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What an incredibly rude thing to say to another person.
Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
71–80 of 361 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#72Plenty of people do this. Go onto any software listing site (eg. Softpedia or AlternativeTo), pick a not-a-brandname commercial product and chances are that it will be a single-person project. From things that are really well-polished and look like a team effort to pimped-up crappy weekend projects. Lots and lots are made and run by a single individual. Whether they sell well is an altogether different question, but…
What is the state of the art in shareware for drop in payment / piracy protection?
As an electron developer I used NodeJS to implement a custom licensing system on top of JWT. My app "registers" a computer (fingerprint) with the server. The server can grant licenses where it signs a JWT with a secret key, and the client can verify using the public key. The client will enable features based on the JWT payload. Again... it's crackable, but it's serviceable and I make my software affordable through either a one-time license ($147) or a monthly subscription ($14.99/month).
I try my best to make it "worth it" to purchase the app. Label LIVE is a super- boring business label printer app so it takes a "special" person to 1) need the app and then 2) decide that they'd save more money by cracking it than just paying for it. If I 10x my pricing (as my competition does), then I would fully expect users would find it worthwhile to crack and distribute.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#73Desktop apps could be be doomed in walled garden.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#74I work for a company that sells a niche desktop app for mining companies, called Aegis.[1] Even if the company is planning to implement something web related in the near future, the business is on the desktop and there are no plans on taking it entirely to the web anytime soon. Mining companies prefer it that way, as internet connectivity is not something you can reliably find on site. [1] https://iring.ca
Delphi?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#75I do. Data management and visualisation for local data store. This stuff is private and can not really go into cloud. Was using Java Swing until very recently. Switched to Kotlin JS in browser, not sure it can count as desktop anymore.
How have your experiences with Kotlin JS been?
I've been considering it for similar type of desktop app development, but haven't dug deeper yet. Mainly because I already have some experience with Rust and have been considering options in this space before venturing elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#76I work on a desktop budgeting application. I love that it's desktop-only (and so do the users)! It doesn't earn a living (yet), but it makes more than enough to cover expenses. [0] https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com
Your application looks really nice. What framework are you using for the UI?
It's Electron (for now)
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the state of the art in shareware for drop in payment / piracy protection?
Why bother with piracy "protection"? You're not going to keep ahead of dedicated pirates. Focus on features and bug fixes rather than going after non-customers. Every iota of effort spent going after pirates is effort not going into servicing existing customers or getting new ones.
99.9% of pirates can only nop ifs. The remaining percentage are the pros that either work on paid basis or go after high-profile apps that give them visibility and status. A mildly well-protected battery indicator will remain intact for a very long time, simply because people who'd want to crack it, can't, and people who can crack it, won't.
PS. Having cracked versions floating around affects SEO ranking of the master website, it affects sales and overall perrception of the product and, as importantly, it also hits support with a lot of bogus bullshit from people that aren't even customers. So for every iota one may "save" by not adding protection, they would spend multiple iotas dealing with the consequences.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#78Related question. How to start to develop desktop applications? In contrast to web applications there are not many resources out there and most seem outdated.
Use Electron and leverage your web skills. Learn as much as you can about the architecture before you start. For example, an Electron app has two main processes: main and renderer. The main process is like your backend API and the renderer(s) are the browser windows. Once you get the hang of it, the world opens up and you can really start cranking out code/features by bending the entire architecture to the will of the developer... until it breaks, but then you get to fix it!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#79I been making a full-time living since 2005 selling software written in C++/Qt for Window and Mac.
My latest product is a drag and drop tool for data transformation (merge, split, clean, dedupe etc): https://www.easydatatransform.com
Things have mostly moved to web, but desktop apps still have major advantages in some areas: -less latency -data kept locally -better development tools
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#80Yes and no. I'm an employee so it doesn't really matter, but my side-project desktop apps pay well enough that I could live off them if I go for a student lifestyle (no pricey events, no restaurants, cooking yourself, cleaning yourself). It was a long way. I started in the Pro Audio niche and initially supported Windows, Linux, Mac. Over time, I learned the hard way that supporting Apple's constantly changing OS is v…
Apple like to nuke their developer ecosystem from orbit on a regular basis. It is quite tiresome. Qt protects me from it to some extent, but cross platform frameworks have their own issues.