The Moqups Team Blog

A new beginning

…sure feels like one, with a new infrastructure, a fresh set of features and new challenges ahead of us. Let me give you a tour of what you’re seeing in the new Moqups app.

New stuff for everyone

You’ll notice we simplified the interface, in part to make it less intimidating and also to make room for some things that are coming in the following months. In addition:

We consolidated stencil linking and the new Hotspots and added handy keyboard shortcuts. Now you can create interactive areas over the images you upload.

To aid in drawing diagrams and notes, we’ve added diagonal lines and arrowheads for all lines.

Emil created a new image placeholder stencil which now scales nicely.

We added a note stencil to annotate your designs.

Premium features

We’ve invested a lot of energy in The Perks of Having a Premium Subscription:

Master pages help you set a common base for your pages.

Live collaboration on projects to make teams more efficient (props to teammate Adi).

Unlimited revisions for your projects, for when you want to save snapshots of your progress or branch off in a different direction.

The ability to create private projects, visible only to the collaborators you invite to the project.

Commenting in both the project editor and the viewer.

Unlimited archived projects, to help you manage your project quota.

What happened to free forever?

If you’ve been with us before this, you might get the feeling things are somehow restricted. “Don’t mess with the users” was a constant discussion while we navigate the intricacies of making a sustainable product.

New, free users get the chance to use Moqups in a casual manner: two projects and all the features of Moqups v1 and more. But what does the change mean to veteran users? If you had a lot of projects, you will see a message that you’ve exceeded the quota for the free account. Other than that, you can continue to use your existing projects exactly as before, with all the old features enabled. We hope this is a helpful compromise. Drop us a line through the feedback widget or on support at moqups dot com, we would love to know your thoughts on this. Also, we’ve put together a page with questions you might have.

What’s next?

We will continue to improve and add new features to both the free and premium versions of Moqups, based on our internal roadmap and your wonderful suggestions. As always, use the feedback widget and our email addresses to ask us anything.

– Team Moqups

P.S. If you bump into any issue with the new release, please contact us at support at moqups dot com with the details. We’re caffeinated and ready to tackle them.

P.P.S. We even have a Facebook page now!

Two little patches just landed in Moqups:

• Dan (AKA Dan from Moqups) added Blokk like experimental support for the Paragraph stencil. He’s still undecided whether the Blokk style or Redacted is the way to go, so maybe you guys can help him make up his mind a bit  
• You can now use Markdown to format the contents inside Grid/Table stencils. This means you can now apply basic formatting to the text inside the grid cells.

As always,  we’re eager to hear your amazing ideas, so please leave your feedback in our awesome community.

P.S. – By popular demand, we’ve created a homepage with some basic info about the team behind Moqups. Go check it out if you haven’t already!

What have we been up to at Moqups HQ…

…instead of updating our team blog? We basically spent the last few months working our rear ends off to bring you some long-awaited features and generally making sure Moqups runs smoothly. And while we’re still polishing a few things, we thought it would be a good idea to release the first batch of fresh stuff, some of which you might have noticed when you logged into your Moqups account.

Export projects to your Dropbox or Google Drive

Have the PDF/PNG version of your projects delivered to your Dropbox or Google Drive account, presto. Ultimately we will have tighter integration with GDrive for things like shortcuts to your projects and the ability to create mockups on the spot.

Grid systems

You can now find new grid options under Project settings (a.k.a. the cog thing on the top). They’re standard 960px-based systems used throughout CSS frameworks and we’ll add the ability for custom ones momentarily.

Note: Don’t forget to select Snap to grid to help you align objects to the grid columns.

Avatars

In preparation for the collaboration features, we’ve added avatars to our user accounts. To use this feature, you will need a Gravatar account associated with the email you use on Moqups. Go on, put a pretty face on that wireframe!

Soon: premium features

Some things coming your way: live collaboration; feedback tools; master pages; sharing and privacy settings. If these are your cup of tea you can follow @moqups so you don’t miss the big day.

Postscript: Moqups, in numbers

As we speak: 6 folks — you’ll meet us as soon as we can get some decent mugshots, 50,000 users, 22,000+ Chrome installs and a ton of good karma on Twitter and other media outlets. Things are, as Larry David would put it, pretty pretty pretty good.

See you soon,
Dan and the Moqups team

Changelog:

• Bug fix: Exporting very large projects to PDF should work fine now.
• Feature: By popular demand, you can now make copies of your projects. You can access this new functionality by clicking the Save Project as menu item under the Moqups logo as well as under the Duplicate icon in the My Projects dialog.

A new version of Moqups that includes several bug fixes and improvements is now available for everyone.

Here’s what we’ve done:

• New iPad stencil
• New Tree stencil
• The iOS button stencil can be resized both vertically and horizontally
• Configurable line height support for the Paragraph stencil
• Buttons stencils can now be smaller than 16 pixels
• CMD+SHIFT+? will now open the Keyboard shortcuts dialog for Mac users (F1 is many times conflicting with the Brightness adjustment on Macs)
• Better visual feedback when saving and autosaving
• Projects in Edit mode have their own URL (useful for bookmarking)
• Fixed some server side issues when saving big projects
• Offline Lost Project Recovery –  click the Moqups logo and then “Recovery” in case of a connection problem or browser crash.
• Moved to a new, more powerful cloud infrastructure thanks to our incredible folks at SoftLayer. This should dramatically improve our recent scalability and stability issues that hit us due to the incredible demand.
• Many other things that are invisible for your eyes but make Moqups more snappy and stable overall.

A fix for failed PDF exports on very big projects is also pending, so please bare with us just a little bit more.

Most of these changes are in response to our amazing community, so THANK YOU and please keep feeding us with your creative ideas or issue reports.