There's plenty of people making a living off of single player video games.
Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
151–160 of 361 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#152I hope people are still building desktop apps because as much as I hate that literally EVERYTHING is being made into an app on mobile (mainly just so they can then push notifications) there are a lot of things that really just run better as a desktop application. Do browser based video editors for example exist? Yes they do and I am sure they have their uses. But if I need to ingest a few hundred gigs of footage and cut that down to a reasonable length there is no way I trust Google Chrome's memory management to do that in any reasonable fashion.
I think what I miss the most are the really lightweight desktop applications that use very little resources but still help accomplish very large things. People love to rag on Windows for the fact that it maintains backwards compatibility but that has also allowed some fairly old but amazingly efficient applications to still be useful today.
My personal favourite example of this is a one man shop developer from Japan who makes some insanely reliable and useful tools on Windows:
FastCopy:
This tool has been around since 2004 and the original developer is STILL regularly updating and improving it. It blows away every other file copy tool on Windows out there (even the fanciest paid solutions) and the interface is dead simple and easy to use while still offering lots of advanced features. Many years ago I had to regularly move terabytes and terabytes of data to external drives that were then driven between VFX houses in Los Angeles. A lot of these outfits were basically smaller startups so often we would have multiple drives connected over USB to a single workstation with a 10gig link back to the storage server. I did extensive testing comparing every tool out there and not only was this thing a little faster than even the best CLI tools it also destroyed the others in terms of reliably transferring data over connections that were not always reliable. If the USB interface dropped for a second a lot of the other tools would fail or start doing a diff compare from scratch while this thing just happily chugged along. And once I had set it up and enabled the right click menu integration it was easy to train someone who was not very technical to use it. It even beat every Linux based solution I tried in reliability.
IP Messenger:
Same guy also makes IP Messenger which is a ridiculously light text chatting tool. It only works over LAN (hence the name) but requires NO central server, has tons of customization options (and can also be locked down in a business environment) and is pretty feature rich. It is also regularly updated and is end to end encrypted and will run on the slowest of the slow machines. And it has been around since 1996!
Both of these are free but I would honestly pay pretty good money for them if I was running my own business.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#153This is my 3rd (or is it 4th?) year of developing and selling Label LIVE, an electron app for designing and printing labels. Originally it only worked with USB thermal printers, but over the last few years it's grown into a multi-function image-rendering pipeline that integrates data import (via spreadsheet, CSV or API) with barcodes, text, image output. My app revenue eclipsed my iOS/NodeJS consulting in 2021 and I…
> I don't yet support Linux because out of thousands of users, only 2 people have emailed about Linux support (probably both from HN!). I'm a little surprised to read this from an Electron dev. I remember reading old forum posts about how the Spotify port for Linux was arranged by two devs who met after work for a few hours and got it working well enough that Spotify let them release it as an unsupported client. Ther…
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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dumb question but why don't you get some help with sales and marketing. Even some affiliate marketing to increase usage.
Unsure where to ask. Worried about high costs. Suggestions welcome :)
Setup a Google Adwords account - once you get the basics its super easy. Very cheap to start out and they used to have a special where you got some free adword money to play with on starting a new account.
Generally I would say try to minimize the amount your spending per keyword - broader search terms or the broader options on those search terms always cost more.
Might help a ton if you renamed your software to something that is more searchable (or just add some kind of name on the end or start)
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#155Yes 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…
what Microsoft fat client technology are you using? the current problem for me with Microsoft fat client is there are too much options and no clear one that Microsoft will support long term.
Yea, I develop a hobby project targeting desktop Mac (Objective C GUI, C++ business logic) and I’m not sure what Windows technology I should use should I ever decide to port to Windows. There are so many and they are all in various stages of unsupported. C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML? WinForms? UWP? Maybe just give up on trying to read the future and use Qt. Fucking madness!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of small tools is what I've been thinking of doing lately. It should not consume much of your time after you deploy it and there's not need to have a server and dealing with people's data.. Small question: how do your users find your product?
When I first started, I was posting about it in various laptop forums and running Google Ads. Having a free version was extremely helpful (there are hundreds of thousands of free users). It spread via word of mouth pretty quickly. After a while, I just stopped all marketing efforts and now it's all just word of mouth/google search.
Have never heard about this but this looks awesome - Gonna throw this on my old ass thinkpad tonight!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#157I have worked professionally for a company that made desktop apps for film production (VFX), and also internally for studios in their R&D departments and those were also almost entirely desktop based. Outside of professional work, I’ve jumped right back in to Ham radio over the Corona times, there are lots of desktop applications in use there (DSP mainly) but usability and support for hardware (both devices, and plat…
Kinda have to be desktop based if your working with VFX levels of change the data - the storage solutions those types of places need to invest in are insane!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#158My Video Hub App is generating about $500 / month. It's a perpetual license for $5 per copy. I am planning to create another app that might generate a similar income stream. I've done 0 paid advertising - only some posts here-and-there; I would probably have more sales if I knew how to market my app better. https://videohubapp.com/en/ - MIT open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Dumb question but why don't you get some help with sales and marketing. Even some affiliate marketing to increase usage.
No affiliate marketer is going to be interested in a product that sells for $5.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#159Our company sells HW and SW for the dental sector. We have a desktop app that processes DICOM data to do implant treatment planning (where to place an implant in the patient jaw). Output is a STL file to print a drill guide for the oral surgeon to perform a guided surgery. Our desktop scanners for dental labs and our intra-oral scanners for dentists generate 3D meshes of the patients oral situation. Those meshes are…
Not sure if it was your specific software, but I recently filmed a promo for a local dentist who was demonstrating this exact tech and I was blown away by how quick and accurate those scanner sticks are and how well the software stitched it in real time. How the hell can you scan something as small, wet and soft as the inside of a person's mouth and stitch it all perfectly? Seems like the absolute worst environment for scanning
Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
#160I'm making Windows/.Net based app for managing queues - QueueExplorer. Started with MSMQ support back in 2005, now it supports Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ. It's old fashioned perpetual licensing, so revenue is a rollercoaster. Because of that, it's emotional rollercoaster as well. Good thing is you get paid for full license at the time of purchase instead of collecting it in 10-20 months. Bad thing is ev…
You should just sell maintenance subscriptions / better support tiers - lots of software companies have been doing that for years. Perpetual license and if it breaks for someone using it at home they can go to the free support forums. Large company that needs it fixed in a super quick turnaround? Monthly fee for priority.