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Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#71

Post by adambenayoun »

jakobe wrote: post #70
adambenayoun wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share your marketing channels? Are you spending money on Ads?

I assume most people find my app directly on the Mac App Store. There is the "Search App Store..." button that Mac OS displays when you double click an unknown file type. I think that's important for my app, but I have no numbers to back that up. On the website, I get some hits from fileinfo.com. I also posted to a couple of forums where people asked how to open mdb files on a Mac. I tried to be as little spammy as p…

Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#72

Post by terhechte »

ShellfishMeme wrote: post #69
terhechte wrote: post #14

I'm a lone developer hacking away on a couple of Mac apps. I also have a few iPhone apps, but these generate little to no income. The Mac apps are better. Most notable is InstaDesk ( http://www.instadesk-app.com ) which generates my main income and I can live off it thus living the dream (i.e. right now I'm sitting outside in a small cafe, enjoying the sun, watching people, and fixing a couple of bugs for the upcomin…

I just looked at http://www.instadesk-app.com and noticed that you forgot to add class="teaser-imag-container" to two of your slider image containers. That causes the padding to be off and the images overlay the text. Just thought I'd tell you.

Thanks a lot! Fixed it right away :)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#73

Post by FigBug »

gawker wrote: post #35
terhechte wrote: post #14

I'm a lone developer hacking away on a couple of Mac apps. I also have a few iPhone apps, but these generate little to no income. The Mac apps are better. Most notable is InstaDesk ( http://www.instadesk-app.com ) which generates my main income and I can live off it thus living the dream (i.e. right now I'm sitting outside in a small cafe, enjoying the sun, watching people, and fixing a couple of bugs for the upcomin…

Do you mind if I ask how you go about learning how to build Mac OS apps? I've seen a ton of tutorials for iOS but hardly anything for Mac OS.

'Become an XCoder' free eBook that is a fairly basic introduction to Objective-C and Cocoa programming.

'From C++ to Objective-C' is also good eBook. http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-obj...

I also bought 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-3rd-Edition/dp/0...

Cocoa is quite different than anything I had programmed before. Once I wrapped my head around nibs, IBOutlets and IBActions it was fairly easy. Once I got going, the apple developer docs were all I needed, but learning I found easier to do from a book than the docs.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#74

Post by jetti »

jaredsohn wrote: post #59
jetti wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swing vs Native isn't the issue. The issue becomes users using old versions of your software and having to support them when bugs pop up, even though it may be fixed in the newer versions. It is hard to get everybody up to the latest version (even if the upgrades are free). It can eat up a lot of time doing support. Whereas, when you make your app a web app, the changes you make are instant (for better or worse) and…

>It is hard to get everybody up to the latest version (even if the upgrades are free) Automatic patching helps with this, although it requires a little more work designing a patching system (you might not want everyone hitting your servers at once), and it doesn't affect everyone (some people's computers are offline or require a proxy to be set up for patching.)

That is true, but even that has its caveats. Depending on who your target is, the user may be skeptical of a program "phoning home" on its own every so often.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#75

Post by jmcqk6 »

EwanToo wrote: post #39
gawker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem like there's no single distribution channel that a Windows app developer can reach out?

Windows 8 aims to fix that with a built-in app store, it's a bit simplistic so far but works. Apps can either be hosted on the Windows app store, or it can be hosted by the developer with just a link from the app store to a download page.

It's important to note that "Desktop Apps" in the windows 8 world are only going to be links from the app store. The developer / company will need to provide their own billing, hosting, deploying, updates, etc. Also, only companies will be able to get desktop apps listed in the app store.

For "metro style apps" i.e. apps that are full screen and run on the Metro version of the .NET framework, those get the full app store experience, and will be able to be submitted by individual developers (i.e. not full companies)

More information here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/06/08/list...

Also, it's important to note that for "metro style apps" you existing libraries will likely have to be rewritten. If you've architected your application well, and only need to change the UI of your app for a different platform, this isn't possible with Metro-style, as far as I can tell. Your libraries have to be of a special type - a "metro class library" - in order for them to be referenced by your metro-style app. So far, I've been very frustrated by this experience and may just bite the bullet and go with the other hosting option.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#76

Post by jetti »

nanijoe wrote: post #57
kaitnieks wrote: post #8

We are (at http://www.blumentals.net ). Windows apps, in fact, and not for big companies but regular people. I don't know what to tell you, the market is far from dead, maybe it will be dead someday, but right now things are fine. The hardest thing about making mass-distributed Windows apps is getting your good app to the customer through a pile of crappy ones.

What do you develop Windows app with? I've been toying with making a Windows version of web only app I am working on, but so far the only option seems to be using C# with .NET. Are there any other options out there? (Not that I have an issue with C#)

I'm not the OP but there are a bunch of options:

- C++ (with all of the variety of GUI frameworks) - Delphi - Java - D (again with GUI frameworks) - Python

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#77

Post by yolesaber »

saddino wrote: post #28

In 2003 I began to supplement my contractor income by writing OS X apps as a sole indie developer and eventually went full time. In the first six years I made enough to live on. In 2008, mostly out of curiosity, I wrote a free iOS app and started a small company to publish it. This company made no revenue in its lifetime but was acquired this year. My return from that acquisition exceeds the revenue I earned from my…

What was the app?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#80

Post by guilloche »

GFischer wrote: post #64
guilloche wrote: post #50

I used to develope desktop applications for security printing. In such a niche market, it is very hard to gain customers. Now I moved to web application and launched online Torapp guilloche designer ( http://www.torapp.info ). Hopefully things will be better.

What's your market? Aren't you replicating the problem? (it's still a very niche market). I hadn't heard of guilloche before now. Also, the website doesn't look professionaly designed - maybe you don't need it to, but it might help.

Yeah, the security printing software is still a very niche market. I need to consider using some of the expertise to something on mobile.
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