Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#31

Post by nickjj »

I'd be careful about creating these types of apps because a lot of people (especially developers) value privacy.

What your describing is monitoring everything I do on my computer and then likely transmit it to your site. Even if it didn't transmit anything I would still be reluctant to use it unless it were open source.

To detect whether or not you're working on what you're supposed to be working on, you'll probably end up recording what window is focused every few seconds right? You might want to hack together an auto hotkey script (Windows) to do this. With a bit of AHK knowledge you could probably write a prototype in a day.

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#32

Post by jjp »

enjikaka wrote: post #10

Make a PWA and you cover Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android in one go.

Not sure that a PWA would have the scope of insight to know when you are skipping off the important task, e.g. playing solitaire vs coding, reading HN vs testing your app?

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#33

Post by johnmax »

fredley wrote: post #7

I wouldn't rely on anecdata from HN posters, who may or may not be representative of your potential market. Try and gather some data and see what it says, e.g. spend $5 on some facebook ads for your not-yet-existant product, and see the breakdown of OS's that hit your landing page.

Yes, it's a good point to do such market research. Will need to carefully structure the ads, to not skew the results (e.g. because users from one platform are cheaper per click, and thus will be preferred by Facebook)

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#35

Post by slantyyz »

bluedino wrote: post #12

Simple, the Mac. Huge bonus of being able to have it on the App Store and sell it for a couple bucks.

>> sell it for a couple bucks.

I would disagree with you on that point and say charge premium pricing ($10+) if the app is good.

People in general seem to think that they are entitled to a lot of support from App Store apps, even if the price is a buck (or to use the overused cliche of "less than a cup of coffee").

IMO, the higher price can help get rid of high support/low revenue users who can suck the life out of you.

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#36

Post by johnmax »

nickjj wrote: post #31

I'd be careful about creating these types of apps because a lot of people (especially developers) value privacy. What your describing is monitoring everything I do on my computer and then likely transmit it to your site. Even if it didn't transmit anything I would still be reluctant to use it unless it were open source. To detect whether or not you're working on what you're supposed to be working on, you'll probably…

Wow, AutoHotkey looks cool - maybe it is nice for doing a first prototype.

Yes, I would check the focused windows, but also would take screenshots to evaluate (with OCR/NLP) whether the email you are writing really relates to your todos.

I would not store those data, neither locally, nor transmit them to my servers, as I am very concerned about security (if my servers get hacked, then I don't want to have anything sensitive on them).

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#37

Post by johnmax »

bronak1 wrote: post #3

you can do both with https://electronjs.org/

Will definitely need to check this out.

I come from the mobile world, and my experience is, from myself and others, that cross-platform solutions always brought more pain than joy.

The latter solutions were great in theory, but created huge problems, when a little bit of a custom behaviour had to be implemented, maybe dependent on the target platform.

Also, when developing natively, there seems to be much more usable open-source code.

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#38

Post by fbelzile »

I run a bootstrapped desktop productivity software business myself. I'd say the split is somewhere around 70% Windows and 30% Mac (all self-marketing, no app stores). The mobile rush created a huge vacuum in the desktop market that I think enabled people like me to succeed. Not to mention, you're not giving a 30% cut to Apple or Google and can generally charge more than a few dollars for your app.

It's definitely easier for me to develop on Windows. Though, this is mainly because XCode performance is atrocious on my mac mini and packaging apps for outside the app store is pretty tedious. I still use a buggy tool that Apple hides very deeply on their developer portal (it involves installing an ancient version of XCode).

If you require a UI that is pretty heavy, here is my "secret" trick to save time when developing for both Windows and macOS:

1) Buy a basic HTML template online for your app's dashboard.

2) Don't use Electon. Your users WILL notice and complain about performance. Instead, use the native WebBrowser control in .NET for Windows and WebView using macOS to display your UI. Disable right clicking and highlighting using HTML/JS. To the user, it'll feel like any other native app. Add this meta tag to the HTML file to ensure the WebBrowser control knows to use new versions of IE to render the UI:

3) Use the built in script calling functions to transfer settings back and forth between the UI and main app in JSON. Do the back end stuff in native code.

4) You can then re-use most of the UI code you wrote to easily port over to macOS. Use the same functions and logic you wrote on Windows to make your Swift functions.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#39

Post by dmos62 »

Let me step back a tad and comment on your use case, i.e. needing to be reminded to work and not procrastinate. I largely solved this problem by adopting the Pomodoro technique. Following it, I subdivide my work time into periods of concentrated work (20mn in my case) and relaxation (3-5mn). This increases my effective work stamina very much, helps with motivation, and has other benefits. Related literature is plentiful.

Re: Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10?

#40

Post by johnmax »

fbelzile wrote: post #38

I run a bootstrapped desktop productivity software business myself. I'd say the split is somewhere around 70% Windows and 30% Mac (all self-marketing, no app stores). The mobile rush created a huge vacuum in the desktop market that I think enabled people like me to succeed. Not to mention, you're not giving a 30% cut to Apple or Google and can generally charge more than a few dollars for your app. It's definitely eas…

Great, thanks for the numbers and the advice.
Post reply on HN