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!

We just pushed out a bunch of fixes and new stuff.  The new stuff includes:

• Automatic filler text when you add Text Area widgets.  It keeps the filler text until you change it - hopefully this will make it easier to designate text areas in your mockups when you don't want to come up with something brilliant to write in them.
• Resizable pages panel.  A lot of people with a lot of pages have been asking for this one.  You should now be able to resize the pages panel by hovering your mouse over the bottom edge of the panel, clicking, and dragging up or down.
• Selecting tabs in tab containers, links in link bars, buttons in button bars, etc.  Just put an asterisk next to the element you want to appear in a selected state.  
• Improved interaction with menu items.  The cursor should change when you hover over a clickable menu item

This was by far our most requested feature, so we're excited to say that you can now export your mockups to a PDF or a zip file of PNGs!  If you load up Mockingbird, you should see an "Export" drop-down in the menubar now.  Click that, and then PDF or PNG to get a nice, crunchy, print-quality local copy of your mockup.  And, as usual, please let us know if you experience any bugs.

We also added two new widgets: a vertical link list and a close button.

Happy holidays!

We've made a few small changes and fixes (and some under the hood):

A few people reported accidentally navigating away from Mockingbird (by pressing the back button or closing a tab) and losing their work.  We just implemented an alert so that you'll be asked if you really, REALLY want to leave the page if you've got unsaved changes.  Probably you do not want to leave the page, in which case you can click "Cancel" and breathe a sigh of relief, crisis averted.