Short Version:

Brian and I (Dave) have decided to go different directions day-job-wise and we are no longer taking on client work for the foreseeable future as Made By Rocket.

More Details Version:

In 2011, we had a client we developed a great relationship with – a young, motivated group who were running a branding/design shop in Austin, Texas. We worked closely with them to develop an interactive children’s storybook series called Plug & The Paddywhacks. During that process, we both realized we had complimentary skills and became good friends. Toward the end of the year we had a ‘just–throwing–this–out–there’ discussion and, long-story-short, decided to merge forces and start a new company together.

During some of our initial discussions, Brian decided he wanted to do his own thing instead, but both Derrick and I made the transition to the new company.

In working through the details of the new company, we came up with a great name and decided to call the new company… (wait for it)… “Rocket.” Yep, same company name, but a completely new legal entity. But, now we are calling RocketMobile.co home (much more in the works on the new site).

As part of this transition, Brian decided to pick up and move from Boise to Seattle – where he is now working for himself, learning the metro, and often found dancing in the rain. He can still be found at bricooke.com or @bricooke.

I also picked up and moved, but from Boise to Austin – where we are working on building a great new company and eating some delicious BBQ. In just a few short months we already have a great team in place and some really awesome clients lined up. I can still be found at davekeller.me or @daveykeller.

We are taking on select new projects in the new company, so if you do have a great project in mind, hit us up over at RocketMobile.co and we’d be happy to talk details.

As for Made By Rocket apps, Brian and I will continue to support those and are planning on keeping the apps we built together alive and well.

In all, building Made By Rocket from the ground up was monumental for both of us. We spent 2.5 years of our lives learning to build a business that allowed us to make great things and feed our families. We worked with so many great clients and are really proud of all the apps and sites, large and small, we built together. We’re extremely appreciative to all of you who have paid us money or otherwise supported our efforts.

We’re very excited about these changes and both feel like these were the best possible outcomes for both our sanity, careers and families. In fact, we pretty much feel like this.

So, what’s new?:

Lion support: Galleried 1.5 was functional in Lion, but it had some major issues. All of those have been addressed in 2.0 and we’ve added support for full screen mode.

New detail sidebar: The new sidebar shows you details about the site or dribbble shot you’re looking at.

View dribbble comments: For dribbble shots, you can now see the comments within Galleried. The new sidebar includes a ‘comments’ section that you can expand to see all the comments without having to leave Galleried.

New ‘zoomed’/detail view: The biggest problem with 1.5 on Lion was how the detail view looked. We re-wrote that and added a progress bar to show better feedback while downloading the detailed screenshot.

Random button: Want to quickly skim through your entire library in Galleried? Just keep clicking ‘random’ in the detail view and see where it takes you.

We have been building a new marketing site and were going to try to have that up before releasing, but also know that this version fixes some problems in Lion and adds other much requested functionality, so we chose not to wait…

Enjoy!

Concentrate was denied (thrice) from the Mac App Store due to the fact that it requires root (admin) access to block domains (like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If apps have root access, the authors can write malicious code that could hurt your computer – obviously something we’d never do, but Apple doesn’t want to be liable for anything that could go wrong there.

Mac App Store

We feel that blocking domains is at the core of Concentrate, so we brainstormed and attempted three different ways to go about it, but no luck – rejected each time, citing the same issue. We ultimately appealed and talked to a (rather nice) Apple representative who said they are aware of the issue and the fact that it affects a lot of third-party software. He said they would take the issue into more consideration in the future, but for now remains a rule.

So, in all, we are very thankful for the positive feedback we’ve gotten from Concentrate users, which will only be available in the rocket store for the time being. If we have any ingenious ideas how to get around it, we’ll be sure to let everyone know, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. You’ll turn blue.

Galleried 1.5

We’ve put a lot of thought (and late nights) into these updates and are happy to announce the latest versions are now in the App Store.

For, Galleried 1.5 we added:

• Support for Dribbble shots!
• Ability to enable/disable specific Gallery feeds.
• Ability to filter sites by Gallery in the source list
• Ability to see only sites you added.
• Ability to resize the thumbnails.
• Refined UI.

For Launch it! 2.0 we added:

Launch it! 2.0

• A completely new user interface.
• Ability to assign multiple apps to one shortcut (I have a “start my day” shortcut that opens all the apps I need to get going).
• Ability to assign one or more websites to a shortcut.
• Ability to mix websites and applications in one shortcut.

We’re really proud of both of these updates and hope they make your life better/easier/more fun.

Grab Launch it! here and Galleried here. Hammer time.

Add sites to Galleried

1. The much requested ability to add your own sites to Galleried. Word to your mother! Read the three easy ways you can now do this here.


2. All high-res screenshots all the time! We’ve taken it upon ourselves to take our own screenshots of every site featured (rather than depend on feeds from design galleries). We’re serving these via Amazon’s CloudFront CDN, meaning that although the images are now higher-res and bigger files, they should still load pretty quick.


3. Better syncing. This is mostly under the hood, but you should see better syncing between your iOS devices and your Mac.


4. Running totals. We’ve added running tallies to your favorites and each of your “Collections” to give you a better visual of how many sites each folder contains.

We’ve also added a FAQs/Extras page to give you more details into functionality/questions you may not have known.

We really appreciate all the feedback, both love and criticism, that we’ve gotten to this point. We definitely see Galleried as a product we want to continue developing/polishing/hugging and already have more in mind for the future releases. But for now, I really need to get to bed.

Launch it!

The Mac App Store opens tomorrow. It’s gonna be pretty pretty cool, right? Who knows. Regardless of its coolness, we’re excited to pre-announce two new apps for Mac that will be in the store on day 1: Launch it! and a desktop version of Galleried.

Launch it! is a menubar app that let’s you create keyboard shortcuts to launch or activate your most used apps. This is something I wrote shortly after we formed rocket but never thought to productize. While brainstorming ideas for the new Mac App Store I explained and showed Dave what Launch it! was all about and he bought in. We cleaned it up and submitted for review. It will be available for $4.99 in the store tomorrow. If you’d like to test a trial version of Launch it!, send us an email to launchit-trial@madebyrocket.com. The trial restricts the number of shortcuts you can have.

Galleried for Mac

Galleried for Mac is just like Galleried for iOS, except on the Mac. But also lets you organize sites into collections. The idea is: you browse sites using Galleried for iOS while you’re out and about, then you come back to your desktop and review them in more detail and organize them for later. Galleried syncs your favorites between your devices and your Macs using Dropbox. Syncing requires iOS version 1.2, which is currently “In Review”. We’re hoping it’s available soon. Galleried for Mac will be $9.99 and will be available tomorrow. Galleried for iOS will remain free.

Regarding our other Mac apps, rooSwitch and Concentrate: rooSwitch will be in the store for $18.99 on day 1. As for Concentrate, it was rejected for asking for admin privileges (which was needed to block websites, a pretty key feature). We’ve worked around this in an update and it’s currently “In Review” again. We’re hoping it gets into the store within the first week. Both rooSwitch and Concentrate will continue to be sold through store.madebyrocket.com.

That’s all for now. You’re my best friend!

Concentrate 1.2

What’s new?

• Added ability to hide the dock icon
• Lots of UI improvements
• 64 bit support
• Fixed bugs related to changing desktop pictures on Mac OS 10.6
• Fixed bugs related to how Concentrate works with Spaces

We’re also happy to announce that Dave gave Concentrate a brand new website: http://getconcentrating.com It’s not a complete overhaul like the rocket site got, but it’s a super solid update. Oh, and it includes a fancy new screencast. Check it out!

5 days passes

Galleried

Brian: 1.0 submitted to Apple!

Of course those 5 days were pretty crazy. Galleried is a pretty simple app, but we each had some interesting problems to solve. It was fun though.

Version 1.0 was approved by Apple 7 days later, but we never released it. We took another week to add a couple features and fine tune a few things to make it something we’re proud of. And we are. Give it a try! It’s free* http://getgalleried.com

* We’ll likely be adding ads soon. Oh, don’t worry, they’ll be classy. You’ll like them.

This is a thumbnail!

It’s been over a year since we started rocket and created our initial website, so we decided it was time for an update. We started over from scratch and designed a whole new layout with the thought that we needed something easier to update with new releases.

As a teaser, we’ve been working on a few of our own apps in between client work and will be announcing an exciting new iPhone/iPad app really soon. We’re also working hard to finish Get Profiting (which is now in public beta).

Anyway, please take the new site for a spin, see what we’ve been up to lately and let us know what you think!

Mac App Store countdown

So I did. Then Brian made it work. It was all on a whim, but it was fun. Plus, we used it to test out our new Type Kit account. Then we decided to include some shameless self-promotion, cause hey, look at that guy over there.

Anyway, hopefully it helps a few other people, but if not, at least I can now stop all those mindless jibber-jabbery questions:

MacAppStore.in