctrl-shift-v. Thanks! :-)

I use the export as PNG to communicate my design to the team. I have a lot of mockups that I have already loaded in session. I would like to export them all at once, or even better select which ones I want to export.

Here is a sample of what I would like:



For extra credit, it would be very cool to provide a scale factor to the export as PNG. But that might be too much to ask. I currently open each PNG and scale it down 75% so it fits better but still has clarity.

I am sure we all use Balsamiq to design and demonstrate user flow. I would love to see a capability to manage and create a storyboard.

You would start by creating a new storyboard in which it displays a grid on the screen. You could right click a cell in the grid and pick "Start new Mockup" or "Import Mockup".

If you click “Start new Mockup”, Balsmaiq puts you into the “create mockup screen”, but when you save it goes back to the storyboard. Of course you can drag and drop to change order, and/or double click to open/edit.

Saving the storyboard just saves an XML file, but you can also export the storyboard to PNG and choose a scale.

That would be cool if double clicking the Icon symbol will open Icon Library screen.

Add some more validation icons and features for the Grid View, like paging and filtering.

Just a quick tip that might be obvious to some, but dawned on me only yesterday. The new image import tool has Flickr support, which is terrific for mockups that feature photos: catalogs, address books, etc. The problem is that imported full-color photos will overwhelm most any mockup: placed inside those black-and-white hand-drawn widgets, they look out of place and are awfully distracting.

Fortunately, the image import tool uses tag-based queries, and on Flickr it's an unofficial standard to add a "bw" tag to black-and-white photos. So, include a "bw" as one of the keywords in the Flickr import field, and you'll get a set of shots that play nice with the rest of the mockup's design.

Camp this into the big idea column...

It would be great to one day have a website devoted to sharing designs created by people (like you) using Balsamiq Mockups. It would be similar to UI Patterns, except you could download each user submitted mockup bmml file. Each design would have a threaded discussion for people to openly share ideas and collaborate on design. Perhaps it could be powered by the Confluence wiki.

This would be a community powered site, and would exploit the power of Balsamiq Mockups, but most importantly would promote reuse and awareness of good design.

Even better would be to build a UI Pattern Mockup explorer right inside Balsamiq. This might be similar to inserting clipart from MS word. It goes out to the Design Patterns Website and provides a nice built-in window that lets you search and select mockups to import directly into your mockup.

Have Fun!

How does Mockups determine tab order? I opened multiple files all at once and the tabs all seem in a random order. They don't seem to be in any order (alpha, date, size). Even if I open them in order (one at a time), they still wont stay in the right order.

I would really like the ability to reorder the tabs:
I often show mockups to demonstrate workflow by having each UI screen on its own mockup. But having the tabs in random order makes this painful. I wish they could be in order.