It’s been 16 months since Jumpchart first launched and, so far, it’s been great. From the very beginning, Jumpchart was blessed by many great reviews and even more exciting to us is that Jumpchart has become such an integral part of so many people’s daily workflow (including our own). But now it’s time to take Jumpchart forward. For the last few months we’ve been working on a major refresh of Jumpchart: Internally, we’ve been using the new version for some time now and we’re really excited about the changes, both in terms of UI efficiency and in terms of the features that we’ve added. While we’re working out the final details and getting ready to send this update out into the world we thought it’d be nice to share some of the finer points of the new Jumpchart.

Wider Content Area
Thankfully, narrow screen widths have all but gone to live with the dinosaurs – last month, for example, only 0.16% of users accessing Jumpchart were on 800×600 monitors. With that in mind, one simple, but significant change coming to Jumpchart is a wider content area on each page. We’ve moved the sidebar navigation in order to liberate as much space as possible for your project’s content. You will soon have significantly more screen real-estate for focusing on what’s really important, the content of your projects.

Two column content
Websites are becoming increasingly complex and, as a result, planning and building those websites is also becoming more complex. As part of the Jumpchart refresh we’ve added the ability to create a second column of content on each page in order to create a more flexible and easier to understand content wireframe.

Each column operates separately and is editable on its own. And because we know that many of you love Jumpchart for it’s simplicity and focus on content, we’ve left the decision to use the two column layout up to you. On a page by page basis you can switch between one column and two columns from the new “Page Settings” pane. If you don’t need two columns, we won’t force you to use them.

Be sure to check back because over the next week or two we’ll be highlighting more of the changes and additions to the new Jumpchart.