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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

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

#201

Post by grujicd »

Scramblejams wrote: post #194
rozab wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked into .NET MAUI yet? I'm cautiously optimistic, but haven't dug into it. Should be releasing Q2 this year. https://github.com/dotnet/maui

I looked into .Net GUIs about a year ago and it seemed like Avalonia and Project Uno were the most interesting contenders, with Uno getting the edge for me because it had a reasonable looking web deployment story (which I suppose doesn't matter in this case). My info may be out-of-date though, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on those two, if you've looked at them.

I did take a look, but at that time they didn't have what QueueExplorer needs. I wrote in another post that we use relatively complex and powerful grid component. Grid is core component in this case and can't be a basic one.

However if you don't have such specific requirements, Avalonia or Uno might work.

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

#202

Post by alottabit »

My company [0] makes a CAD-like destkop product for architects & real estate developers. It's sold on a subscription, but the product is a native application (runs on C/SDL/OpenGL). Nothing inherently prevents you from mixing that business model and delivery mechanism. Many of our customers (especially architects) are used to installing & running desktop software.

Pros: - You give customers the magical feeling when the app reacts instantly because the front-end doesn't have to wait on a round-trip to the server to execute complex business logic. It actually blows customers' minds to realize how powerful their computers are when you use the hardware well and don't have to wait on the network. - You have a very low infrastructure bill. - The platforms/frameworks/libraries are pretty stable compared to the webdev world. You do less migration work and get to become an expert in something that will be around for a longer time. - It's easy to develop and test locally in a 'production-like' setting. I make sure my hardware reflects my customers' hardware. - You can trace every line of code after main(). It eliminates a lot of complexity and a whole category of service communication bugs (and introduces other categories of bugs :)). - Developers are usually more predisposed to thinking about performance (in my experience).

Cons: - You have to buy & renew code signing certificates, which is a hassle when you're independent or a small company. - You have to build/buy/maintain some form of installation/update system and be prepared to deal with users who refuse to update. - You have to deal with corporate IT departments & their security requirements (we're B2C). - You typically want to customize at least some parts of the UI/UX for Mac/Linux/Windows. - You run into bugs from clients that are hard to debug because "it works on my machine", and you don't have access to theirs.

It's definitely a trade-off. I can understand why most devs/companies don't choose to be on the desktop.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhCm5sh9mr8

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

#203

Post by ChadB »

semireg wrote: post #199
ChadB wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really cool! I'm working on an asset tracking application right now ( https://www.assetbots.com/ ), and generating labels are a big part of the workflow. My roadmap calls for simply generating Avery sheets. But it would be AWESOME if I could let a user click a button and send them to a labellive:// URL and have it just work. I'll explore a little and see if there's a mom-tested way to make this usable. Again,…

Label printing is still a world of hurt. My hope is to make it incrementally better, a smaller dumpster-fire, if you will. I definitely have users triggering labellive:// integrations. The nice thing about the URI is it automatically launches the app if it isn't open - which is not true of HTTP integrations. The downside is it can be slower, especially on windows. Been there, done that. Maybe there's a workaround bec…

I definitely will. I'm adding an issue to my roadmap right now. This would be a no-brainer add-on for some common use cases.

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

#204

Post by ZeroClickOk »

hermitcrab wrote: post #175
czeh wrote: post #121

I spent a few years on a side project for a 'better' screenshot tool: https://www.bettersnipper.com/ Tried to sell it for $5 home / $14 office, but only got a handful of purchases. I still personally use it every day and have probably collect 10k+ Snips across all my computers. I converted the entire program from VB.NET -> C#.NET over a year which burned me out and I've kind of just let it wither due to lack of inter…

I find it hard to take seriously software that is $5. Google 'price as signal'. Also you are up against some very established and polished competitors, such as SnagIT.

...or Sharex, that is pratically a swiss army knife

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

#205

Post by grujicd »

Melatonic wrote: post #160
grujicd wrote: post #116

I'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.

We do have a maintenance option, but we don't push it that hard and it doesn't bring in significant revenue. This could be handled much better I'm sure.

We also have major upgrades which do bring in some more cash since they're more expensive and more users buy them. But it's every 5-6 years. And it's still significantly lower than regular new licenses.

I'm thinking about adding a Saas "Team" edition, which would offer centralized management of users, connections they use, permissions, with some auditing etc. First problem is we would have to store some sensitive data (connections) which gives me a security scare. Second problem is we'll introduce central point of failure which gives me another kind of scare. And very soon we'd have different versions of client software running on end users machines which should all work correctly with a server. That's a third scare, a versioning one.

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

#206

Post by semireg »

Melatonic wrote: post #161
semireg wrote: 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?

Which models, specifically? Tape are less supported by the roll-based models. However, Label LIVE can submit PDF-based jobs to any printer installed with a driver. So it might work if the manufacturer drivers work as one would expect (hint: they usually don’t… :()

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

#207

Post by Melatonic »

grujicd wrote: post #205
Melatonic wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We do have a maintenance option, but we don't push it that hard and it doesn't bring in significant revenue. This could be handled much better I'm sure. We also have major upgrades which do bring in some more cash since they're more expensive and more users buy them. But it's every 5-6 years. And it's still significantly lower than regular new licenses. I'm thinking about adding a Saas "Team" edition, which would off…

Do some type of integration with Azure AD so you do not have to worry about the security or any of that? Plus clients will be familiar with it and could use existing users in their infrastructure.

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

#208

Post by Melatonic »

semireg wrote: post #206
Melatonic wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it work with the tiny Dymo printers?

Which models, specifically? Tape are less supported by the roll-based models. However, Label LIVE can submit PDF-based jobs to any printer installed with a driver. So it might work if the manufacturer drivers work as one would expect (hint: they usually don’t… :()

I have a Dymo LabelWriter 450. Gonna start looking into it myself as well

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

#209

Post by allanrbo »

Desktop app dev feels like a dying art, unfortunately. I see many comments mention Qt, but just wanted to give a shout-out to wxWidgets too. I chose it on a recent project over Qt for resulting in a more lean statically linkable self contained binary, and it also seemed easier to get a native look for all platforms I was targeting.

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

#210

Post by ronyfadel »

I'm currently making between $3k and $4k per month making little utilities for the Mac, e.g.:

- Mission Control Plus to enhance macOS' Mission Control: https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus

- Batteries to see your devices' batteries from your Mac: https://fadel.io/batteries

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