301–310 of 356 posts
Sorry, chief. I've been a macOS dev for 10 years now. I think charging a subscription for a menubar app with a singular use-case is just the absolute worst. "not one time payment because I don't know what would the right price be for supporting an app for years to come and still have people willing to pay for it" The right price would be about $5-10. If you want to be kind, $0.
A subscription for an app that fixes what is considered a minor annoyance? It’s a menu bar app at best. This should be a one time payment. If maintenance is required for future macOS versions, then publish new app and charge one time fee. Many app devs use this same model with success (rogue amoeba comes to mind). Don’t be greedy
Well, one thought about your pricing model - you’re thinking that it might need work in the future, but you’re charging each month without delivering any additional value to customers. How about charging additional money for each new major version, corresponding to either new feature development or support for new versions of the OS?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a Bluetooth issue years ago. Now it's only an Apple issue where it can't use a more decent codec. On Linux you can choose the mSBC codec and get decent two-way quality on a modern headset.
>Bluetooth issue Its a licensing issue. The borderlands between the headset and headphone profiles are rife with licensing land-mines - developers have flipped the table and rage-quit the issue, and this technical debt has been shipped. (Disclaimer: I make headset/headphone firmware for a major competitor and deal with this issue every single week...)
My sympathies, and I appreciate your willingness to wade through neck deep licensing excrement to produce something that still works.
I learned something today! Didn't realize that the microphone could throw off audio quality indirectly. Sidenote: this might do well on SetApp.
A2DP is how you send high quality audio over standard Bluetooth. The basic codec is OK, and you can negotiate much better ones. It's only one direction though, no microphone
HFP is the classic profile that's been around since the dawn of Bluetooth that allows you to make calls. You get microphone in one direction and (mono) speaker in the other, but it works in a fundamentally different way to A2DP and so the bandwidth and codec selection are much more limited.
Bluetooth devices can only do one of these at a time, so if you're just playing audio you get A2DP. But if there's a need for the microphone it has to switch to the other profile, and you get the low quality audio. At least these days software (usually) does do this switch seamlessly, it used to be worse...
This is really a Bluetooth issue. The same happens with any headphones that have a mic on any OS. When Bluetooth mode is switched from Headphones to Headset (with mic), only much lower quality audio codes are used. Does anyone know if Bluetooth 6 adds support for higher quality codes for Headset? It's a big issue, in my opinion.
What we need is a new profile that uses A2DP in once direction and in the other for the microphone. I suspect the reason it has never happened is that there's a good chance of causing issues with existing devices that do at least work with HFP.
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Why is Bluetooth so bad? This, plus the literal second of latency to my car's speakers. All these problems are solved by headphones with proprietary wireless dongles and they work great, so why can't Bluetooth incorporate those improvements so we can get them on other devices than desktop PCs?
Also, wireless subwoofers (that come on many consumer TV speaker systems these days) don't have this latency problem either. You just plug them in and they sync to the system and work transparently. They can't have any noticeable latency, or else the bass would be out-of-sync with either the rest of the audio, or if they slowed down the audio to account for latency, then all the sound would be out-of-sync with the vi…
> if you use your mic to talk to people or record something, you will have better sound quality too. How often do you talk to people or record something while listening to a streamed song on your buds, ... and which has to be uninterrupted and in high quality ?
Sorry, chief. I've been a macOS dev for 10 years now. I think charging a subscription for a menubar app with a singular use-case is just the absolute worst. "not one time payment because I don't know what would the right price be for supporting an app for years to come and still have people willing to pay for it" The right price would be about $5-10. If you want to be kind, $0.
I hear the feedback but no way I'm doing get payed once support forever or give away for free support forever. I've done these mistakes it the past, I might re-consider if I get rich or something and start donating my time to passion projects. Even the simplest apps end up having problems, even the perfect one can break when something in the environment changes. Working on even the simplest app is always a full time…
Why do you keep saying that "support forever" is the default here? Nobody would expect that except if you were releasing under a subscription model.
Plus, this app doesn't need support. Come on.