We've been working on a lot of smaller fixes since our 1.0 launch in November, and I just wanted to give a quick listing of a few of the more important changes we've made since then:

• Fixed bug where the size of a widget would get reset when the widget's text or font is changed (this was our most requested bug fix)
• Fixed how unicode project names get displayed in the account management interface
• Fixed an issue with capitalization not being ignored for e-mail changes
• Started using secure cookies since we now run everything over HTTPS
• Lots of changes to improve connectivity to the Mockingbird real-time collaboration server that have resulted in a 50% decrease in disconnections to the real-time collaboration server
• Fixed bug where there would be a flicker when switching amongst pages in preview mode
• Fixed bug where your last opened project would show briefly when opening a new project.
• Fixed bug where, if you deleted a page that was linked to, clicking on that widget in preview mode would still try to navigate to the deleted page.
• Fixed bug where pressing the keyboard shortcut to open a file while the open dialog was already up would freeze the app
• Made a lot of dialogs that don't need to be modal not be modal
• Fixed bug where if you selected a bunch of widgets and then clicked within the selection but not on a widget directly, Mockingbird would deselect the widgets
• Fixed bug where undoing a color chang for a group widget would not update the color in the toolbar correctly
• Fixed bug where setting the font color on a group widget consisting of only text-based widgets would not work
• Fix bug where, if you deleted a widget, changed pages, then tried to undo, the widget would get re-added to the currently selected page instead of the page it was deleted from
• Fixed bug where horizontal list widgets, linkbars, horizontal link list widgets, and breadcrumbs widgets would sometimes load with a slightly different font size than what was set on them if autosize was on

This year has been an extremely exciting one for us.  Sheena and I started working on Mockingbird almost a year and a half ago when we were living on different coasts and realized how annoying it was to share wireframes with each other.  At the time, we knew that we wanted Mockingbird and had a hunch that a few others might feel the same way, but we had no idea that Mockingbird would have over 60,000 accounts created after only one year and turn into a crucial tool for so many organizations.  Seeing Mockingbird get used by others to make really cool new stuff is the best feeling in the world, and here's to seeing a lot more of it in the years to come.

We have a boatload of updates for you.

Mockingbird 1.0 is live!

 Mockingbird is now out of beta.  New users can sign up for a premium plan, and beta users can now upgrade.  (If you're a beta user, don't forget to check your e-mail for a 25% off discount code!)  You won’t pay for months you don't have active projects, and all plans include unlimited archived (read-only) projects.

Remember: beta users will keep full edit access to their projects for two more months whether or not they decide to upgrade to a paid plan (and read-only access after that).  More beta transition details.

Real-time collaboration

Multi-user editing is here -- and it's in real time!  You can check out the demo now to get a sense of how it feels.  

When you make an edit, your clients and teammates will see your changes instantaneously, making collaboration smooth, easy, and even fun.  We implemented our own operational transformation framework on top of Socket.io, Node.js and Redis to make sure multiple users can edit simultaneously without having to lock the page or overwrite each other's changes (we'll be writing more details in the coming weeks about the technology behind this on our tech blog).  We also made sure to optimize how we send your edits to other users so that the overall experience is speedy and frictionless.

To start collaborating, just send your project link to another user.  Your collaborator will be able to edit with you or see your edits in real time (depending on the project's access settings, which you can tweak by clicking the "Share" button in the toolbar).  

If a collaborator joins your project, you'll see a little Collaborators panel appear below the Widgets panel in the left sidebar.  When other users make changes, you'll see a highlight around the widget they just edited.

You can also check out the screencast below to see how it works.

Full permission control

Now that collaboration is here, we've beefed up the project permission settings.  You now have complete control over exactly who can see or edit your projects.  You can limit access to your company or, if you need even more fine-grained control, only specific individuals.  If you want to keep things simple, you can allow anyone with the link to access the project without having to log in.

(download)

Click here to download:

1-0-and-real-time-collaboration-xuCgudJrJwCDzrxJkwth.zip (47 KB)

Link directly to a project or page for editing or viewing

Your project link now shows up directly in your browser's URL bar, so you can just copy and paste it instead of having to open the Share panel to get the link.

We've also added the ability to share a link directly to a specific page.  This is especially helpful if you just want to point something out on one page of a project that has many pages.  While you're editing, your browser's URL bar will show a link to the exact page that you're editing.  The page identifier is the portion of the URL after the last slash.  If you omit a page identifier when you send the link to someone, the project will just open to the first page.

Back button support in preview mode

Your browser's back button now works when you navigate through your mockup in preview mode.  This should make for a more realistic browsing experience and will help you get feedback from clients and teammates on the flow of your wireframes.

Updated sidebar resizing

The sidebar is now much easier to manage.  You can easily resize any of the sections or collapse them by clicking the green headers.

New account management

You can now manage all your projects, collaborators, and account settings in one place.  The new account management panel is where you can rename projects, change project permissions, add users, transfer projects, upgrade your account, edit your billing details, and more.  Enter the account management panel by clicking on your name in the top right hand corner of the menubar and selecting "Manage Account" from the dropdown.

Thank you

We're happy to announce our two latest features:

Instant autosave

Mockingbird now saves your project as soon as you make any changes to it!  This should be a big help to any of you who have experienced browser or computer crashes.  Additionally, we've built this feature to only send your changes to the server and not your entire project - so even if you have a very large project, the autosaves will be fast. And for those of you who like using Mockingbird offline (though this is probably not a great idea for long periods of time), you can still do so - Mockingbird will detect when you've gone offline and enable a manual save button for you.  When you get back online, simply click this button, and you'll begin autosaving again.  In fact, should the auto-save fail for any reason at all, Mockingbird will give you the option to save manually so you have no fear of losing any project data.

HTTPS access

Some of you have probably noticed that Mockingbird now defaults to using HTTP secure .  We spent some time running some benchmarks and found that there was no noticeable difference in Mockingbird performance by turning on SSL/TLS, and the security benefits of doing so are huge.  All your interactions with the site are now encrypted and transported over a secure channel, so you should have no fear of making the master mockup of your super stealth startup using Mockingbird.

Finally, a lot of people have been asking us about our post-beta plans, and we just wanted to give you a quick update.  We're currently putting the finishing touches on real-time collaboration, testing things as much as possible and deploying bits and pieces of it to production (instant autosave actually uses all the infrastructure for real-time collaboration, which is one reason we're extremely excited to have it released) and on our completely new account management system.  We've also been beefing things up on the backend, adding even more backup locations for your project data and building out a lot of monitoring tools to make sure that the new features we release are working well.  We really want to get these features out, but we hope the extra time and thought we're putting into them will show.

Hope you guys enjoy our latest additions, and as usual, let us know if you have any feedback or issues!

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:

(download)

Click here to download:

Color.mov (1.98 MB)

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!