Bottle Rocket has chosen Habitat for Humanity as its charity of of the month. Habitat for Humanity International is a nonprofit, nondenominational Christian housing ministry. Habitat welcomes all people—regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or any other difference—to build simple, decent, affordable houses with those who lack adequate shelter. Habitat affiliates work locally in communities around the world to select and support homeowners, organize volunteers and coordinate house building. Homeowners are selected based on their need for housing, their ability to repay a mortgage and their willingness to work in partnership with Habitat.

Since its founding in 1976, Habitat for Humanity has helped build over 400,000 houses, providing shelter for more than 1.75 million people around the world.

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Bottle Rocket Apps hosted a group of future mobile developers from St Mark's School of Texas last Friday. The students learned about Bottle Rocket's process for approaching strategy and pencil design thanks to Creative Director Michael Griffith, spent some time discussing market trends and opportunities with President Calvin Carter and received a few sneak peaks at upcoming apps from Production Manager Matt Johnson.  The Q&A session was lively with questions ranging from working with data feeds to in app purchase considerations.  Bottle Rocket would like to thank the Dr. Kenyon and the class for taking time to come and tour our offices and remind us that the future of app development is very bright!

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The PBS app for iPhone and iPod touch is currently featured by Apple at the top of the New and Noteworthy section of the iTunes App Store.

The app, developed for PBS by Bottle Rocket Apps, features more than 300 hours of free video, including full-length programming from FRONTLINE, PBS Newshour, and others, as well as scheduling details, previews, and a new tune-in reminder calendar that can be synched with iCal.

PBS for iPhone and iPod touch [link opens in iTunes Preview] debuted on January 8, 2011.  Since then, it has risen to the #7 most popular Entertainment app and the #37 free app on the entire App Store.

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The Apple Stores are sporting a new, dynamic mobile in their display windows.  Each of the items hanging from the mobile is an icon of a well-known popular app for the iPad or iPhone (or both).

Guess what app is the only one appearing on the mobile twice?

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January 12 marked the first anniversary of the initial release of Bottle Rocket's Doodle Bomb to the iTunes App Store.  The award-winning game enables players to blast their way through 77 mind-bending physics puzzles to achieve the ultimate goal of "Bomb Master".  Along the way, the player interacts with unique physics-driven machines and characters who will help--or hurt--his attempt to infiltrate the enemy base using as few bombs as possible.

We would like to say thanks to the almost 1,000,000 users who have downloaded Doodle Bomb to date.  Don't let anyone tell you this game isn't addictive:  those users have spent more than 125 person-years playing the game.  In more than 7.3 million sessions, they've completed 28.7 million missions, and retried another 22 million.

And 40,355 players have earned the coveted title of Bomb Master by completing all of the levels of the game. So far.

It's no wonder that Doodle Bomb at one point was the third most popular free app on the App Store (when it went free for a day as part of a special promotion), received 5 stars and an Editors Choice award from Macworld, and was at various times included in Apple's hand-picked lists of Best Doodle Games, What's Hot, New and Noteworthy, and Staff Favorites.

The Bottle Rocket team celebrated with a cupcake party and--of course--lots of doodles.  (Click through for larger photos.)  So happy birthday, Doodle Bomb!

[buy Doodle Bomb from the App Store]

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