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At Agile 2008, Atlassian partner, Pyxis Technologies will be demoing GreenHopper, GreenPepper, JIRA and Confluence. The new release of GreenHopper 3.0 has many new and improved features including "Quick Card Creation". Stop by booth 824 for a demo.
On Wednesday, Pyxis will sponsor a Texas Hold'em poker tournament! If you are lucky, you might win a prize from Atlassian.
Also, be sure to check out VersionOne's integration with JIRA.
Laura blogged about Balsamiq on the News Blog, but this is just too cool not to share here on Dev Blog. New Atlassian partner, Balsamiq, has released an amazing new tool called Mockups: it's a flash-based drawing tool that is built specifically for designing software GUIs.
Lots of designers preach the value of designing paper prototypes before you start to code a feature. And we do it ourselves for much of our feature design. Some of the most productive design sessions I have involve nothing more than the whiteboard. But as fast as it is, there are still some shortcomings. But what happens when you need to have a design session with someone seven thousand miles away? Or what happens when you need a record of what you just designed? (I can't count the times I've taken a digital photo of a whiteboard but then never managed to get the photo uploaded to the right spot.)
And besides, we make a wiki! We've moved beyond static Word documents -- God forbid we regress all the way back to paper!
Fortunately, Balsamiq mockups solves exactly this problem. It's a collaborative design tool that works right in your browser. Which is great, but what makes Balsamiq really stand out is how tightly focused it is. Everything is geared toward imitating the experience of designing on paper: the whole app even looks like a sketch pad.
Across the top, you'll see some of Mockups' huge library of GUI elements. You can drop and drop, resize, re-title, and reposition inside your design. But they looks like they were drawn with a felt tip pen -- you can't get too caught up in making things pixel-perfect, or worrying about color and fonts choices. Paper prototyping is way to early in the design process for those decision. By enforcing some of the same constraints as paper, Mockups forces you to get down to the real task of design, and prevents you from being distracted by visual styling.
Check out this 2.5 minute video to see how it all works:
And you can do an amazing amount of design with these simple elements. Check out the example gallery.
Mockups is super-easy to use: it's all drag and drop. You can use Mockups in Confluence or to enhance design or requirements documents, or Mockups in JIRA to illustrate tasks or bugs. Find out more about mockups, including licensing and price, on the Balsamiq site. Go try it out!
A few days ago, we rolled out a significant update to our hosted development tool, JIRA Studio.
First, we've upgrade JIRA Studio to Confluence 2.8. Laura posted all the details about 2.8 earlier, but in brief, Confluence 2.8 features an updated user interface focused on making our Wiki easier to use (and look at), better searching, and more, for a total of over 90 improvements. Check out Laura's Post for more details on Confluence 2.8.
Speaking of search, this update to JIRA Studio includes Studio-wide searching. The search box found on every page now allows you to search across Issues, Wiki pages, Reviews, and Code. And you can filter the results based on Project. Have a look:
Performance was another focus of this update, and you'll see big improvements in the Source and Review tabs.
Finally, we now allow certain 3rd party plugins to be installed into your JIRA Studio Instance. Currently we support Gliffy and EditGrid for Confluence. EditGrid and Gliffy licenses are, as they say, sold separately. Check out the JIRA Studio Plugin Policy for complete details.
We're back with a fresh round of Atlassian User Groups, designed to help you meet customers, developers and discover more about our products and the Atlassian community!
To sign up for any of our user groups, please visit this page.
Someone recently delicioused Michael Ogawa's code_swarm project. It provides neat little visualisations of all the commits to a source code repository, focussing on interactions between all the different committers.
It turned out to be quite easy to create a JIRA code swarm. The project is open source with some pretty good instructions. It uses the processing framework to generate visualisations. I made some quick modifications to add images for committers (if available) and stop them from overlapping too much. Here's the history of JIRA:
Each of the particles represents a file that was committed. The particules will hover around the author that committed them. Particles are also colour coded:
Charles was kind enough to create a video for Confluence (using the original code swarm project):
Here's a look back on some of the art of Atlassian, from tshirts to logos. The stuff shown here is the work of our ace designer, Jason... Jason, ya done good!
Tshirts
"Atlassian should be known for their T-shirts."
Of course we'd like to be remembered as the company that makes the most fantastic bug tracker, enterprise wiki, code review tool, etc., but in the end, we may be known as the company that produced awesome tshirts. ;)
Our enterprise customers get free tshirts. Some of the ones shown below were made for employees only or given out to different groups. We sell some shirts on the Atlassian gear store.
Home page headlines
These are graphics that we've run on the website home page.
"Charlie"
Charlie has become the unofficial nickname of our logo. It was derived from Charles Atlas, the early 20th Century poster boy for fitness. Here are some different takes on our Charlie.
Meeting rooms
On the glass of the Sydney office meeting rooms, you'll see Charlie peeking into your strategy meeting.
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