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Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#141

Post by anotherevan »

hermitcrab wrote: post #134
ausjke wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not correct. You can use the LGPL version of Qt to develop commercial product without paying for a license and while keeping your source proprietary. You aren't allowed to statically link Qt under LGPL, but that isn't a big deal.

Does the LGPL deal with the fact that you actually pull in a lot of Qt code in the form in header files into your actual compiled binary?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#142

Post by makufiru »

bdavisx wrote: post #69
DizzyDoo wrote: post #23

I'm making video games for PC, Mac and Linux (like this one - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900 ), it's a very traditional release cycle, I work on a project for x months, and then I release it, moving onto the next game after a few weeks of post-launch support. PC games are generally seen as more valuable than mobile games, so I don't need to sell a terribly large volume in order for me, a single developer, t…

When you say "make a living" - how does that compare to a "typical" US developer salary/benefits - say around $120K total compensation? (and yes, I know that's far below a SV total compensation, but you wouldn't have to live in SV for this kind of lifestyle business).

$120k in just salary is common for a regular developer with 3 years experience here. Not even SV

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#143

Post by lostmsu »

orf wrote: post #118
lostmsu wrote: post #74

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.

Your link is grey for me, so I've seen it before. If it's been on HN you must have seen more than 3.5 downloads, what are your actual counts?

I don't have exact download count, but only 13 people actually launched it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#144

Post by dejv »

stcredzero wrote: post #105
dejv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not: the application has around 100 printouts (with tons of spaghetti logic behind it making it impossible to count all variations) and it will be very hard to switch to new reporting framework. The big problem with legacy software without huge user base and limited space for growth is that it just don't make sense to invest huge amount of time and money in it.

This is funny. I saw the same pattern in Smalltalk apps: Reports being the locus of spaghetti code. Reports are added as an afterthought. Then the resulting spaghetti code patterns are replicated cut & paste, where they then slowly melt into surrounding code in a way that makes them impossible to extricate. After some years, it then becomes obvious that reports are the primary driver of value for those clients.

Yeah, I tried to migrate out of that mess into other tools and it ends up as even bigger mess. Now I do have three different reporting systems in three different technologies (QuickReports in Delphi, code that generate HTML code from inside Delphi code and then XQuery based declarative code that can be customised by (/for) customer) and I ended up in even deeper hole.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#145

Post by arisAlexis »

gambiting wrote: post #113
bdavisx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "make a living" - how does that compare to a "typical" US developer salary/benefits - say around $120K total compensation? (and yes, I know that's far below a SV total compensation, but you wouldn't have to live in SV for this kind of lifestyle business).

Just to keep your expectations in check - I work for a major games company in the UK as a C++ programmer and make 25k pounds/year($36k USD). US salaries are an abnormality.

As a web developer I frequently get offers for 50k+ in UK you are seriously underpaid

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#146

Post by AlikhanPeleg »

jventura wrote: post #45
AlikhanPeleg wrote: post #35

For more than 3 years now I am making a decend full time income with a desktop cross browser testing application ( http://www.browseemall.com ) It is for a rather small customer group but still works great and is growing modestly.

Very interesting case of subscription based desktop application, am I right? How do you manage things such as a person being offline, do you require the person to connect to the internet so that you can manage the subscription? How does your users react? Have you already started with a subscription-based approach?

Generally people will need to get online to get the latest version (which is necessary frequently to get newer browser versions). During this time the licence is also checked.

In my experience the customers expect a subscription based pricing especially with an application that required high-frequency updates (I release a new version once or twice a month).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#147

Post by lostmsu »

wang_li wrote: post #89
lostmsu wrote: post #74

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.

Isn't this what ReadyBoost does?

ReadyBoost does not cache writes at all. Windows Server 2012 R2 actually have similar feature, but it requires some PowerShell magic to set it up, and only available in Server.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#148

Post by kidproquo »

jventura wrote: post #116
kidproquo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built Tasktopus[1] using QtQuick/QML/C++. Highly recommended. I built it on the LGPL version. [1] https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus

Can you comment on your experience? One of my doubts is if I should go the QML / Qt Quick Controls way or the standard Qt Widgets (with PyQt).. For instance, do you think you could implement your app's interface with Qt Widgets by itself? The problem is that I know how far I can go with Qt Widgets, but on the same way, I would like to build something more "modern" and Qt Widgets may be quite limited..

I could have implemented it with QtWidgets, however I had found a decent UI widget library that suited my use case very well ([1]). Hence went with QML/QtQuick.

My advice - just do it :-). If you want to build a cross-platform desktop app then go for QtQuick/QML/C++. QtCreator has a bunch of example projects. Use those as reference. The Qt docs are solid. Worst case - you will learn that Qt/C++.

I am not a big fan of PyQt/PySide, especially when starting fresh with Qt - you would have a hard time figuring out how everything fits and where the issues are.

[1] https://github.com/papyros/qml-material

Paraphrasing a previous comment:

I have used web-based task/todo lists (trello, asana, etc.) but I wanted something that could be used offline - my work does not allow storing company sensitive data on 3rd-party servers.

Started the project with Electron, using AngularJS and Angular Material. That allowed rapid prototyping with a slick UI and it was fairly easy to find additional Angular-based plugins. My main motivation in selecting Electron and Angular was to learn the two technologies (easier to learn something by doing a project in it). Screenshot: http://imgur.com/NZzEFKX

Had a few issues with the Electron app - big download size (50-70MB zipped), no print functionality, app felt non-native, very convoluted process to get it published on the Mac App Store.

Decided to change the tech stack to Qt/QML. I have published C++-based games, built on Cocos2dx. Wanted to try Qt to build a serious app.

Gumroad has been a slick experience - I have opted for the fully functional trial option and let the user buy a license to use beyond the trial period. Gumroad's onboarding (buy workflow) and tech (license key generation and validation) have been a revelation.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#149

Post by dvdkon »

derefr wrote: post #130
rxlim wrote: post #72

First, of course you can make a living out of desktop applications. In the echo chamber of HN you could maybe get the idea that they are no longer relevant, but out in the real world millions of people need to do real work, but don't have a stable connection to the Internet. Second, If you decide to create a desktop application, then make it native. I must strongly advise against using any of these "web frameworks" e…

> They only exists because many developers don't know anything else than web development I know how to write native apps in C# with WPF, Obj-C with Cocoa, C++ with Qt, Erlang with WxWidgets, and even in pure Tcl/Tk. I still prefer using HTML5 to any/all of those. It's about multi-platform portability, where "the web" is itself one of the targeted platforms. > I would NEVER install an application created using a web f…

I use Gmail and other web apps, because I'm accessing remote data through them, and running remote apps to do so is a good idea IMO. However, I think "the Web" is not a good platform for native-like apps. It's not only slow and resource-hungry (I can edit pictures and video reasonably, yet web apps still stutter and hang up), it was also never designed for app GUIs. HTML is a nice text markup language, but it was never meant for GUIs. CSS is nice for styling text, but it's now used for much more. Layout is torn between HTML and CSS. And web apps don't "fit in" with their appearance, and I value consistency in desktop apps a lot. With Qt/GTK, I can change a system-wide theme, and all apps will fit in with each other, which is something web apps can't offer. And while creating new frameworks may help programmers, it doesn't solve the fundamental issue that the web is not meant for native-esque apps.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

#150

Post by hermitcrab »

anotherevan wrote: post #141
hermitcrab wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not correct. You can use the LGPL version of Qt to develop commercial product without paying for a license and while keeping your source proprietary. You aren't allowed to statically link Qt under LGPL, but that isn't a big deal.

Does the LGPL deal with the fact that you actually pull in a lot of Qt code in the form in header files into your actual compiled binary?

Yes, my understanding is that including headers is not a problem for LGPL. If it was, LGPL libraries would be useless.

Note that the LGPL version of Qt doesn't contain everything the commercial version does. But there isn't a lot missing.

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