I've spent a lot of time over the years building mockups and demo videos for my apps with tools like Photoshop and After Effects, always frustrated by how tedious it was.
For the past year and a half, I've been working on building a better way.
MockRocket makes it easy to show off your app, right from your web browser–no experience required. Choose a template, drag and drop a screenshot or video and display it on a realistic 3D device model. You can even animate it to create a video.
You can customize as much or as little as you want, and export in up to 4K resolution. All rendering is done in the browser, not on a server–using WebGL and WebAssembly–so your imported designs stay 100% private.
This is the first release! Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions!
I saw a discussion on HN earlier today criticizing SPAs for offloading data processing to the user's machine, benefiting Facebook/Google/big tech at the expense of the user experience. I think that conversation sometimes misses the positive side of React/client-based apps.
MockRocket and other web-based creative tools demonstrate the strength of the web as an application platform, making complex tools more accessible and easily distributed than before. Derek's built a pretty slick editing & rendering experience that allows more people access to video editing, without having a powerful machine with a GPU. I'm incredibly impressed with the rendering fidelity he's been able to build into MockRocket and excited to play around with it more.
Another great application is https://www.photopea.com/ -- a pretty powerful photoshop competitor that also works exclusively in the browser. Looking forward to seeing more people build and distribute creative/technical tools that more people have access to.
Agreed–data processing on the user's device can certainly be abused in some cases, but when it's used right you can build some pretty amazing experiences with modern web APIs.
Closely following the development of WebGPU as well–I think that's going to enable a whole new class of web apps with serious graphics and compute power.
* https://twitter.com/dannygarcia/status/1220401033064484864
Definitely can't compete with those nice photorealistic reflections in Blender, but it's cool to see how close you can get with some of the other aspects in a pretty short amount of time!
2 devices + camera + laptop screen angle + depth of field blur, all animated in the same shot!
There are definitely some trade offs with doing it client side and even some nasty graphics driver bugs across devices (especially Intel integrated GPUs) that have taken quite a lot of work to figure out. For the most part it's worked out though and renders have been pretty consistent, both in my testing and from what customers have shared with me.
I do actually have server rendering built as well, and may enable it down the road for certain use cases, but it's much more expensive, especially because it needs real GPUs on cloud instances and those are obviously in very high demand these days on AWS and GCP.
* I cannot buy on mobile ("made for desktop" message). I'll check back on Desktop but not everybody will do.
* It's not clear to me if the launch sale fixes the price "forever" or just for the first year.
Yeah I'm still working on figuring out some fallbacks for mobile browsers. It's especially tricky to render videos on mobile, both due to CPU/GPU constraints and due to some missing APIs–even Safari desktop is tough at the moment. But I hear you, I'll try my best to figure out a solution, even if it's just image exports to start.
The sale price does indeed fix the price, it's an 80% discount recurring for as long as you keep the subscription. I'll clarify that!
For example, a video screencap of a mobile web page scrolling down. Or the interface changing due to a tap on a button.
I’m going to work on clarifying this on the landing page.
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