We've got a bunch of updates for you today.

• Grids: You can now show a basic grid in the background to help you design your wireframes.  Select View --> Show Grid in the menubar.  You can also adjust the grid spacing to your liking  (View --> Grid spacing).  Check View --> Snap to grid to make widgets conform to the grid while you're moving or resizing them. 
• Columns: We now have support for column-based grids like 960gs.  Go to View --> Show Columns and choose one of the three popular presets (960gs 12 column, 960gs 16 column, or Blueprint) or select View --> Show Columns --> Custom to create your own background columns. 
• Remember me:  You requested a "Remember me" feature to avoid the annoyance of having to enter your password over and over.  It's here.
• More precise widget sizing and positioning: When you're resizing or moving a widget, you'll now see an overlay with the size or position of the widget.  This should address many of your requests about being able to set the widget size exactly and fine-tuning your wireframes.  If you'd prefer not to see this extra detail, go to the View menu and uncheck  "Show extra info when moving or resizing."
• More control over snapping behavior: As mentioned above, you can now choose "Snap to grid" but you can now also turn off "Snap to other widgets" (the default snapping behavior) entirely if you don't want to use it (though it's recently improved and we think it's helpful!).  As always, holding down Ctrl on the keyboard while dragging a widget will temporarily turn off all snapping.
• Shift-arrow to move widgets by 10 pixels: You can now hold down Shift while pressing any of arrow keys on the keyboard to move a widget by 10 pixels instead of 1.
• Alt/Option-drag to duplicate a widget in place: If you hold down option, then click a widget and drag it, you will duplicate that widget and start dragging the copy.  
• Better page deletion behavior: When you delete a page, we don't scroll all the way to the top of the pages panel anymore.  So this shouldn't be annoying anymore.

Most of these updates are in the new View menu:

Let us know what you think! 

UPDATE 2: Based on more feedback, we've revised our transition plan for current beta users and the page limit for the free plan (now 10).  If you are a beta user and do not upgrade your account, you will not be able to create new projects after August 15, 2010.  However, you will keep full access to all of your current projects for another two months after August 15.  You will also have read-only access forever to all of your projects via the share link.  From Mockingbird usage data, we've seen that most mockups no longer get edited after about a month.  If for some reason you need to keep edit access longer than two months, please e-mail us.  After two months, all beta users that do not sign up for a paid plan will automatically be put onto a special free plan with one project with unlimited pages and given the option to transfer one of their existing projects into their new plan.  And, of course, all beta users can export a PNG or PDF version of any projects that they wish to keep.

UPDATE 1: Based on your feedback, we've updated all plans to include unlimited users to better suit your needs.  Thanks for your input.

We really want to make sure all our beta users are happy with the transition, so thanks a lot for letting us know your thoughts and keep the feedback coming!

Mockingbird will launch on August 15th, 2010, and it will include multi-user collaboration when it does!

Here are the details:

There will also be a free account available that allows 1 project with 10 pages.

You can archive finished projects, which won't count toward your active project limit.  You won't be charged for months during which you have no projects active, so you don't need to pay when you aren't using Mockingbird

We want to thank all of our beta users for all your suggestions and feedback during the beta months; your help has been invaluable.  We'll be e-mailing beta testers a code for 25% off the first three months of any paid plan, so look out for that.

Also, look out for grids in the next few days!

One of our biggest feature requests on our Uservoice forums, garnering a total of 137 votes, has been to show guides and snap to other widgets when resizing.  Today, we're releasing exactly that, as well as releasing a huge improvement to our snapping algorithm when moving widgets as well.  When you drag widgets around now, Mockingbird will be smarter about picking which widgets to snap to as well as showing you more clearly which widget is getting snapped to.  Go ahead and give it a try, and as usual, let us know about any feedback you have!

Mockingbird is now in color.

You can change the color and font color of your widgets.   Just select a widget, click the "Color" or "Font Color" item in the toolbar, and get coloring.  

You can save your own colors by dragging colors from the preview swatch to the empty swatches we've provided for you.  These colors will be saved along with your project.

For your convenience, if a widget has text on a background, the font color will set itself automatically to be legible as you adjust the background color.  For example, if you make your widget black, the font color will change to white.  If you set your own font color, then automatic font color setting gets turned off until you decide to turn it back on.

Here's a quick screencast highlighting your newly granted coloring capabilities:

Click here to download:

Color.mov (2029 KB)

Let us know what you think of the new, more colorful Mockingbird.

A few updates for this week:

Hello, everyone.  This week we've added a couple of new features based on your requests.  

I just pushed a new version of Mockingbird running on the latest Cappuccino frameworks.  This has various improvements and bug fixes, the biggest being that keyboard shortcuts for menu items now work in Chrome (though command-o is still having some issues, but I'll try to push a fix for that soon).  Also, load time for the app and for projects has gotten better.  

Let us know if you see any issues!

UPDATE (2010/03/01 02:48 PST): Rolling this back temporarily.  There seems to be a small issue with Firefox 3.0 - will keep you guys updated.

UPDATE 2 (2010/03/01 17:28 PST): Fixed the error.  Everything should be back to normal!

Until now the only way to resize the canvas was to drag widgets off the edge, prompting the canvas to size to fit. Many of you asked for more control over the canvas size, a wish we've granted with this latest update. Now there are three ways you can resize the canvas (skip to the video below if you prefer):

1. Hover near the edge of the canvas to bring up a resize tab that you can drag. You can get a tab to appear at the bottom, right, or bottom-right corner of the canvas. You'll see the pixel dimensions of your canvas (width and height in pixels) as you're resizing. 
2. If you'd like you can edit these pixel dimensions directly. Just hover over a resize tab, click into an input field, and enter a width or height. 
3. You still have the ability to expand the canvas by dragging widgets off the edge, so you don't need to stop what you're doing every time you need a little more space. 

Here's a 40 second video to show you the new resizing feature:

Click here to download:

ResizingCanvas.mov (771 KB)

We also got in two performance improvements, making working with larger page sizes snappier and export more reliable.

As always, let us know how the updates work for you.

Our server went down for about three and a half hours earlier this morning, which I managed to fix with a reboot after I was made aware of the issue.  After investigating it, it seems like it was just a simple matter of our web server taking up too much memory, which led to the server killing a few processes and eating a bunch of CPU.  This, in turn, caused the site to become inaccessible.  

Enhancing our infrastructure has been one of our major goals as we go towards 1.0.  We've already worked on a lot of enhancements, but much of these have been towards redundancy and protection of user data, as we believe keeping our users' data safe and backed up is our first priority.   We now need to turn our attention to better server monitoring, as today's outage shows.  We've already put in measures to make sure we are notified as soon as our server goes down, no matter what time of day or night it is.  In the coming weeks, we'll be installing more tools to monitor memory and general server usage more intelligently. 

Sorry again for the downtime, but rest assured that we'll be doing our best to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Not a huge update, but we just pushed some changes to help with project loading performance.  This should take care of the vast majority of slow script errors that people were getting on larger projects (and you get a nifty progress bar as your project loads).  As with all things performance, there is definitely more I can (and plan to) do to speed things up, but I think this is a good start in the right direction.

As always, let us know if you run into any issues or have any other feedback!