81–90 of 201 posts
It seems that his customers share a lot of characteristics with your ones.
Solo developer of a productivity app for the Mac for quite a number of years now. Yes, desktop apps are still very relevant and at least on the Mac, plenty of people willing to pay good money (unlike, say, the mobile market). Whether to go desktop or web really depends on the application itself. Don't try and shoehorn it into one or the other. Ultimately, you'll need to find the right niche. Like in most industries,…
This is incredibly important advice! Marketing & actually finding customers is the hardest part of the business, so if you only need a few customers, you'll be way ahead of the pack.
I know someone who is selling a Photoshop Plugin for $100 and seems to be doing okay from it, even though that's more than the price of Photoshop Elements itself! If your product is valuable enough to your customer, they'll pay for it. If they're earning $100/hour & your product saves them even two hours of work, it's a no-brainer.
> ... plus I have support emails to deal with.
Don't forget this when considering your pricing. Some percentage of your customers will always need support, and you need to account for all those 15 minute blocks where you're helping people. If you're selling a $2 app, a single support email wipes out your earnings from several sales.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is QtQuick commercial? No GPL version?
IANAL but if you're making commercial products you need pay for QT. You can use GPL etc if you're doing open source I assume.
Fail story: I have SSD + HDD caching for Windows ( https://diskache.io/ ). But due to lack of marketing skills, and, perhaps, lack of common store for system software for Windows, even free Beta version has been downloaded by like 3.5 people during 3 months of availability.
Yes, I am thriving with a niche C++/Win32 graphics app. Web apps are a long way from having the responsiveness and control of a desktop app. Do you really think users will be doing Photoshop and AutoCAD in a browser? No matter if you have a fibre op connection, the lag is always there. Recently the main player in this domain moved to Web apps. There was an overwhelming protest from its customers, who insisted they pr…
The beauty of AutoCAD was that it was designed for power users only. The learning curve was almost vertical...but to me, that's the true sign of a powerful application. Fortunately, I had a high-school drafting class and then took a class at my local community college...having a real-life instructor was invaluable. It was exclusively designed around a "one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse" stance, but you could do _everything_ from that position.
Once I got over the the initial learning hump and most of the commands became second nature, I could work almost as fast as I could think. I was working on something like a 500Mhz PIII running Win98, and I cannot remember it ever lagging or crashing while I was working.
But the most important thing to me? Since it was a desktop app, it had 100% control over the keyboard and mouse inputs.
No accidentally closing a tab or refreshing the page.
No browser updates f'ing with my right click menu.
No scroll-jacking.
No zoom-jacking.
No shortcut-key overlap with plugins (looking at you, 1Password/google docs)
No input lag...EVER.