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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

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161–170 of 361 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#161
post #68

This 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…

Does it work with the tiny Dymo printers?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#162
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

On a product that costs $5? Forget it. No-way you will get a return. (Background: making a living selling software online for 16 years, advertised continuously on Adwords for nearly all of that).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#163
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a Mac do I'm not your target customer. However I really like your approach having a pay-once personal edition and a subscription team/business edition. It's something different from the subscription-everywhere trend.

I'll report back in a year or three if it does in fact work in real life hehe

Standard for years was perpetual license + monthly fee for premier support / maintenance so it is definitely a workable model.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#164
post #32
post #8

Plenty 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?

Shareware (at least back in the day) almost always had a free component. For a game that might mean levels 1-3 are free and then you buy the full game for the whole thing.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I faced that question over a decade ago, and after looking around at my options, I went with Qt. No regrets. Sure, it had its flaws, and sometimes the "not-quite-nativeness" shows through, but it worked pretty well and gave me support for all 3 major desktop systems. And although someone else has long since taken over maintenance of the application in question, it's still going strong (and still built with Qt).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#166
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got up early every day and got in an hour or two before my proper full-time backend Python programming job begun. That and working on The Cat Machine on Saturdays got it finished within a year, and then after it came out I could go full-time. It's hard to just make the switch from 'real' (normal?) job to small business game programming without already having a game that's done okay released, so that's what worked f…

How have you found the switch technically? What frameworks are you using?

I still use a lot of Python, often for little tools or scripts, especially anything where data needs to be transformed (like file formats for art assets), or something needs to be automated (run build scripts for all the different platforms). I built a little graphical puzzle/level editor for The Cat Machine with Python and SDL bindings too.

But I'm mostly using C# and Unity these days. There's too much useful stuff build into Unity to ignore it, and C# is very pleasant so I didn't find it particularly hard to make the jump - there's just a very definite 'Way' Unity wants you to do everything and so most of the time it's just a case of working out what that Way is.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#167
post #16

I have a side-project ( https://batterybarpro.com ) that's a native Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.

There's a small error in the Windows 11 warning at the top of the page:

> removed the feature the allowed for toolbars

Should be that, I presume.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#168
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any plans for Kafka support? I was frankly a bit shocked when Conduktor raised investment: https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/22/conduktor-which-brings-a-... If anything, it's a testament to what an absolute pain it is to develop on existing message queue/event streaming platforms, so it's clearly a valid niche.

I would love to support Kafka, and even made a simple prototype. However, hit a brickwall when discovered that .Net client (by Confluent, other clients seem to be deprecated) does not have all the features the Java one has. For instance there's no way to get current consumer offsets and I think's something that should be available in a management app.

If you really want to support Kafka, I think there are options. Besides the obvious option of forking the .NET client to add these missing features, you could also write some kind of "plug-in" in Java or Go or some other language with a fully featured client library, and communicate with it over some type of local RPC from your main application to query against Kafka. Whether it is technically feasible or not, it may not make business sense for you, which is fine, just interesting to think about the options.

I'm slightly surprised that the .NET client isn't fully featured, but I've never tried to use Kafka from a .NET language before.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#169

I 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…

It is interesting that there are many ham apps that are single person developed and closed source, but free to download. It's weird how open source is not ubiquitous in that hobby. This leaves lots off ageing, quirky software out there.

I'm not sure how related it is, but the average age of people involved in ham is pretty old. I went to a few meetups near me and the average person there was at least 60 years old. So it might be that these apps are made by an older generation with different norms around open source. Could just be an EE vs CS thing too, since open source is less common the EE world.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

On a product that costs $5? Forget it. No-way you will get a return. (Background: making a living selling software online for 16 years, advertised continuously on Adwords for nearly all of that).

If you optimize so that you are paying maybe 2-5 cents a click it really just depends on the application and industry. Something people need to buy right then and there is going to have much better conversion than something they need to research and think about it. Plus there is value in just getting the name of your software out there and into peoples hands so that it then spreads organically after that.

For something like this I would probably start at like 30$ a month and keep optimizing - worst case you lose only a few hundred over the course of a year.

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