After a small battle with the app review team, Galleried v2.0 is now available in the Mac App Store and is a free upgrade for existing owners of Galleried v1.0.

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!

We love the Mac App Store. It just makes buying apps easy. We love having our other Mac apps (Galleried and Launch it!) in the store. But, unfortunately, it looks like Concentrate won’t be allowed in any time soon.

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.

Since the release of the Mac App Store, we’ve had some decent success and gotten some great feedback for both Galleried and Launch it!.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that our latest submissions of Galleried for Mac and iOS have been approved! These updates include the following:

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!

Dave: I want an app to quickly browse sites featured on design galleries

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!

Over the last week, I’ve asked Brian a handful of times “When does the new Mac App Store open?” Yesterday, after asking one more time, he said, “Why don’t you just make a countdown, you big dummy.”

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

Our latest and greatest creation has just entered a public beta: http://getprofiting.com

Elevator pitch

Help freelancers and small teams reach their financial goals by always knowing how much they’ve earned vs. where they need to be.

Get Profiting

The story

Over the past year, we’ve continuously had a difficult time knowing where we stood financially throughout the month. Although we use Quickbooks Online (bookkeeping) and Harvest (time tracking/estimating/invoicing), it always took a lot of time just to figure out where we stood vs. where we wanted/needed to be.

Realizing that Harvest had a robust API, I went to work hacking together a rough first version of what is now Get Profiting. It would download the information on how many hours we worked on each project and then compare that with a monthly goal for our team. Seeing how many hours you should have at any given point in the month and seeing how many you do gave us the financial transparency we needed. Due to Get Profiting, we have daily motivation to reach our goals and the last two months have been our best months so far.

As Get Profiting completely changed our productivity for the better, we thought it might be useful to clean it up and put it out there for others suffering the same problems. So here she is.

What’s it cost?

It’ll be completely free during the beta. When we release 1.0 (sometime in Nov, hopefully) we will add a reasonable monthly fee for the full featured version. There will always be a free version, but it will have a minimum feature set and will be restricted in how often you can refresh the information.

If you do give it a spin, please let us know what you think.