Hi and welcome to Mocksup
If you’ll indulge me, this post will be a quick history of how Mocksup came to be.
Finding a problem to solve
Last year I was working on a big redesign of our site at work, with lots of mockups but no way to get them in front of my coworkers (well, no way that didn’t involve all hell breaking loose in the form of jumbled email threads and mixed up version numbers).
I thought to myself, “There’s got to be a webapp out there already that lets you upload mockups, link them together to create a psuedo-prototype and then organize the feedback. And if not, I’m going to make one.”
I googled around and, sure enough, I came across a just launched service that did what I was looking for. I signed up and immediately started uploading my mockups.
Building a better mousetrap
As I used it, though, I kept coming across all its bugs and inadequacies. I took notes as I continued using it and eventually sent a dozen or so bullet points to the developers as feedback for how I, as a potential heavy user, thought they might improve the app. The first couple of weeks a few things got updated, but from then on nothing. I still used the product, because at its core it was extremely useful, but it was never a pleasant experience.
So, in August of 2009, when my co-worker Jim “Sideburner” Van Fleet asked if I wanted to do the 2009 Rails Rumble, I said “hells yes” and suggested the beginnings of Mocksup as the project we work on. He agreed and we set to work.
If it weren’t for a jQuery rabbit hole I fell into on Sunday and a last second check-in bumble I made, we probably would have done a bit better in the voting. But that was okay because we decided to take the impressive progress we’d made in just a couple of days and build a business out of it.
To the future and beyond
What you can signup for and start using today is the result of all of our work since then. The app has really come a long way! And while we still have a long way yet to go, we already have a few regular clients and are using it everyday ourselves, so it can only improve.
So, if you read this far and still haven’t signed up yet, what are you waiting for? Get to mocksupping.