Talk:Balsamiq

Improving the Balsamiq article

Hi! My name is Francesca and I work for Balsamiq. I'd like to suggest some changes and updates to this article. I've studied a lot about Wikipedia and its editorial rules, COI and markup language... I'm not sure to master them.

Here is my version on the article.

draft

Balsamiq

Balsamiq is an ISV founded in March 2008 by Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni, a former Adobe senior software engineer. The Balsamiq Mockups tool was launched in June 2008 and has become an industry standard tool for User Interface Design. Balsamiq started as a one-person Micro ISV; in 2015 it has 20 employees, based in Italy, France, Germany and the USA. The company's motto is "Life's too short for bad software."

Balsamiq became profitable 3 weeks after launch, and cleared US $100,000 in sales after only 5 months. The company achieved almost $5 million USD in sales in 2011 and more than $6 million USD in 2014.

Product

Balsamiq Mockups is a graphical user interface mockup and website wireframe builder application for developers, designers, and product managers, focussed on the early stages of designing user interfaces for websites and web, mobile and desktop Applications. It allows anyone to arrange pre-built widgets using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor. Its low-fidelity look (both with a rough, hand-drawn 'sketch' skin and a clean lines 'wireframe' skin) helps make it clear that the wireframe being discussed is not the final design, preventing reviewers from focussing on colors or details too early in the design process.

The application is offered in a Desktop version as well as a web application called myBalsamiq and as a plug-in for Google Drive, Atlassian Confluence and Atlassian JIRA.

Versions for FogBugz and XWiki were offered until 1 November 2013.

Pricing

A Balsamiq Mockups Single User Licence costs $89; there are also Volume Licenses, Upgrade Licenses and Discounted Licenses for Existing Plugin Customers. The web app is called myBalsamiq and has different plans, starting at $12 per month. The plugin for Google Drive costs $5/month or $50/year..

Every product starts with a 30 day free trial.

Balsamiq Mockups is free for nonprofits, for classroom use, UX training, and open source projects.

Balsamiq also donates 3% of its profits to charities.

Release History

• Version 1.0: June 19, 2008.
• Version 2.0 (November 2010): added the ability to create Symbols, reusable controls. Also added PDF and PNG export, autosave and other features.
• Version 3.0 (March 2015): the biggest update in the company's history. A whole new user interface, easier look and feel customization, better symbols support, inclusion of FontAwesome icons, better support for projects with embedded images and assets, a new full-screen user-experience, addition of mockup and project notes, and a trash bin.
• Version 3.1 (April 2015): addition of Mockup Alternates features and Background Music.
• Version 3.2 (October 2015): addition of a new way to draw rectangles and text for even faster wireframing, and the ability to quickly transform controls to different types.

See also

• Website wireframe
• Mockup
• Prototyping
• Rapid prototyping
• Rapid Application Development
• Software Prototyping
• User Interface Design

External links

• Official website
• Balsamiq on Twitter
• Rapid Wireframing: Finding the Right Product Design, free class on Skillshare
• Wireframing with Balsamiq Mockups, free course on Udemy
• Faranello, Scott, Balsamiq Wireframes Quickstart Guide, Packt, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84969-353-0
• Uncommon Interview: Balsamiq Studios, a smart bear, 14 September 2009
• The new generation of kick-ass web apps, TechRadar, 29 November 2009
• How *Specifically* Did Balsamiq Bootstrap Its Way To $2 Mil In Sales in 18 Months? – with Peldi Guilizzoni, Mixergy, 30 April 2010
• [this link Do Worry Be Happy: Peldi Guilizzoni] at Business of Software Conference, 2010
• 9 Excellent Tools for Design Mockups, Mashable, 7 June 2012
• Hello, I am Peldi from Balsamiq. Ask me anything!, Reddit, 30 December 2013
• How Balsamiq Bootstrapped Its Way Into a $6M Business ConversionAid, 30 September 2014
• Peldi Guilizzoni, Product + Support, 19 May 2015
• Balsamiq Mockups 3 on Product Hunt

(Giulietteb t)(COI) 11:18, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi Francesca, and apologies for the delay in answering your edit request. There is currently a backlog of 120+ edit requests dating back to September of last year. I have implemented some of the changes you suggested, but since Wikipedia is not a sales catalogue, articles generally desist from listing the price of products; the release history is also a bit too much in detail. Thanks, Altamel (talk) 02:19, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi Altamel, thank you so much! No worries, I was aware it would take time :) Considering what's on the page right now, we aren't a Micro ISV anymore, and we'd rather use Countries without cities (otherwise, we have to add a bunch of them). Furthermore, there are 24 of us now: do you think I can edit this little detail by myself? One last thing: for the other sections (releases, external links, etc.) you didn't approve, I had drawn inspiration from other similar wikipedia pages (I had studied a lot, before submitting my request!). I was on the fence about the Price list, but I added it just because I had found it somewhere. Believe me, we didn't want to be salesy. Thank you again for all your work!

--(Giulietteb t)(COI) 14:53, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

You are welcome. I changed the bit about the ISV and the cities. I don't see any problem with you updating employee counts periodically, as it is an uncontroversial change. Just be sure to update the supporting citation as well. Altamel (talk) 02:07, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Broken link

The link for the first reference, http://readwrite.com/archives/man_writes_software_blogs_abou.php, is broken. --Mortense (talk) 08:18, 21 June 2016 (UTC)