From the beginning, Jumpchart has always been about making website planning quicker and easier. As designers and developers, planning has, historically, not been the most rewarding part of our jobs. Jumpchart was created out of a strong desire to ease the pain of planning. Originally, we built Jumpchart for ourselves and used it internally, but we quickly came to realize that there must be a lot of other people just like us. So we set Jumpchart free into the world, hoping that others would benefit from it just as we had, and hoping that we could create a viable source of revenue from it as well. Almost a year and a half later, it makes us incredibly proud that so many other studios have adopted Jumpchart for their website planning (12,000+ accounts and counting) and we’re happy to say that we are in fact turning a profit. But after 16 months, it’s time that we take Jumpchart to the next level. This is part two in our open ended series highlighting some of the changes coming to the new and improved Jumpchart. You can see the first post here.

New Textile Formatting Palette
The new Jumpchart sports a totally redesigned formatting palette. It’s now smaller in size and pops up right in context with the column that you are editing. We’ve also given the palette springy little sub-panes for quick access to files uploaded, internal links to other pages or to one of your snippets. Check out this quick video to see the new textile formatting palette in action:

Page utilities
Currently in Jumpchart, both global options and page specific options reside in the sidebar. While there isn’t anything particularly wrong with this, we’re committed to improving the efficiency of the UI. The first step we took was moving anything that had to do with the Jumpchart as a whole to the top of the page. That left the “Add file” option, which has to do with the specific page you’re working on. We grouped that at the bottom of the page, right next to the new “Page Settings” option.

Before



Now

Global options at the top, Page specific options at the bottom. Cleaner, clearer and it carried the added benefit of freeing up an awful lot of space for the content area.

Stay tuned for more news and updates about the new Jumpchart. Also, if you’ve built a site using Jumpchart, we’d love to highlight it here. Drop us a line and tell us about your experience, don’t forget to include a link to the live site as well.